Perhaps, but to be fair, is the percentage of original fiction good enough to be nominated that much greater? I mean, the whole point is to select the small number of works that stand out from the pack.
I don't really see how it's relevant what the percentage is, what matters is the absolute numbers. And though most years there's one finalist whose presence of the shortlist baffles me (e.g.,
Legends & Lattes), I'd say most of the finalists are heads-and-shoulders above tie-in fiction. No
Star Trek books being published by S&S are competitive with
Ancillary Justice or
The Fifth Season or
A Memory Called Empire or what-have-you. These books have ideas, characterization, prose, worldbuilding, and heft that's just not present in most tie-ins. Which is fine, I don't go to tie-ins for those kind of things, I go because I'm nostalgic for stuff I watched on the tv.
Besides, the Hugos nominate movies and TV shows all the time, and those tend to be relatively entry-level science fiction compared to the prose stuff. And the prose/comics tie-ins to those movies and shows are often on the same level of quality and sophistication as the movies and shows themselves.
Indeed, a lot of the finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation are also risible. I still can't believe
The Old Guard won, surely the most boring movie to ever be awarded a Hugo. (I'm not sure that "as good as mediocre entry-level visual sf" is much of an endorsement but okay.)
Isn't that kind of the definition of snobbery, though? Deciding, often on an arbitrary basis, that certain categories of thing are not worthy of attention?
No, not at all. Liking some things and not others is not snobbery, it's taste. The Hugo electorate also tends to not go for hard sf these days. I don't think there's any snobbery in that, it's just not to the taste of the electorate.
Of course, all this is why I don't care much about awards. They're not objective measures of quality, but are based on the subjective, often arbitrary tastes of the people choosing the nominees and winners. (I also never understood the point of arbitrarily picking a single "winner" instead of just paying tribute to every deserving work. Not everything has to be a competition.)
No one ever claimed awards were objective, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. I find genre awards an interesting way to understand what people value and find interesting in genre, and how that shifts over time. Obviously that's all subjective, but given my enjoyment of fiction is also subjective, I'm not sure what objectivity could have to do with it in any case.
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