It is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

There are no written rules as to which works qualify as science fiction or fantasy, and the decision of eligibility in that regard is left up to the voters, rather than to the organizing committee.

Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, and the presentation evening constitutes its central event.

The selection process is defined in the WSFS constitution as instant-runoff voting with six nominees per category, except in the case of a tie.

[10] The six works on the ballot for each category are the most-nominated by members that year, with no limit on the number of stories that can be nominated.

The award trophy was created by Jack McKnight and Ben Jason in 1953, based on the design of hood ornaments of 1950s cars.

[21] At the time, Worldcons were completely run by their respective committees as independent events and had no oversight between years.

[24] While traditionally five works had been selected for nomination in each category out of the proposed nominees, in 1971 this was set down as a formal rule, barring ties.

[37][38] In 1983, members of the Church of Scientology were encouraged by people such as Charles Platt to nominate as a bloc Battlefield Earth, written by the organization's founder L. Ron Hubbard, for the Best Novel award; it did not make the final ballot.

[39] Another campaign followed in 1987 to nominate Hubbard's Black Genesis; it made the final ballot but finished behind "No Award".

[51] Another special Hugo Award, for Best Art Book, was run in 2019 but was not repeated or made a permanent category.

[53][54][55] In 2015, two groups of science fiction writers, the "Sad Puppies" led by Brad R. Torgersen and Larry Correia, and the "Rabid Puppies" led by Vox Day, each put forward a similar slate of suggested nominations which came to dominate the ballot.

[56][57] The Sad Puppies campaign had run for two years prior on a smaller scale, with limited success.

The leaders of the campaigns characterized them as a reaction to "niche, academic, overtly [leftist]" nominees and the Hugo becoming "an affirmative action award" that preferred female and non-white authors and characters.

[57][64][65] Multiple Hugo winner Samuel R. Delany characterized the campaigns as a response to "socio-economic" changes such as minority authors gaining prominence and thus "economic heft".

[59] The two campaigns were repeated in 2016 with some changes, and the "Rabid Puppy" slate again dominated the ballot in several categories, with all five nominees in Best Related Work, Best Graphic Story, Best Professional Artist, and Best Fancast.

[67] In response to the campaigns, a set of new rules, called "E Pluribus Hugo", was passed in 2015 and ratified in 2016 to modify the nominations process.

Intended to ensure that organized minority groups cannot dominate every finalist position in a category, the new rules define a voting system in which nominees are eliminated one by one, with each vote for an eliminated work then spread out over the uneliminated works they nominated, until only the final shortlist remains.

[12] In January 2024, the voting statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards from the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Chengdu, China, came into question due to several authors being declared ineligible without explanation, including Neil Gaiman, R. F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao, and Paul Weimer.

[69][70][71][72][73] Leaked emails revealed that the authors were excluded due to self-censorship by the Hugo Award administrators in order to appease the Chinese government, known to have a strict censorship regime.

[74] Additionally, an unknown number of ballots from Chinese voters were rejected because an award administrator considered them to be similar to a recommendations list published by the Chinese SF magazine Science Fiction World, and thus equivalent to a slate, even though there was no rule against slates.

[75] Based on complaints about the 2023 Hugo award process and official statements made about those complaints, Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), the non-profit organization that holds the service marks for the World Science Fiction Society, censured the director of WIP and two individuals who presided over the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon, and reprimanded the chair of the WIP board of directors.

[76][77] Glasgow 2024 Chairperson Esther MacCallum-Stewart announced in February 2024 that to ensure transparency in the awards selection, they would keep a log of all decisions, publish the reasons for any disqualification of potential finalists by April 2024, and publish the full voting statistics immediately after the awards ceremony on August 11.

[90] 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.

[97] The official logo of the Hugo Awards is often placed on the winning books' cover as a promotional tool.

[91] 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,[102] while Jo Walton claimed in 2011 that the Hugo is the only science fiction award "that actually affects sales of a book".