Few works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you.

I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.

Hugo voters are members of the World Science Fiction Society (who are mostly Worldcon attendees). Which is to say, voters for that are chosen for enthusiasm for the genre, not taste.

Hugo awards are by popular vote of fans attending conventions, and SF mostly prided itself on being about ideas, so you'll get what caught most people's fancy at the time.

I have come to accept that most books are good at something, and maybe even a few things, but not so great at many things. I embarked on a similar "read the Hugos" adventure and much of it is great in a sci-fi premise - understandable - but the characters or pacing or unfolding story is meh.

Example, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber [0] is a great exposition of gravitational effects when a planet-sized object appears in the sky nearby earth. Characters and unfolding story are meh. I pictured it as a C-grade 60's movie with stilted acting. But the way the earth was reacting and the moon coming apart was a great fictional invention and the way it was done was novel at the time!

In similar vein, Conan stories are great fantasy adventures with well described fights, battles, scenes. I've never found a better author to describe a fight - or a battle between armies - with enough detail to make it interesting and exciting and yet in relatively few words. I've also never read stories as sexist and racist... but I don't go out of my way to look for that I guess. I accepted it was written in the day it was and had to sort the wheat from the chaff.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21808426

I did the same a couple of decades ago and enjoyed it. It was especially interesting to see a slice of early sci-fi. It's been a while, but I remember enjoying "The Big Time" and Connie Willis' books.

Not to be the one to point out the pink elephant, but the Hugo Awards became somewhat politicized a decade or so ago and identity politics started to feature heavily into selections. If your criteria doesn't include that then the awards are now probably meaningless. But go back to the past, and there's a reason they used to have such prestige associated with them. For instance in the 60s some winners were Starship Troopers, Man in the High Castle, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!

Come to think of it not sure if that says more about the 60s or the award though. Cripes there was something in the water back then.

Yes, 60s famous as period when the gender of the author or characters did not mattered in the slightest. It was totally only later when they started to matter, sure.

identity politics sneakily becoming a required element in media (whether that be for genuine representation reasons, appeals to that market, whatever) isn't a necessary result of equitability in writing.

Compared to era when female characters and writers were excluded openly ... I mean common.

It is absurd to use the era where identity (gender, race) was key determinant of what will happen, before anything else.

Do you have any evidence that such alleged exclusion of good writing was common and disproportional compared to male writers?

Of course it mattered, but it didn't define the results. Le Guin won it multiple times. And as far back as 1956, the third Hugo ever, a female author made it to the short list. But they weren't winning or being nominated because of their sex. They were just exceptional authors who happened to be female, which is as it should be.

Meanwhile male authors had to be less exceptional to win or succeed. Simple as that. Men had lower bar, every step of the way.

Also, claim that hugo winners won only because of their gender is crap. They won't the vite fairly. Unlike sad puppies, they did not even needed politically motivated coordination for that.

What authors of the past were neglected in your opinion, or perhaps unfairly promoted? In modern times I think this is fairly easy to demonstrate. Books like Project Hail Mary are insufficient to win, while the most winning works are not especially exceptional. Those that are, perhaps The Three Body Problem, tend be the exception rather than the rule.

The vote also is not fair. People publicly organize voting cliques on e.g. Reddit (to say nothing of what's happening in private), and the new system is extremely exploitable. But I think that's beside the point. The issue is the outcome. The Hugos used to not only reliably reflect the best in genre works, but also select works that would often be talked about decades later. How they achieved that is irrelevant, only that they used to be able to do so, and now do not.

I think the groups that coopt, or try to coopt, these sort of things (which obviously also includes the Puppy stuff), fail to realize that the prestige of something is not based on that thing itself - but on the value of that which it promotes. If MIT just started enrolling 'merely above average' students and printing out diplomas, then they'd quickly lose their prestige. The same thing has happened here.

I mean Project Hail Mary is also far from being exceptional. I didn't dislike the book and it was enjoyable but I would never think it deserves an award. In particular, the scenes with the alien fell really flat. Now I haven't read the winner for best novel of 2022 and to be honest I haven't read any amazing novel published in 2021.

Of course there are personal tastes, so I'd simply look at large scale data. The winner for 2022 is A Desolation Called Peace. [1] As per Amazon it ended up with far fewer purchases, lower reviews amongst those who purchased it (in spite of a rather conspicuous amount of reviews that are generally critical of the book then giving it 5 stars anyhow), and it won the Hugo.

Of course the Hugo obviously shouldn't just be "#1 book [in genre] on Amazon" because the entire point of awards is to focus on quality, which may not always be clearly reflected by sales. But when even the relatively small minority of people buying the winning book don't seem to like it as much as other books, something is quite wrong. Let alone the fact that Project Hail Mary came in last place, also behind books like She Who Became the Sun. [2]

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Desolation-Called-Peace-Teixcalaan-Bo...

[2] - https://www.amazon.com/She-Who-Became-Shelley-Parker-Chan-eb...

FWIW, A Desolation Called Peace is one of my favorite SF books I've read in the last 10 years. I really enjoy that series.

I like Project Hail Mary, too, and it's certainly more popular because the author is far more well known, but there's no question in my mind which one is "better", certainly in terms of deserving to win an award.

I've noticed the same thing, especially with Hugo awards.

On the other hand my favorite SF author, Gene Wolfe, has also won many other awards, like the Nebula and Locus awards. So you can find good stuff by using the awards as a starting point.

Huh, that's interesting. I read a lot of Hugo winning stuff and always found them well written even if not massively engaging.

When awarding bodies grow in popularity, their roles switch from populist to elitist, as their membership becomes more elite.

This hit the Hugo awards extra hard, because their voting method is especially vulnerable to lobbying, and warring factions have been lobbying to sway the body of voters one way or another.