Hugo Award Winners Announced and Initial Thoughts

Now later today and tomorrow and possibly through into Monday, I plan on writing/posting reviews of the five finalists for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel (in the coming weeks, time permitting, I'm going to read the online versions of the nominees in most of the other fiction categories and possibly review them in short form here). But today, I thought I'd just post a link to the final results.

I've read the winning novel, Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, and while I'll weigh in later with much more commentary as to that particular book's perceived strengths and weaknesses, it just didn't have that "feel" that an award-winning book ought to have, or at least for me anyways. But what struck me was the extremely low number of votes - only 471 valid ballots? That is only a slight bit higher than what would happen if one of the more-visited fantasy websites or author blogs were visited and people had the chance to vote. In this day of instant access and hundreds of people weighing in at almost any Joe Schmo's site/blog on most anything (the recent SFWA snafu being a prime example), the continued relevance of the Hugos as being some form of "the fan's choice" is probably going to be questioned. But I have already weighed in on this before, so I'll just let this link speak to a long-term concern many of us have had.

But despite all this, I suppose the Hugos are still valuable in forcing some of us to take notice of books that we would probably never have given a second thought to if a few hundred others hadn't felt a strong enough affinity for them to place them into the finalist round and thus to the attention of thousands of more people. I just don't know if this is a better system than a juried award, though. Only time will see, I suppose.