How reliable are Hugo / Nebula awards and nominations?

[Kevin_Grey]

@Sharpe

Disagreeing with Stepsongrapes: I feel that the nominees miss a lot of good work. For example, I didn’t see anything by Alistair Reynolds or Neal Asher on the lists and both of those authors have at least a couple of very good books in this time frame. The awards don’t completely suck but they are not a particularly good guide to quality sci-fi, in recent years, IMO.

I believe Reynolds has come within just a few votes of making the list at least once (ie he came in sixth in the initial voting).

I also think delayed release may be a factor in both of those cases- UK authors often have their books delayed by 6 months to a year before being released in the US. So a decent chunk of the voting block may not even have read it in it’s qualifying year of release.