Why would you be surprised for a Hugo? The Hugos are deliberately pure popularity contest, they're a fan award. There is nothing wrong with that, but it makes winning a Hugo more like having a gold YouTube plaque than say winning a conventional literary prize like the Booker. It doesn't have to be any "good" whatever that means so long as enough members of the fan community like it.

The Nebula has a smaller problem because its members are at least nominally actual authors, so you don't have fan contigents bloc voting like the Hugos and most SFWA members know something about what makes a good novel but it's still definitely there.

You seem to have posted a free-floating critique of the Hugo that has nothing to do with what I wrote. (If anything, I have more faith in the Hugo award to reject overwrought and overlong works than a more conventional literary award).

So, your theory is that fans aren't the ones who uncritically support overlong works? Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

Wait, no, those franchises got horrible reviews and they were made because fans kept turning out to buy tickets for each iteration. Exactly the opposite of what you seem to believe.

It's not a critique of the Hugos, they aren't pretending to be anything else except a popularity contest. A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated. They liked it. That's fans for you.

> Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even. A large part of their popular success is that they keep their pacing up even at the expense of things that the critical establishment might consider more important.

> A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated.

No, they didn't. That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo. That was my whole point.

> The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even

That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the ride don't care because now they have your money.

Frenetic action is NOT the opposite of "long slogs with nothing left to say" any more than a carousel ride is the opposite of going nowhere.

> That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo.

That's correct. But my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers. His editor, like you, thought it needed substantial trimming. His fans don't agree. The text you have also includes some bug fixes, but they're not why it's so long.

> That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the ride don't care because now they have your money.

The attack here is that it has nothing to say, not that it's overlong/bloated. If you think a movie is saying nothing then even 10 minutes would be "too long", but the movie's length isn't the salient problem.

> my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers

A handful of fan readers may have seen that text, but surely not a significant fraction of Hugo voters. Again this is a case where a popular vote has an advantage: voting will necessarily be based on what was widely published, whereas when an award is given by insiders it's more common for them to have access to a different edit.

Why would they do that?

Author's ego probably. Or just an attempt to get people who've already read it to buy a second copy (the version in question was released 10 years later.)

> A special tenth anniversary edition, which includes the "author's preferred text" and 12,000 additional words, was published in June 2011 by William Morrow. The tenth anniversary text is identical to the signed and numbered limited edition released in 2003 by Hill House Publishers, and to the edition from Headline, Gaiman's publisher in the UK since 2005.[2] The tenth anniversary edition marks the first time the author's preferred text has been available in wide release outside the UK.[14]