Friday, April 24, 2015

Hugo Award slates
and the politics of exclusion

Slate voting is an exclusionary tactic.

Regular Hugo Awards voters nominate the stories and authors that they love in a scattershot manner, a method of voting that is easily overwhelmed in the nomination process by a relatively small group of lockstep slate voters.

The leaders of the Rapid Puppies and Sad Puppies recruited enough voters to march in lockstep, filling entire categories of the Hugo Awards ballot with their large slate of nominees. The motivation behind these slates, it is clear to me, has little to do with promoting under-appreciated authors and stories. Instead, their goal is the exclusion of others from the Hugo Awards ballot.