The Hugo Awards have really come to represent the views and tastes of a narrow clique. I don't know to what extent this was always the case -- my impression of the Awards in the 90s and 00s was that they strived for more objectivity -- but it's quite flagrant right now. And it's unfortunate, as they go HARD for very soft science fiction which reads a lot more like fantasy...
Voting is open to all attendees of the World Scifi Convention and they usually get thousands of votes now. It's possible that you find the winners too "mainstream" but accusing them of being cliquey doesn't make sense.
WorldCon is not representative of all readership. Its website even notes: "The Hugo voters are good at finding and nominating good works, and do talk among themselves, so word spreads." [1] They seem to do an awful lot of talking among themselves, I'll give them that.
Besides, it doesn't take a whole lot of nominations to get something onto the ballot. An energetic and motivated clique can capture the whole thing.
And surely it's apparent that they reward a certain type of work, and disregard others. For e.g., Analog Magazine -- which specializes in hard science fiction -- didn't pick up a single short story or novella nomination.
Traditional print magazines like Analog are at a huge disadvantage in popularity contest awards like the Hugos because they are only available to subscribers.
Hugo winners usually come from magazines that make their stories available for free online.
I'm curious, is there some novel that you think was underlooked at this year's Hugo awards, like if you were running the show you would have given them the award? I feel like my tastes probably agree with yours but I am not sure if the problem is the Hugo voters or if there are just very few great books of the sort I most prefer the past few years.
Ah, interesting - I did like The Mountain in the Sea, I forgot about that one. Eversion was decent too. I am going to get Beyond the Burn Line as a result of this comment's recommendation. So thanks!
McAuley's recent output (Austral, War of the Maps, Beyond the Burn Line,) has been very good -- and I'd say that those three books are all equal in terms of literary and entertainment quality.
All of them are, in a sense, the same type of story -- Person Goes on Journey Through Strange Territory -- but that's a solid foundation for a science fiction novel, and McAuley does it well, with more than enough variation to keep things interesting. Austral has near-future climate fiction and crime fiction elements; War of the Maps takes place on a Dyson Sphere around a white dwarf star in an aged and dying universe; Beyond the Burn Line is a middle-distance cautionary tale about AI and, in a sense, religion...
McAuley has a novella in this month's Asimov which is also quite similar, and also very good. "Blade and Bone" is about the sole survivors of an annihilated infantry battalion as they make their way across a hostile Mars -- which has been terraformed but is reverting to a cold and dry baseline.
This kind of engaging hard SF is, emphatically, not appreciated by the people who vote on Hugo awards. So much the worse for them, I think...
