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The resulting five top nominees, from my extremely unofficial poll of various people I happen to know, and a few of them asking other people, listed alphabetically:
* Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
* City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
* The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
* The Peripheral, by William Gibson
* Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear
1. Polling method: this was, as noted before, not intended to be a representative sample of Hugo voters as a whole, and it certainly wasn't. I asked for votes in four places: LJ/DW, Twitter, and two private chat rooms. There was significant overlap between some of these places, but any given person's votes were only counted once. The only nominations I got from people I don't know myself came from Twitter, where the request was retweeted a few times.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting top set of books has a high (but not complete) overlap with my own nomination set (which I counted as normal with everyone else's, and refused to change despite a few "Damn, I should've thought of that one!" moments as other nominations came in); I asked the people I tend to talk to, and we tend to have similar tastes.
2. Interesting patterns: About half of the people responding nominated fewer than five books. Several people noted that they simply weren't sure what they'd read in the last year that qualified. Of the people who nominated fewer than five books, most of these people nominated Ancillary Sword, The Goblin Emperor, or both.
One could reasonably conclude that these are the books people actually knew for sure were eligible, having been reminded by their appearance on official Hugo nominations lately. One could also reasonably conclude that these two books were already wildly popular, given they made it onto the nomination list despite the concerted effort to keep everything but the *Puppy slates off. It's probably a bit of both.
Out of the people who offered three or more suggestions, no two of them ever had the exact same set. (Occasionally there was someone nominating three books, which were a subset of someone else's four or five, but that's still not an exact match.) Every time a nomination set with at least four books came in, it added at least one book to the list. This doesn't mean each five-book set included at least one book no one else suggested--it's partly an artifact of the order they were added--but I still found that interesting.
There is no one book that was nominated by every single person.
3. Minor edits: A few people noted "Ancillary Justice"; those I contacted said they meant "Ancillary Sword", so I counted those votes accordingly. They're easy names to mix up. One person voted for the Eternal Sky trilogy, and I counted that as a vote for Steles of the Sky. One nomination was dropped on account of being published in 2013 rather than 2014. (Codex Born, by Jim Hines.)
4. Personal notes: The list of five novels that came in highest in the numbers would represent the first time a Hugo novels nomination list came out when I had read all of the novels that made the cut. This is, of course, largely a factor of where I asked the questions; it would be unlikely for all my friends to be raving about a book and me not to have read it.
On the other hand, if I had recused myself from this set of nominations... Well, there would be a very awkward five-way tie for fifth place, but it also shows that even among my friends, there's a lot of debate after the first three or four. And you can bet I'll be at least looking at samples for every book that got two votes, along with many of the books that got one.
5. The hard numbers: As I probably should've expected, there's a very strong spike in the top few books, and then a very long tail. You'll see that one more nomination set with another vote for any of the twos could have created a tie for the fifth place; it just didn't happen to come in that way. The full numbers are:
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison: 18
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie: 11
Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear: 7
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett: 4
The Peripheral, by William Gibson: 3
Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor: 2
Lock In, by John Scalzi: 2
My Real Children, by Jo Walton: 2
The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher: 2
Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu: 2
Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer: 1
Bloodbound, by Erin Lindsay: 1
Echopraxia, by Peter Watts: 1
Full Fathom Five, by Max Gladstone: 1
The Girl in the Road, by Monica Bryne: 1
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, by Genevieve Valentine: 1
Havoc, by Ann Aguirre: 1
Heaven's Queen, by Rachel Bach: 1
Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta: 1
The Mirror Empire, by Kameron Hurley: 1
The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross: 1
Skin Game, by Jim Butcher: 1
Sparrow Hill Road, by Seanan McGuire: 1
Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal: 1
The Winter Long, by Seanan McGuire: 1
#
General discussion of the individual books and/or the results are more than welcome below. It's certainly given me an interesting reading list to work with.
* Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
* City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett
* The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
* The Peripheral, by William Gibson
* Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear
1. Polling method: this was, as noted before, not intended to be a representative sample of Hugo voters as a whole, and it certainly wasn't. I asked for votes in four places: LJ/DW, Twitter, and two private chat rooms. There was significant overlap between some of these places, but any given person's votes were only counted once. The only nominations I got from people I don't know myself came from Twitter, where the request was retweeted a few times.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting top set of books has a high (but not complete) overlap with my own nomination set (which I counted as normal with everyone else's, and refused to change despite a few "Damn, I should've thought of that one!" moments as other nominations came in); I asked the people I tend to talk to, and we tend to have similar tastes.
2. Interesting patterns: About half of the people responding nominated fewer than five books. Several people noted that they simply weren't sure what they'd read in the last year that qualified. Of the people who nominated fewer than five books, most of these people nominated Ancillary Sword, The Goblin Emperor, or both.
One could reasonably conclude that these are the books people actually knew for sure were eligible, having been reminded by their appearance on official Hugo nominations lately. One could also reasonably conclude that these two books were already wildly popular, given they made it onto the nomination list despite the concerted effort to keep everything but the *Puppy slates off. It's probably a bit of both.
Out of the people who offered three or more suggestions, no two of them ever had the exact same set. (Occasionally there was someone nominating three books, which were a subset of someone else's four or five, but that's still not an exact match.) Every time a nomination set with at least four books came in, it added at least one book to the list. This doesn't mean each five-book set included at least one book no one else suggested--it's partly an artifact of the order they were added--but I still found that interesting.
There is no one book that was nominated by every single person.
3. Minor edits: A few people noted "Ancillary Justice"; those I contacted said they meant "Ancillary Sword", so I counted those votes accordingly. They're easy names to mix up. One person voted for the Eternal Sky trilogy, and I counted that as a vote for Steles of the Sky. One nomination was dropped on account of being published in 2013 rather than 2014. (Codex Born, by Jim Hines.)
4. Personal notes: The list of five novels that came in highest in the numbers would represent the first time a Hugo novels nomination list came out when I had read all of the novels that made the cut. This is, of course, largely a factor of where I asked the questions; it would be unlikely for all my friends to be raving about a book and me not to have read it.
On the other hand, if I had recused myself from this set of nominations... Well, there would be a very awkward five-way tie for fifth place, but it also shows that even among my friends, there's a lot of debate after the first three or four. And you can bet I'll be at least looking at samples for every book that got two votes, along with many of the books that got one.
5. The hard numbers: As I probably should've expected, there's a very strong spike in the top few books, and then a very long tail. You'll see that one more nomination set with another vote for any of the twos could have created a tie for the fifth place; it just didn't happen to come in that way. The full numbers are:
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison: 18
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie: 11
Steles of the Sky, by Elizabeth Bear: 7
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett: 4
The Peripheral, by William Gibson: 3
Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor: 2
Lock In, by John Scalzi: 2
My Real Children, by Jo Walton: 2
The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher: 2
Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu: 2
Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer: 1
Bloodbound, by Erin Lindsay: 1
Echopraxia, by Peter Watts: 1
Full Fathom Five, by Max Gladstone: 1
The Girl in the Road, by Monica Bryne: 1
The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, by Genevieve Valentine: 1
Havoc, by Ann Aguirre: 1
Heaven's Queen, by Rachel Bach: 1
Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta: 1
The Mirror Empire, by Kameron Hurley: 1
The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross: 1
Skin Game, by Jim Butcher: 1
Sparrow Hill Road, by Seanan McGuire: 1
Valour and Vanity, by Mary Robinette Kowal: 1
The Winter Long, by Seanan McGuire: 1
#
General discussion of the individual books and/or the results are more than welcome below. It's certainly given me an interesting reading list to work with.
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This is always my problem with this sort of thing. I'd have to dig back through my library records for the past year, and rummage through my bookshelves trying to remember what I'd bought when, and then I'd have to check each of those books individually to see when they were published (because I read a lot more old stuff than new, and even "new" in my world can be several years old), and then I could try to pick which of the survivors I liked best.
Or I could spend that time reading another book, y'know?