The slate of Hugo Award nominees has been announced, and it contains a sorry collection of right-wing has-beens who put together a set of Vox-Day-approved candidates and then went cruising through #gamergate, gathering assholes who would vote for them simply to poke Social Justice Warriors in the eye, rather than on the basis of the quality of the writing. They called it the “Sad Puppy slate”. I’ll just point out that there was no comparable effort to assemble a bloc of ideologically liberal authors and then ask people to vote for them sight unseen — which I would have also said was ethically questionable and rather undermines the purpose of a writing award.
The best take yet on the problematic nature of ballot-stuffing comes from Patrick Nielsen-Hayden.
