Haha yes, these are all fantastic. But they're not 'modern' right? i.e. some of these I read as a child. They're all pre-2000s, and we're a quarter of the way through this century.

Thank you to everyone else for recommendations. I'll have to give KSR's Aurora a shot. I couldn't get into New York 2140 very much but I'm down to try again.

The Wikipedia article has every winner and nominee, including 2025, and all (?) of the books seems to have an article themselves so you can get a quick synopsis to see if the book matches what you want. You can probably do worse for a short list of reading candidates.

There are Youtube channels that focus on scifi reading, and they probably have recent 'best of 2025' videos.

(I haven't read "modern" sci-fi as much relative to my youth (GenXer), since I'm most doing non-fictional lately.)

Hugo’s have shifted towards the soft scifi / fantasy / new weird. It’s not an absolute shift, but hard sf space operas seldom win nowaday