Pupless Hugo ballots 2016 - Books by the Lake

Stephanie Zvan estimated what de-puppied ballots would look like; since I used a different method and got very different results, I thought I’d post mine here. Zvan simply subtracted 330 “hardcore slate votes” in every category. But I attempted to adjust for the fact that slate voters got fewer and fewer as they went down the ballot, by estimating a separate number to subtract in every category based on items that hardly any non-slate voters would have chosen (e.g. 440 in Best Novella; Nick Cole’s Fear of the Unknown and Self-Loathing in Hollywood got 438 nominations). Yes, this is very inexact guesswork -- the list below is no one’s opinion but mine. I found the results of the EPH analysis of the 2016 data very useful, since it magnified small differences in the raw number of nominations. I considered such small differences to be statistical fluctuations that might have changed if anything whatsoever about the year had been different; therefore, in cases where items had very similar numbers of nominations, I used the relative rankings established by EPH. The fifth place in Best Short Story was tied between “Madeleine” and “Pocosin” with 177 nominations apiece; but “Madeleine” had 119.5 EPH points compared to “Pocosin”’s 111.833.

BEST NOVEL

Ancillary Mercy (Ann Leckie)

The Fifth Season (N. K. Jemisin)

Uprooted (Naomi Novik)

Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)

Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Karen Memory (Elizabeth Bear)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson)

The Just City (Jo Walton)

The Grace of Kings (Ken Liu)

Sorcerer to the Crown (Zen Cho)

BEST NOVELLA

Binti (Nnedi Okorafor)

Penric’s Demon (Lois McMaster Bujold)

“The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Djinn” (Usman T. Malik)

Slow Bullets (Alastair Reynolds)

“Waters of Versailles” (Kelly Robson)

“The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” (Aliette de Bodard)

Witches of Lychford (Paul Cornell)

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (Kai Ashante Wilson)

“The New Mother” (Eugene Fischer)

Perfect State (Brandon Sanderson)

BEST NOVELETTE

“Our Lady of the Open Road” (Sarah Pinsker)

“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” (Brooke Bolander)

“So Much Cooking” (Naomi Kritzer)

“Another Word for World” (Ann Leckie)

“The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild” (Catherynne M. Valente)

“Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” (Rose Lemberg)

“Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan” (Ian McDonald)

“Folding Beijing” (Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu)

“The Deepwater Bride” (Tamsyn Muir)

“Entanglements” (David Gerrold)

BEST SHORT STORY

“Cat Pictures Please” (Naomi Kritzer)

“Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” (Alyssa Wong)

“Wooden Feathers” (Ursula Vernon)

“Today I Am Paul” (Martin L. Shoemaker)

“Madeleine” (Amal El-Mohtar)

“Pocosin” (Ursula Vernon)

“Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight” (Aliette de Bodard)

“Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer” (Megan Grey)

“Damage” (David Levine)

“Pockets” (Amal El-Mohtar)

BEST RELATED WORK

Letters to Tiptree (edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce)

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (Felicia Day)

Invisible 2 (edited by Jim Hines)

John Scalzi Is Not a Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular (Alexandra Erin)

Lois McMaster Bujold (Edward James)

The Wheel of Time Companion (Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan, Alan Romanczuk, and Maria Simons)

“Sad Puppies Bite Back” (Declan Finn)

Geek Knits (Toni Carr)

A History of Epic Fantasy (Adam Whitehead)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY

Nimona (Noelle Stevenson)

Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine (Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro, Taki Soma, and Robert Wilson)

Saga, Volume 5 (Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples)

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 2: Generation Why (G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, and Jacob Wyatt)

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1: Squirrel Power (Ryan North and Erica Henderson)

The Sandman: Overture (Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III)

The Sculptor (Scott McCloud)

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (Sydney Padua)

Rat Queens, Vol. 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N’rygoth (Kurtis J. Wiebe)

The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 2: Fandemonium (Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, and Matt Wilson)

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (LONG FORM)

The Martian

Mad Max: Fury Road

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Ex Machina

Inside Out
Jessica Jones, Season 1
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Avengers: Age of Ultron

Ant-Man
Sense8

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (SHORT FORM)

Doctor Who: “Heaven Sent”

Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile”

Game of Thrones: “Hardhome”

The Expanse: “CQB”

Person of Interest: “If-Then-Else”

Daredevil: “Cut Man”

The Expanse: “Dulcinea”

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: “4,722 Hours”

Doctor Who: “The Husbands of River Song”

Orphan Black: “Certain Agony of the Battlefield”

BEST EDITOR (SHORT FORM) [Note: I added together the nominations for "Lynne M. Thomas" and "Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas"]

John Joseph Adams

Neil Clarke

Ellen Datlow

Sheila Williams

Lynne M. Thomas

C. C. Finlay

Jonathan Strahan

Gardner Dozois

Ann Vandermeer

Jerry Pournelle

BEST EDITOR (LONG FORM) [Note: I left the late David Hartwell off the list because he once said he would not accept any more nominations]

Toni Weisskopf

Sheila Gilbert

Liz Gorinsky

Anne Lesley Groell

Devi Pillai

Marco Palmieri

Joe Monti

Miriam Weinberg

Jane Johnson

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

BEST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST

Julie Dillon
John Picacio
Galen Dara
Cynthia Sheppard
Richard Anderson
Larry Elmore
Rowena Morrill
Chris McGrath
John Harris
Kathleen Jennings

BEST SEMIPROZINE

Uncanny Magazine (Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, and Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky)

Strange Horizons (Catherine Krahe et al.)

Beneath Ceaseless Skies (Scott H. Andrews)

The Book Smugglers (Thea James & Ana Grilo)

Interzone (Andy Cox)

Escape Pod (Mur Lafferty, Al Stuart et al.)

Fireside Magazine (Brian White)

Giganotosaurus (Rashida J. Smith)

[Multiple candidates nearly tied for the last places]

BEST FANZINE

File 770 (Mike Glyer)

Lady Business (Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan)

Journey Planet (James Bacon and Christopher J. Garcia)

A Dribble of Ink (Aidan Moher)

Rocket Stack Rank (Greg Hullender & Eric Wong)

SF Signal (John DeNardo)

Mad Genius Club (Dave Freer)

nerds of a feather, flock together (The G)

Banana Wings (Claire Briarly & Mark Plummer)

Mark Watches (Mark Oshiro)

BEST FANCAST

Tea and Jeopardy (Emma Newman & Peter Newman)

Galactic Suburbia (Alex Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts, & Alisa Krasnostein)

Verity! (Deborah Stanish et al.)

The Skiffy and Fanty Show (Jennifer Zink )

Ditch Diggers (Matt Wallace & Mur Lafferty)

Sword and Laser (Veronica Belmont & Tom Merrill )

Fangirl Happy Hour (Renay Williams & Ana Grilo)

Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (Jay Edidin & Miles Stokes)

The Coode Street Podcast (Jonathan Strahan)

StarShipSofa (Tony C. Smith)

BEST FAN WRITER

Mike Glyer

Alexandra Erin

Natalie Luhrs

Mark Oshiro

Abigail Nussbaum

Eric Flint

George R. R. Martin

Foz Meadows

Liz Bourke

Jeffro Johnson

BEST FAN ARTIST

Steve Stiles
Megan Lara
Karezoid
Likhain
Matthew Callahan
Richard Man
Euclase
Brad W. Foster
Piper Thibodeau
Ninni Aalto

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD

Andy Weir
Alyssa Wong
Becky Chambers
Kelly Robson
Sunil Patel
Natasha Pulley
S. L. Huang
Isabel Yap
Scott Hawkins
Rachael K. Jones

Addendum: I think that articles related to the Puppy affair belong in Fan Writer rather than in Related Work, and in the unlikely event that the administrators had decided to shift them into that category, here's how things might look (uncertain, since there are surely many people who nominated the author in both categories, but they'd only be counted once, and also if a nominator already had 5 fan writers nothing else could be shifted in):