Tie for 2010 Hugo Award For Best Sci-fi Novel

The 2010 Hugo Awards were announced last weekend in Melbourne, Australia. As I expected, China Miéville's acclaimed novel The City & The City (see MadProfessah's B+ review) was the winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. That's not a surprise. What is a surprise is that there was another winner, despite the fact that the voting process used is preference voting (like the Oscar ballots, voters rank the nominees in order of their preference for what they want to win the prize).

The other Hugo Award winner for Best Novel is Paolo Bacigalulpi's The Windup Girl, which Time magazine listed as one of the Top 10 reads of 2009. I haven't read it, yet, but it is now on my Amazon wishlist.

The organizers of AussieCon4 have released statistics of the vote (pdf) in this year's Hugo awards and the Best Novel balloting is fascinating:

The City & The City by China Miéville (winner)	The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (winner)
240	240
240	240
264	254
292	275
323	308
380	380

The two winners were tied in 3 of the 6 rounds, with Miéville having a lead in the unimportant middle rounds. The only rounds which are determinative are the 1st and last rounds, and there the two were completely tied. The last time there was a tie in the Hugo Award for Best Novel it was between two of my favorite books of all time, in 1993 Doomsday Book (read MadProfessah's A review) by Connie Willis and A Fire Upon The Deep (see MadProfessah's A review) by Vernor Vinge.

It should be noted that the only time there has ever been a tie in Oscar voting is in 1968 for Best Actress when Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter and Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl tied. The Academy sadly does not release the results (ever!) of Oscar balloting.