What makes a Hugo-worthy novel?

Introduction
As part of the research for my masters dissertation, I ran a survey at Worldcon in Glasgow this year looking into what Worldcon members felt made a Hugo-worthy novel. I’ve been invited by SF² Concatenation to publish those results for the readers here.

The survey asked participants to select their age cohort, and then to answer the following two questions:
1) What qualities do you think a Hugo nominee or final winner
for Best Novel should have?
2) Do you think more works not marketed or obviously identified
as genre fiction (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror, etc) should be
considered for Hugo Awards? Why or why not?(1)

The purpose of the first question was to get a sense of what ‘best’ meant to those voting (or at least eligible to vote) in the Hugo awards. I was interested in finding points of significant overlap which indicated commonalities between respondents as to what ‘best’ meant.

The second question was about where readers look for Hugo nominees and to what extent they feel the Hugos are a genre specific award or, with the increased relaxation of boundaries between genre and mainstream literary fiction, how open readers were to looking beyond genre-marketed fiction for Hugo contenders.

Methodology
The survey was completed anonymously via Google forms, with no other prompts beyond the questions asked.

As the questions were of a qualitative nature, interpretation was a subjective process. For this reason, it is possible what the researcher comprehends may differ from what the respondent intended.

For Question 1 (Q1), responses were coded into categories based on ideas or words which appeared in multiple responses. However, if the meaning was judged to be similar enough, several different words or phrasings were grouped into one large category. For example, ‘meaningful’, ‘relevant’, and ‘deep’ were all put within the same category of ‘big themes’.

If a respondent said they looked for something ‘well-written’ that was ‘original’, then a tally would be added to the categories of both ‘well-written’ and ‘original’

Interpreting what respondents meant by the words they used could at times be tricky. It was hard to tell if ‘interesting’ was being used in the sense of ‘thought-provoking’ or in the sense of ‘entertaining’, and so interesting ended up in a category all of its own.

Question 2 (Q2), was slightly easier, but it was still sometimes difficult to determine the difference between whether respondents thought non-genre marketed works were already considered for the Hugos or if they thought in the future they should be considered.

Age	Number of Responses
75+	1
65-74	17
55-64	29
45-54	22
35-44	25
25-34	13
18-24	3
Total Responses	110

Due to the small number of respondents in some age groups, I did not feel there was enough data to confidently compare responses based on age cohort and so the following show overall results only.

Q1: What qualities do you think a Hugo nominee or final winner for Best Novel should have?	Number of responses which mentioned X: *Responses usually included more than one idea so there are more tallies than individual respondents.	Percentage of total respondents *Not out of a percentage of 100, but of 107 people how many mentioned this idea.
Well-written / good plot / good characters / good worldbuilding	77	71.96%
Original / innovative / imaginative / new concepts	65	60.75%
Big theme / meaningful / relevant / deep	21	19.63%
Compelling / engaging	18	16.82%
Genre literature specifically	17	15.89%
Entertaining / fun / enjoyable	15	14.02%
Strong science concepts	12	11.21%
Thought Provoking	9	8.41%
Interesting	9	8.41%
Pushes the genre	7	6.54%
Science Fiction specifically	7	6.54%
Gives a sense of wonder / possibility	6	5.61%
Outstanding in 1+ areas / Doing things it does well	4	3.74%
Timeless / stands test of time	3	2.80%

Total Responses Counted: * Three responses had to be discarded as meaning could not be determined.	107

Discussion
The answers I received to the first question were wide-ranging, resulting in many different categories.

Overwhelmingly more than two thirds of the respondents looked for books that were well-written, with good prose, plotting, and characterisation. More than half wanted books with original, imaginative or new concepts that they haven’t encountered before. Almost one in five wanted big themes and topics that were meaningful, made them think, or captured their interest. More than a quarter wanted something compelling and exciting which they enjoyed reading. (‘Compelling’ and ‘Entertaining’ categories). A notable portion mentioned genre literature as a requirement, it is unknown how much this was influenced by the second question (Q2) asked by the survey.

Results for Q2

Q2: Do you think more works not marketed or obviously identified as genre fiction (Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, etc) should be considered for Hugo Awards? Why or why not?	Number of responses which expressed X:	Percentage of total
Yes	57	52.78%
No	26	24.07%
Already do consider non-genre works	17	15.74%
Sometimes	7	6.48%
Only SF works should be considered	1	0.93%

Total Responses Counted: * Two responses had to be discarded as meaning could not be determined or field was left blank.	108

Discussion
A little more than two thirds (‘Yes’ and ‘Already do’) of respondents expressed that the Hugos either already were open to non-genre marketed works, or that they were fine with non-genre marketed works falling within consideration. Most expressed that ‘marketing’ was irrelevant or even could be mistaken about a book’s SF/F/H nature.

However, almost a quarter of respondents believed that the Hugos are or should be a genre-specific award. Many expressed that there were enough other awards out there for non-genre works, so SF/F should have its own too. Some felt there was so much to read published within SF/F already that it was too much to also be looking beyond the genre. A few respondents mentioned something to the effect that the Hugos should represent the Worldcon SF/F community, and that nominated works, and their authors should be proud to write in genre.

Conclusion
This survey only sampled a comparatively small number of people and so results should not be considered an absolute reflection of the opinions of the Worldcon members.

Responses to Q1 showed a wide range for what made something the ‘best’, but overall matched what academic Nicola Humble called the taste of the middlebrow, or the bestseller, balanced between intellectual challenge and entertainment.(2)

Answers to Q2 showed that a majority (‘Yes’ and ‘Already do’) did not think the market segment a book is ascribed to was relevant to whether it was Hugo worthy or not. Often expressing that the ability to determine a books ‘genre’ lay with the reader. But there was also a decent portion of respondents who strongly felt the Hugos were specifically for books within the S/SF genre market.

Even considering the number of respondents open to non-genre marketed works in theory, due to the strong genre-identity associated with Worldcon, the many years of precedent when nominating for the Hugos, and the practical problems of widening the field given by some of the respondents, it is unlikely that there will be a significant rise in nominees from outside the S/SF/H genre for The Hugo Awards in the future.

Rebecca Montgomery

Notes & References

1) While I did not give an example in the survey, by ‘non-genre marketed’ I meant books like The Handmaid’s Tale (Margret Atwood), Sea of Tranquility (Emily St. John Mandel), or Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro), those works which are usually classified (and often shelved in bookstores and libraries) as literary fiction, or perhaps ‘speculative fiction’ but inside the literary fiction bracket and outside the realm of Science Fiction.

2) Humble, N. (2012) ‘The reader of popular fiction’, in D. Glover and S. McCracken (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, pp. 86–102. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Great Britain.

Rebecca Montgomery has recently completed a masters in Publishing Media at Oxford Brookes University. This research was conducted as part of her final dissertation titled, Shoot for the Moon and Land Among the Stars: The Hugo Awards and Science Fiction Culture. Glasgow 2024 was her first Worldcon, but hopefully not her last.

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What makes a Hugo-worthy novel?

A Survey Conducted at the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon

A Survey Conducted at the
Glasgow 2024 Worldcon