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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.
Having read all the nominees, I think this was not a very strong year. I liked Feed, but I'm sick of zombie novels (and so is everyone else). Cryoburn is (I believe) Book #16 in the Vorkosigan series, and though it's well-executed, it doesn't stand out from the other 15. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is fine, but it suffers from a bit of debutnovelitis. I would have picked either The Dervish House or Blackout/All Clear, and apparently The Dervish House is so little known that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.
I disagree about the Hugos being hidebound, though - look at the last three years, with The City and the City, The Graveyard Book, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union all winning - none of which are conventional science fiction at all.
The Magicians and The Magician King (by Lev Grossman) are very cool fantasy books (imho). Sure there are tons of Narnia and Potter parallels, but it was nice to see wizardry from a darker, adult perspective. If nothing else, I think you're right, a chance to discover new authors.
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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.
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I will say that historically, the Hugos go to more high quality books than the Nebulas, though overall quality is still lacking; the failure of Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds to have won a single Hugo is kind of ridiculous.
I must disagree, if only slightly, Iain Banks hasn't written a lot of SF, although his novel "Transition" has some elements of Quantum Mechanics 'many worlds' model as a major element. Arguably, that's actually more science in the fiction than most SF, but it's still generally considered a mainstream novel. Iain M. Banks, on the other hand, as the author of the 'Culture' series, well deserves a Hugo or two. I can see how its possible to get the two mixed, and fortunately, both of them live quite near each other in Fife, Scotland, and I'm told they both will make sure mail sent to either will be read by the appropriate one.
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