Are the Hugo nominees really the best sci-fi books of the year?

This year’s awards have been beset by controversy, but there’s reason to believe the genre is more diverse and democratic than ever

The sci-fi calendar revolves around prizes. From April to September, the best or simply the kookiest sci-fi books of the year are celebrated in a packed schedule of awards. On 4 April alone, the Tiptree award was scooped up by dual winners Jo Walton and Monica Byrne, while the British Science Fiction Association awards were announced at Eastercon.

Locus magazine’s annual publicly voted awards are a useful guide to the best recent science-fiction writing, with William Gibson’s The Peripheral, Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Causal Angel and Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire among the titles that reveal the rough outline of science fiction and fantasy in 2015. It has been a wonderful year for quality imaginative storytelling, but very little of that quality was reflected in arguably the field’s best-known awards, the Hugos.

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