The Hugo Awards Have A Massive Problem As They're Getting Less Than 30% Of Votes Than A Decade Ago

Worldcon Seattle has announced its 2025 Hugo Awards finalists, and many are not familiar with the names on the list as the awards become more of an insular club and less about the greatest books that can be agreed upon in science fiction as masterpieces.

The Hugo Awards have been embroiled in controversy too many times in the last decade to have much relevancy anymore. Once known as science fiction’s Oscars, the publishing industry has turned off most casual readers from their incessant political activism and gotten to a point where it’s hardly notice anymore who’s winning these ballots.

Back in 2016, it took a lot of votes to get a nomination for the Hugo Awards. 3,695 ballots were cast for Worldcon that year, and you’d find familiar names for Best Novel such as Neal Stephenson and Jim Butcher among the list of those nominated ,even though much more niche works eventually won.

In that same year, Worldcon changed their rules to make it difficult for people outside their insular circles of SFWA writers to influence nominations, which caused many to not bother voting or attend Worldcon in subsequent years. With rampant identity politics causing problems with the nominations, and horrific unwarranted personal attacks on popular authors like Larry Correia and Vox Day coming from much of this crowd, they lost a lot of momentum in the process.

During COVID, Worldcon diminished further with draconian rules in place for attending forcing people to wear masks, even canceling one year’s in person convention, causing further dwindling interest as the insular group keeps aging and hasn’t done anything to try to bring in a modern generation of readers.

The political problems didn’t stop there. In 2023, Worldcon was held in Chengdu China, and the awards were controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, who threw out ballots and works they did not agree with in a censorious controversy that upset even the insular people who tried to gatekeep to begin with.

All of these problems have only compounded in recent years as more people have tuned out.

By the numbers, the best novel category had 3,695 ballots in 2016. In 2024, even after the controversy in China, there were 1,420 ballots cast,. This year, however, only 1,078 ballots were cast for the most popular category, less than thirty percent of a decade ago.