In fact, if you examine the actual history of the Hugo Award, you’ll discover that it has never been exclusively for science fiction. Ever since the award’s rules have been codified, it has been for “science fiction and fantasy,” regardless of the fact that the nominal official name of the award was “Science Fiction Achievement Award.” (A name since abandoned as official by the World Science Fiction Society. The official name of the Hugo Award is “Hugo Award.”)

You say that certain works “should not be allowed to be nominated.” I take it that you mean someone should decide, “These works aren’t science fiction, and thus should be disqualified.” Is that correct? If so, then who should decide? What would you do if an administrator disqualified a work as “not sufficiently science fictional” that you personally believed to be SF?

Because of the extremely thorny issues involved, it has been the practice of WSFS to allow the members of the organization, through the nominating ballot, to decide that works have enough SF (or F) in them to be eligible. Administrative decisions are limited to publication date and length of work. Decision on a work’s “worthiness” are left up to the members who vote.

You are of course welcome to attend Worldcon and propose changes to how the Awards are administered. There’s no Board of Directors or mysterious “they” you have to persuade. Every person represents him/herself and nobody else. All you have to do is join and participate.

Examining the 2008 Hugo Award Nominations data, I cannot find your work listed. This means that the work did not receive sufficient nomination votes to place 15th or higher. Worldcons are only obliged to disclose placements down to 15th, although they may go lower if they so choose (this year’s Worldcon did so). Therefore, I’m afraid we don’t have an answer to your question other than “fewer than 19 nominations,” that being what it took to make the top 15.

(Posted and e-mailed)

Read our post announcing the results, which was posted shortly after the ceremony. Note that at the bottom of the announcement are links to the voting breakdowns and nomination information.

In the 1977 Hugo Awards, there was no winner in the category Best Dramatic Presentation because the voters selected “No Award” as the winner. Under WSFS rules, “No Award” always appears on the ballot, and if it wins, no Hugo Award is presented in that category.

There were Hugo Awards in the other categories in 1997.

Done; however, because the original (but wrong) answer is sufficiently old, I struck out our mistaken answer but left the struck-through information visible so that anyone coming back later would understand that we had made a correction nearly a year later.