I mean, Hugo?

Would it be so hard to explain in one little sentence what those award are about?

The first sentence in the post mentions 2003, but the link leads to the 2004 awards (the title of the article says 2004, too). Could an editor fix the mistake?

I love SciFi, but honestly, heritage? Asimov, Dick, Heinlein & Clarke were all hobbled by their inability to write as well as they thought. I haven't read Lem. The four I have read wrote some really interesting stories and have some very good ideas, but characterization and plotting are weak and their novels generally limp along. Fantasy on the other hand typically focuses more on the writing and less on the magic.

So what should the Hugo judge, science or fiction? I think a blend of both. Take Robert Forward for instance, he writes technically solid hard science books that absolutely stink, with characters that might as well be Barbie and Ken dolls (and plenty of Heinlein/Clarke style gratuitous sex). They sure do explore our scientific options, as do Clarke's, but they're painful to read. Flipside, Roger Zelazny's _Lord of Light_ is mostly characterization and plot, with the science barely considered at all. Which one is more fun and more inspiring to read? And is _Lord of Light_ even a scifi book, or more of a fantasy book? It certainly blurs the line.

Vernor Vinge wins a Hugo practically every time he turns around, because he can write well and think scientifically. I greatly prefer reading him and have reread most of his books because they're so damned good.

Just some thoughts, really. I don't think LoTR really deserves a Hugo either, as much as I like it, but it looks to me like it's WETA and Peter Jackson getting the awards here, not Tolkein.

It's easy to show that fantasy and SF are distinct if you cherry-pick your examples (LoTR), but can you give us a definition of one genre or the other that can be applied to any arbitrary work to decide whether it fits into one or the other categories? I contend you can't.

My standard example is two Zelazny novels: _Lord of Light_ and _Creatures of Light and Darkness_. Both are tales of wars between gods of ancient pantheons (Hindu in the former, Egyptian in the latter). However, in the first, the "gods" are explained as being psychically gifted humans who have managed to take over a lost colony, and who vigorously suppress all use of technology among the colonists, and reserve it for themselves, so they can appear more godlike to their subjects. Their technology is not particularly advanced (airplanes, lasers, telephones) except for the mind-transfer machine that they use to provide "reincarnation" for themselves and the more favored of their subjects. By contrast, in the latter novel, no attempt is made at all to explain these "gods", but the story is full of standard SF elements - spaceships and interstellar travel, computers, cyborgs, etc. I've seen people argue for hours about whether and how either of these books should be categorized.

Magic, Dragons and Castles? How about Psionics, Dragons and Castles? How about Anne McAffrey's Pern series, where the dragons are actually alien creatures native to the planet, and the humans live in castles because they've lost the technology they used to come to the planet? Scientific Methodology? How about Randall Garrett's stories of Lord D'Arcy, whose research magicians are bound by laws as rigorous and scientific as anything propounded by Newton or Einstein, even though they don't happen to apply in our universe.

Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke? Aside from Lem (who I'm not too familiar with) and perhaps Dick (whose stuff was considered so outrageous that some people questioned whether any of it could be called SF), there isn't a writer there who hasn't written both SF and Fantasy, and occasionally, the hard-to-classify story on the boundaries between the genres (e.g. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God).

By the 1950s, it was clear that the writers were going to treat any attempt to define the boundaries between SF and Fantasy as a challenge. You're fighting a battle that was lost half a century ago, and citing as authorities the very people who carried the other side to victory. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic" -- A. Clarke.

Myself, like you, I generally prefer SF, insofar as I can distinguish it, but beyond that, I also prefer the rigorous logic and internal consistency of a Lord D'Arcy fantasy over the psuedo-scientific babble of most Hollywood SF. Anyway, Bujold is primarily a science fiction writer, so I find it hard to complain too much when her fantasy novel wins the Hugo. :)

How about Iain Banks? Communist utopian science fiction, not exactly a done-to-death theme...