The Hugo Award is highly regarded by observers. The
Los Angeles Times has termed it "among the highest honors bestowed in science fiction and fantasy writing", a claim echoed by
Wired, who said that it was "the premier award in the science fiction genre".
Justine Larbalestier, in
The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), referred to the awards as "the best known and most prestigious of the science fiction awards", and
Jo Walton, writing in
An Informal History of the Hugos, said it was "undoubtedly science fiction's premier award".
The Guardian similarly acknowledged it as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction" as well as "one of the most venerable, democratic and international" science fiction awards "in existence".
James Gunn, in
The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988), echoed
The Guardians statement of the award's democratic nature, saying that "because of its broad electorate" the Hugos were the awards most representative of "reader popularity".
Camille Bacon-Smith, in
Science Fiction Culture (2000), said that at the time fewer than 1,000 people voted on the final ballot; she held, however, that this is a representative sample of the readership at large, given the number of winning novels that remain in print for decades or become notable outside of the science fiction genre, such as
The Demolished Man or
The Left Hand of Darkness. The 2014 awards saw over 1,900 nomination submissions and over 3,500 voters on the final ballot, while the 1964 awards received 274 votes. The 2019 awards saw 1,800 nominating ballots and 3,097 votes, which was described as less than in 2014–2017 but more than any year before then.
Brian Aldiss, in his book
Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, claimed that the Hugo Award was a barometer of reader popularity, rather than artistic merit; he contrasted it with the panel-selected
Nebula Award, which provided "more literary judgment", though he did note that the winners of the two awards often overlapped. Along with the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award is also considered one of the premier awards in science fiction, with Laura Miller of
Salon.com terming it "science fiction's most prestigious award". The official logo of the Hugo Awards is often placed on the winning books' cover as a promotional tool.
Gahan Wilson, in
First World Fantasy Awards (1977), claimed that noting that a book had won the Hugo Award on the cover "demonstrably" increased sales for that novel, though
Orson Scott Card said in his 1990 book
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy that the award had a larger effect on foreign sales than in the United States.
Spider Robinson, in 1992, claimed that publishers were very interested in authors that won a Hugo Award, more so than for other awards such as the Nebula Award. Literary agent Richard Curtis said in his 1996
Mastering the Business of Writing that having the term Hugo Award on the cover, even as a nominee, was a "powerful inducement" to science fiction fans to buy a novel, while Jo Walton claimed in 2011 that the Hugo is the only science fiction award "that actually affects sales of a book". There have been several anthologies of Hugo-winning short fiction. The series
The Hugo Winners, edited by
Isaac Asimov, was started in 1962 as a collection of short story winners up to the previous year, and concluded with the 1982 Hugos in Volume 5.
The New Hugo Winners, edited originally by Asimov, later by
Connie Willis and finally by
Gregory Benford, has four volumes collecting stories from the 1983 to the 1994 Hugos. The most recent anthology is
The Hugo Award Showcase (2010), edited by
Mary Robinette Kowal. It contains most of the short stories, novelettes, and novellas that were nominated for the 2009 award. ==See also==