Slashdot Mirror
The 2011 Hugo Awards
An anonymous reader writes "The Hugo Award is the leading prize for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy writing. Named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine, the awards have been given out since 1955. This year's winners were announced Saturday during the Hugo Awards Ceremony in Reno, Nevada."
Tor has links to online versions of the nominees for Short Story, for Novellette and for four out of the five Novellas.
The Hugos are awarded by fans, the Nebulas by writers who are members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA. Ca. 2007, a lot of SF writers started questioning whether SFWA was relevant anymore. A couple of their elected officers showed extremely poor judgment (google "sfwa hendrix" and "sfwa burt"), and this seems to have been symptomatic of more widespread dysfunction within the organization.
Find free books.
If you were a British science fiction fan you would certainly have heard of Steven Moffat, who has written some of the best episodes in the Dr. Who reboot, and has been the lead writer and executive producer of the show since Russel T Davis left in 2009.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The other thing to do is make sure you check out the full list of nominees (available here).
I've often read the Winning book and thought "meh" and then gone on to read some of the nominees which I really enjoyed. It's a good shortlist of some great recent sci-fi.
I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
The "judges" for the Hugo are the same people as are on the nomination committee: the members of that year's WorldCon. If you don't want Girl Genius to get the Hugo next year, buy a supporting membership, pay the voting fee and vote for somebody else. GG still might get it, but at least you'll have done what you could to affect the outcome.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
It was not the greatest year, but Restoration Game and The Dervish House were pretty strong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The problem with using the Hugo awards to find good sci fi is that the Hugos stopped being a good place to do that when the fantasy fanbois took over the world cons. The thing about the Hugo Awards is that *anybody* who joins a world con can vote for the Hugos; there was always a fringe fantasy element at the cons, but it stopped being fringe all of a sudden. You can pinpoint the year it started, too -- 2001, when a fucking Harry Potter fantasy got Best Novel. Up to 2001, not a single work of fantasy recieved Best Novel. Of the twelve best novel award winners since 2001, seven are works of fantasy. As other people have suggested, look at the nominees and not just the award winners. A quick google will help you weed out the fantasy crap.