2011 Hugo Awards: Predictably Meh

As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn’t all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would’ve been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout/ All Clear, a pair of books that almost nobody had anything good to say about? The only possible outcome that would’ve been less inspiring would’ve been a tie with Cryoburn.

Lower down the ballot, things are a little better. I don’t read much short fiction, but lots of people who do said before the voting that Sheila Williams was way overdue to win the short form editor Hugo. I’ve enjoyed Shaun Tan’s work, Clarkeswordl seems like a good magazine, Lou Anders has done a good job building up Pyr, I liked Inception, the Ted Chiang story was perfectly good, and most importantly, the short story Hugo didn’t go to that terrible Kij Johnson story, or the Peter Watts one, either.

The Campbell not-a-Hugo went to Lev Grossman, whose books and blogging I enjoy quite a bit, so I’m happy with that. He’s not really a new writer, in that he had at least one novel published before The Magicians, but not in the genre, so it’s no sillier than David Anthony Durham winning a few years ago.

So, you know, it could’ve been worse. Still… it’s hard not to be disappointed, given the Novel result.