I’m trying to figure this out. My understanding is that the Hugo is the one accused of being a popularity contest. It says right there in your post that HP won a Hugo in 2001. But then you say that Rowling has never even made the ballot? How did her novel win if it wasn’t on the ballot? Was there a hug(o)e write-in campaign or something?
Not really. The novels are garbage and Martin is a hack.
See? Simple.
She hasn’t made the ballot since that one time, I think.
You overlooked “since” - the second HP made the Hugo ballot and won; none of the other novels was even nominated.
I hear a Treme reference in Exapno’s post - I will forever treasure John Goodman’s delivery of the line, “Harry Fucking Potter.”
ETA: Ah, ninja’ed, grasshopper.
I haven’t been particular impressed by the Nebula winners the past few years and there have been some absolutely awful stories winning the past few years. There was a big change about four years ago when they eliminated the Australian ballot (which the Hugo still uses).
The ballot (which has nothing to do with Australia) has voters rank their favorites. If any story gets a majority of votes, it wins. If not, ballots for the title with the fewest votes are checked, their first place choices are eliminated, and their votes go to the second place choices. Titles get eliminated and eventually there’s one with a majority of votes; that’s the winner.
For example, you choose Story A as #1, and Story B as #2. Story A gets the fewest total votes, so you vote counts for Story B. If Story B is eliminated, your vote goes to your third choice.
The advantage of this is that it comes to a consensus choice. Most voters would have to give a decent rating to the winner
The Nebula is now a simple plurality. With six nominees, the winning story can be chosen by 20% of the voters (or less). 75% of the members can hate the story, but it still wins.
And while the Hugos do become a popularity contest, the current setup of the Nebula encourages logrolling: You vote for a friend’s short story; they vote for your novel. There are some authors who are very popular within the organization and who always seem to get nominated, even for mediocre work. And only a very small percentage of SFWAns take part in the voting, and fewer take part in nominating and recommending.
Both awards also suffer from blindness toward SF works that aren’t marketed as SF. The fact that Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu didn’t get a nomination from either is preposterous.
Let me add that back in the 80s, an editor said that a Hugo Award was better for an author than a Nebula. Putting “Hugo Winner” on a book increased sales; Putting “Nebula Winner” did not.
I liked Sandkings.
I liked Armageddon Rag very much. But since he started writing his “epic” he’s turned into a complete hack.
Probably. You see everybody at a Worldcon once, although you can never find anybody when you’re looking. 
Congratulations on being on the final ballot. No matter how much you discount these awards for being popularity contests, it’s still high recognition.
I have a friend who was part of a group active in fandom at the time and they frankly block-voted to give him two stories on the ballot one year. This writer was asked to withdraw one and said, paraphrased, “I know I’m not going to win but my name will always be in the records as having two nominees in the same year.” And why not? Go to that Locus awards page and there the name is.
The important point to take away is that all awards can be gamed and normally are gamed. No process can take the human element out of opinion voting. The Nobel Prize committee gamed the system by giving Obama an undeserved Peace Prize to make a political point. Every arts award is subject to furious criticism every year. To some people the whole notion of giving out an award ranking disparate creative works is a heresy.
The surprise is that the Hugos and Nebulas have a pretty good overall record of recognizing important works. You can compile a list of alternate works that are “better” but as good as that list might be, it’s bound to leave out bunches of works that almost everybody would argue belong on the list. The awards now reflect the fact that f&sf is huge and fragmented. There are an order of magnitude more books. Nobody reads them all, there are no consensus greats, and it’s harder for younger writers to break in. Frankly, nobody in the field agrees with anyone outside of their own clique.
Still, every once is a while a book wins them all. Jo Walton’s Among Others won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the British Fantasy Award. This is excerpted from the Booklist review:
Normally I wouldn’t touch a book with that description with a ten-foot pole. Did it win because it’s targeted at the core voting reader? Or is it really that wonderfully written? Or both? What’s a voter to do?
I liked “Armageddon Rag” too (and Martin’s earlier SF, like “Tuf Voyaging”). My impression, however, is that the book sold very poorly, and led to Martin moving away from written SF.
I don’t know as much about the stinkers that have won, but I do note that Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress didn’t win a Nebula despite being (in my opinion) the best science fiction novel yet written, and Niven’s “Inconstant Moon” (my choice for best science fiction short story) wasn’t even nominated for the Nebula. Neither was his “Neutron Star”. All of those, however, rightly won the Hugos.
“Moon” lost out to Babel-17 and Flowers for Algernon, both of which are more than respectable choices, and both of which were better novels (beating Heinlein in characterization by a wide margin). Heinlein won Hugos because it was a popularity contest.
Same with Niven. Delany’s “…Aye and Gomorrah” is clearly a far more imaginative work than Neutron Star, dealing with really visionary events. And I can’t think of any short story that could have been dropped in favor of “Inconstant Moon.”
Not that the stories you like are bad – they are well-written traditional SF. But the Nebula in the 60s was going to authors who were trying to advance the genre, not to well-made versions of the same old stuff. (This is still happening, but I personally don’t think that many of the Nebula nominees are really doing that.)
This is pretty much exactly why the authors wanted to give out their own awards, rather than letting the fans make all the decisions.
And if I were an author, I might agree with them. As it is, though, I’m a fan, and so I’m interested in seeing stories that fans like, because I’m likely to like them, too.
The Nebula Awards and The Hugo Awards are a set of awards given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works published in the US. The books which got these awards are amazing .So as told earlier I prefer to read good science fiction books rather than reading Hugo award books or Nebula award book. Finally we all love reading books of science fiction and when it comes to favorites it will be the author not the awards. 
I haven’t read all of those, but of the several I have, I agree.
Either way, the list of joint Hugo and Nebula winners makes for a pretty damn good reading list.
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Ringworld by Larry Niven
- The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
- Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
- Gateway by Frederik Pohl
- Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre
- The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
- Startide Rising by David Brin
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
- Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
- Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
- The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
- The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
- Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis
- Among Others by Jo Walton