Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...those collections of the best works of the year. It wasn’t until much later that I learned how the Hugos work, and even later that I made the miraculous discovery that I could participate.... But this year, someone pissed in the brain-pool. A group calling themselves the Sad Puppies has been trying to game the system for a couple years, and this year they and their more extreme Rabid Puppy buddies managed it incredibly successfully, getting entire categories filled with nothing but their nominees. I find the members of both groups to be odious human beings. Not only did they put together a full slate, there is evidence that they recruited people explicitly to vote for that slate as a whole. The delight is utterly missing.

Although I find the members of these groups problematic, and many of the works they nominated unpalatably bad, the existence of the slate itself is the bigger problem.... There’s a new record for number of nominations of a single person in one year, and for a writer who’s not all that good. There were also several canid slate entries that weren’t actually valid nominations, which is I suspect why some regular people made it onto the ballot. Charlie Stross has some interesting information on Castalia House...