The Hugo final ballot is out!
Here are the Goodreads / LibraryThing / StoryGraph stats for the categories where those numbers are relevant. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) has measurably penetrated the wider market.
Best Novel
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The Everlasting | Alix E. Harrow | 46,962 | 821 | 17,250 |
| The Raven Scholar | Antonia Hodgson | 45,637 | 882 | 14,571 |
| A Drop of Corruption | Robert Jackson Bennett | 43,096 | 885 | 12,306 |
| Death of the Author | Nnedi Okorafor | 21,987 | 811 | 9,613 |
| The Incandescent | Emily Tesh | 11,463 | 535 | 5,333 |
| Shroud | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 11,892 | 382 | 1,894 |
The top three are surprisingly close here on GR and LT, with SG spacing them out a little (though still close). I have read two already. I am sorry that When There Are Wolves Again is not on the list.
Best Novella
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| The River Has Roots | Amal El-Mohtar | 43,140 | 729 | 19,142 |
| Automatic Noodle | Annalee Newitz | 21,619 | 563 | 9,189 |
| What Stalks the Deep | T. Kingfisher | 17,779 | 449 | 7,326 |
| Murder by Memory | Olivia Waite | 12,527 | 366 | 4,822 |
| The Summer War | Naomi Novik | 11,767 | 434 | 3,635 |
| Cinder House | Freya Marske | 6,559 | 192 | 2,884 |
I read The River Has Roots for the BSFA Awards and described it as “a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces”; it got my vote, and it’s well ahead on the sites.
Best Graphic Novel or Comic
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon | Thompson / Sherman / de Iulis / Bellaire / Carey | 5,405 | 103 | 1,192 |
| A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel | Le Guin / Fordham | 1,598 | 96 | 540 |
| The Invisible Parade | Bardugo / Picacio | 1,724 | 60 | 309 |
| The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers | Gillen / Wijngaard / Cowles | 1,238 | 68 | 375 |
| The Space Cat | Okorafor / Ford | 376 | 45 | 169 |
| A Girl and Her Fed | Spangler / Presser |
A strong leader here, but NB that A Girl and Her Fed is nominated as a webcomic rather than for the printed volumes.
Best Related Work
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler | Susana M. Morris | 1,719 | 120 | 718 |
| Inventing the Renaissance | Ada Palmer | 648 | 227 | 198 |
| Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction | Paul Kincaid | 7 | 5 | 0 |
| “The Cuddled Little Vice” | Elizabeth Sandifer | |||
| “Ragnarök vs the Long Night” | Ashaya and Aziz | |||
| The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom | maintained by Renay |
Three of these are not standalone publications. “The Cuddled Little Vice” is a blog post, “Ragnarök vs the Long Night” is a podcast episode and The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom is a spreadsheet. On top of that I hear some people comment that Inventing the renaissance isn’t really about science fiction or fantasy. It does not speak well of StoryGraph that none of its users have yet logged Colourfields.
Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
| Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners | SG reviews |
| Sunrise on the Reaping | Suzanne Collins | 1,160,615 | 5,016 | 179,837 |
| Oathbound | Tracy Deonn | 30,205 | 617 | 13,943 |
| They Bloom at Night | Trang Thanh Tran | 5,484 | 206 | 2,620 |
| Holy Terrors | Margaret Owen | 3,944 | 129 | 1,907 |
| Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe | C.B. Lee | 1,683 | 222 | 835 |
| Among Ghosts | Rachel Hartman | 428 | 69 | 157 |
As with the Andre Norton and BSFA Award lists, Sunrise on the Reaping is far ahead, though not as embarrassingly far as in the other two cases, which makes me feel that the Lodestar list is a better reflection of reader tastes in general. (Among Ghosts, which is the lowest ranked of the Lodestar nominees, is some way ahead of both the second placed books for the Norton and BSFA Awards.)
I’m starting my Hugo reading with Holy Terrors, which costs $4.70 for 561 pages on Kindle at Amazon.com, an astonishingly economical 119 pages to your dollar. By contrast, one of the Best Novella finalists costs $15.12 for 135 Kindle pages, three times the cost of Holy Terrors for less than a quarter of the length (and two of the others are only a little better).
On the other categories:
- Congratulations to everyone I know who is on the ballot!
- I think that Best Series is showing its age.
- I have actually seen three of the BDP Long Form finalists (Andor, KPop Demon Hunters and Superman) and four of the BDP Short Form finalists (Doctor Who, Murderbot and Plur1bus).
- I don’t know how anyone can really rate Best Editor Long Form, but participation rates are decent.
- The threshold to get onto the ballot for Best Professional Artist was the lowest of any category.
- Some of the Semiprozine finalist descriptions are simply Too Long.
- I’m glad to see An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog and Octothorpe, Roseanna Pendlebury, Sara Felix, Richard Mann and España Sheriff in their respective categories.
- I look forward to reading the poems and the Astounding Award finalists, and indeed anything else that generous creators and publishers choose to put into the Hugo Packet.
- Best of luck to Tammy Coxen and the rest of her team, and well done on getting through this stage of the process.
See you on the other side.