[sangnoir]

> But after 40+ years of reading, why am I not getting recommendations on anything in the last 10 years (again, except for Three Body Problem)? You dodged that question also. No recommendations from the last 10 years? Why is that?

I thought it's a rhetorical question, because on its face, comparing award-winners across decades is orthogonal to the question on whether the recent winners deserve to win, and is frankly subjective. If I accept your prior that the winning story in 20xx is not as good as the winner from 1975; that information is insufficient to support the argument that the 20xx winner didn't deserve to win. IMO, the way to prove that would be to name another book from the same year that deserved to win, but didn't. "Everything is now shit" is an indictment of the entire industry - not minority authors whose quality of work is for our purposes, is yet to be quantified (relative to the rest of the contemporary field).

To answer your question about the lack of "monsters"; I think it's a function of the number of SF authors active in a given decade (big fish in a small pond), the number of SF books published, the relative proportion consumers reading books vs competing media (some of the best SF I've experienced are games - which weren't competitive with books as a vehicle for stories until, SystemShock maybe?). People don't read books as much anymore. I am working through my list of Hugo winners, and there are some not-so-great books in there. IMO, several of Ted Chiang's are better stories than a good chunk of the winners 1960-2000.