The 2010 Hugo Award Winners
I’ve posted the list of 2010 Hugo Winners over at Suite101, together with some Hugo trivia.
In the article I talk a lot about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, particularly in light of the fact that it’s only the fourth novel to win the ‘trinity’ of Hugo, Nebula & JWC. I’m not so naive as to believe that the best novels always win these awards. In fact some stinkers have won individual awards. But over the years they’ve collectively been a good barometer of what exemplifies what we should treasure, and point newcomers to as introductory works to the genre.
A second mini-thought: Nicholas Whyte mentioned on his blog that all five fiction winners were men. When I looked through my scrappy list, I found that the [fiction] winners for the 2000s had the lowest proportion of women of any decade since the 1970s. Does that mean that Hugo voters are becoming more sexist, or is gender less of an issue in who the voters pick, leading to a greater preponderence of male stories on the ballot? You decide.