120px-HugoAwardDesign2005 The Hugo Awards were given out recently.  These are some of the most famous awards for science fiction authors.  As an avid reader of science fiction they really don’t matter to me.  If anything a Hugo Award is a negative factor when I’m choosing a book by an author I don’t know.  I’ve read a lot of the Hugo winners, both in collections from the early years and by picking up stories with "HUGO AWARD WINNER" splashed all over its blurbs.  There are some Hugo Award Winners that I have enjoyed reading, but the majority of them hold little appeal.  In a number of cases it has felt as though the author was writing for other authors or for critics and not for readers (or at least not for readers like me). 

As a sample, here are the Hugo Award winners for best novel that I’ve enjoyed enough to think that they deserved recognition. 

There are actually more of them than I’d thought.  There are another four or five that I’d say were worth reading even if they were nothing special.  Of the 40ish novels that have received a Hugo, I’d estimate that I’ve read or tried to read about 30.  On the bright side, if a novel is a Hugo winner I can usually know if I’ll enjoy it within a couple of pages.