Which of these two major sci-fi awards is considered more prestigious? Does one or the other tend to honor specific sub-genres of sci-fi? Etc., etc.?
Sua
Neither, both. Your pick. The Nebula is voted on by writers (technically, members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America). The Hugo is voted on by fans/readers (technically, attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention). Many times, the same works are nominated for both awards and quite often the same work wins both.
There can be only one!
It’s simple, really: The Hugo is awarded by vote of the members (in actual attendance or not; so long as they’re registered and paid, they can vote by mail – or online, I suppose) of the annual World Science Fiction Convention. The Nebula is awarded by a professional association, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. So the Nebula might be considered more “presitigious” – but if you’re a Hugo winner you probably have a broader fanba$e, for what that’$ worth.
They’re roughly even. I think the Hugo is more likely to be recognized outside of the scifi world, but not drastically so. Personally, I’ve preferred the Hugo in the past, but lately they keep giving the Hugo to Harry Potter books, which I’m not entirely ok with.
Thanks
I should mention that both are pretty heavily affected by politics too. You’ve got to schmooze the writers to get the Nebula but you can pander to fans for the Hugo. The Hugo is always going to have a broader nominee base since the Nebula is limited to members of the SFWA.
What do you mean “keep giving”? It was once, seven years ago.
I personally wouldn’t have picked it but that’s the kind of result you can expect from a fan award from time to time. What’s popular will always have an edge and when something is a pop culture phenomenon like Harry Potter sometimes the voters who just go “Ooooh! Harry Potter!” will overwhelm those who say “Hmmm… I don’t think Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is really the best work of fantasy or science fiction last year.”
I think the bigger sin of recent Hugos is Hominids which is one of the worst books I’ve ever read (I quite literally had to stop every two or three paragraphs because I encountered something so mindnumbingly stupid that I couldn’t go on; for a book that was 300 pages with lots of extra spacing and huge margins it took me about three times as long to read as I would expect), but Worldcon that year was in the author’s home town and he campaigned very heavily for the votes.
I do think the past few years have been pretty good. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is an exceptional book, Spin was some solid “big idea” science fiction that didn’t even disappoint with the big reveal at the end, and Rainbows End wasn’t a bad -punk novel (info-punk perhaps?).
The Hugo in the past has voted for some real stinkers (I’ll go dredge up a list, if I get a sec). I’ve almost always agreed with the Nebula choices, IIRC.
That sounds like fun. Having read all of the novels these are the Hugo winners that I couldn’t stand (as opposed to just disliked):
They’d Rather Be Right - Scientology plus Ayn Rand will turn you into a telepathic superman!
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Farmer does what is essentially bad Mary Sue’ed Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) fan fiction completely wasting a wonderful premise.
Dreamsnake - Tripe would be putting it nicely. Super perfect protagonist wanders around making things better with no effort until she realizes where babies come from, something which a very large population of genetic engineers were having centuries of trouble figuring out.
Foundation’s Edge - See my above comment about sometimes fan sentiment overwelming other voter’s good sense. This is essentially trying to hand out one last award to Asimov (he actually got another a decade later but it wasn’t as bad of a mismatch as this).
Speaker for the Dead - Hot writer at the time coming from a Hugo win on the very deserving Ender’s Game so he pulled in the votes on this much, much worse follow-up. For some reason it has the same problem with people not being able to work out where babies come from as Dreamsnake. I think that may say something about science fiction fans. 
Green Mars and Blue Mars - My guess is that these got swept in on a wave of “Look at the terriforming!” while people were ignoring the horrifically stupid characterization and sociology. Economies cannot run on the “everyone play nice!” theory and since everyone’s life went on pretty much like normal despite the need for a despotic totalitarian government to manage the rules Robinson set up to make a “utopia” I could only keep rolling my eyes when a character would spontaneously break out into a multipage rant about how much better they were than us evil modern day humans.
Hominids - Has the same incredibly terrible economics and sociology from the Mars trilogy along with clumsily inserted expository dialog on biology. It’s preachy, condescending garbage. I quite literally have several pages of ranting notes on how terrible this book is for a review.
The Nebulas are not faultless either, though I haven’t yet read all of their winners. There’s a lot of books in their list that I simply didn’t like (looks like about a third) while the only one that I’ve read that I despise is Red Mars (like the above but it introduces us to the pack of highly trained professionals colonizing Mars who behave pretty much like a bunch of junior high kids).
Mostly agree, Just Some Guy. I’d add Forever Peace off the top of my head. I liked The Forever War, as a Heinlein parody, but I hated this one.
You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about these and many other SF, fantasy and horror awards here.
FWIW, the Hugos exist in many more categories than the Nebulas, which are for writers only. Hugos also exist for movies, TV shows, magazines and artists, among other things.
As for which is more prestigious, that depends on which you value more, the opinion of a writer’s peers or that of the audience. I won’t take sides there. I will suggest that any work which has won a Hugo and a Nebula would probably be worth reading; if you hate it, you can still have fun trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.
I won’t put up much of a fight on that one. I liked the telepathy premise and the protagonists being willing to go off the moral deep end despite the consequences but didn’t care for about the last third of the novel.
There was a movement in the early 90’s to add scriptwriting awards to the Nebula’s but a lot of the SFWA rejected it since they considered scriptwriting to not be “real” writing.
I need to add that screenplays have since been added to the Nebulas; I was just remembering hearing about the fight when it caused a few screenwriters who also wrote some science fiction to quit the SFWA over it.
Aw, hell. I thought Speaker for the Dead was poignant. Otherwise, I agree with you.
I quit enjoy Robert J. Sawyer and my introduction to him was actually through the Neanderthal Parallax. Could you go into more detail or possibly open a new thread about it, Just Some Guy?
With Speaker for the Dead I thought that the sections that were Ender dealing with the consequences of his actions in Ender’s Game were good. The problem was that just about everything else was terrible. I didn’t like Ender as the almost magically perfect protagonist who can fix a broken home just by showing up and making an entire colony of religious conservatives not care about a twenty year long web of lies just by saying the truth. And then there’s the baby problem again; figuring out the life cycle of the alien environment should have been step number one for any biologist and yet it took them fifty years to start looking at this. Fifty years which included genetically modifying some of those alien plants. Finally, I pretty much found all of the characters to be one note and unlikable.
As for Hominids let me keep this simple rather than going through my examples:
[ul]
[li]Sawyer peppers the book with factoids about Neanderthals but they’re tossed out so haphazardly in terrible expository dialog that it makes the book read like a bad third-grade science paper.[/li][li]That expository dialog goes along with the fact that the prose is terrible. Dialog is so clunky you can hear the audible thunks as it falls into place.[/li][li]Sawyer bases his Neanderthal society on then current anthropological hypotheses of their tribal structure; saying things would be just like they were one hundred thousand years ago only with future technology is insane.[/li][li]Sawyer’s understanding of technological development apparently stops one hundred thousand years ago as well since he just drops future tech into Neanderthal society with no thought as to the steps that would have to come before.[/li][li]There’s dozens of just plain freakish bits of engineering that Sawyer dropped into the book to make the Neanderthals different but don’t make any sense. In general he just doesn’t understand the consequences of the designs and technology he places in Neanderthal society.[/li][li]And then there’s the gratuitous rape scene at the beginning which is done as cheap characterization (all of the characters could be replaced with cardboard cut outs, though) and nothing actually happens regarding those events which require the audience to accept that a modern, middle-aged, Canadian professor to believe that the police wouldn’t do anything about her being raped. Fifty years ago I could have bought it, a fifteen year old I could have bought it, in Saudi Arabia I could have bought it, a stripper I could have bought it but it’s like Sawyer doesn’t understand how modern criminal justice systems respond to rape…[/li][/ul]
In my opinion, both have equal importance because both are recognitions given for good work, one by the writers and the other by the fans or the readers. So, none can be singled out. Both are prestigious in their own.
Zombie thread, but interesting still:
Many writers will want the Nebula award because it’s conferred by other writers. It’s the reason actors want an Oscar, because it’s awarded by their peers. An actor can win a lot of Golden Globes and People’s Choice awards, but the they’ll mention an Oscar nomination before a win for the other ones.
I was at the 2001 Hugos when Harry Potter won. Afterward, a friend of mine - an actual Nebula winner - came up to me. All he could say was, Harry FUCKING Potter. That attitude must have been common; Rowling has never even made the ballot since which is a gigantic surprise for an award often accused of being a popularity contest. It’s just as odd that George R. R. Martin, a four-time Hugo winner, has never won for any of the Game of Thrones (A Song of Fire and Ice) novels.
I need to correct Just Some Guy about the Nebula script awards. They did do a script award from 1974 to 1977. The huge problem that killed it was an obvious one: nobody on the outside ever sees the actual script for a movie. You can listen to the dialog, but that’s not a script. And you will never know how much of the dialog and actions were in the actual script rather than a product of the director and actors and cinematographers and the million others. There were 10 people in the organization who were qualified to make a judgement. Killing it was the right thing to do, even if those 10 writers were pissed off about it.
The award was brought back in 2000 as a dramatic presentation award and was given to the work rather than specifically to the script. Since 2010 it is the Ray Bradbury Award and is not a true Nebula, but a companion award, the same in every other way.
Both awards are prestigious and anybody I know would want to win either. Because of that, constant accusations of gaming the system echo through the sf community. It usually takes a ridiculously small number of nominations to make the ballot, so it’s not difficult for a campaign or logrolling or a secret cabal to get enough votes to make a difference. I’m sure it’s happened. All I can say is that I’ve been around 40 years and my vote is as good as anyone’s and I’ve never been approached once.
The Hugo is more substantial.
Hugo voting is, 90% of the time, pure popularity contest. Sometimes a book wins because it is popular because it is truly excellent; other times it wins because… it’s popular, or the author is the biggest name on the ticket that year.
I missed a Hugo by literally a few votes because I was up against a Big Name. All ego and so forth aside, I don’t know anyone who thinks the winning book was really award-grade; besides mine, there were two other very good contenders.
I missed the Locus award that year, too, because Stephen King.
ETA: @Exapno, we probably crossed paths that year.