2010 Hugos, or, Why The Hell Did THOSE Two Books Tie?

The 2010 Hugo Awards were handed out over the weekend. I voted on the awards, so I get to comment on them. (Well, this being a free country and all, so do you, but you get my drift.)

In the short fiction categories, there were no surprises. Peter Watt's The Island was at the top of my list, and the other short fiction winners were in the top two or three. The surprise was in the novel category, which was almost exactly the opposite of my vote. The City and The City put me to sleep, and if The Windup Girl had been a physical book it might have ended up thrown against the wall. But instead of just being happy to be nominated, they tied for first place!

My two biggest problems with The Windup Girl were scientific and fictional. Scientific in that gunpowder is not an artifact of the Industrial Age (Bacigalupi has spring-loaded guns) and fictional in that there's not a single character I gave a tinker's damn about. Other then that, it's a wonderful book ;-)

So, I'm trying to figure out what people saw in the winning books, especially Windup Girl. Comments are appreciated.