Some aren't happy about that. For the last three years, Correia has led a small but vocal anti-progressive campaign called Sad Puppies in an attempt to game the Hugos by mobilizing people to vote for its preferred choices. The secret of the awards is that they're actually very susceptible to manipulation—it costs just $40 for a supporting membership that gives one voting rights. Low participation, paired with the sheer breadth of eligible work, means nominees can get onto the ballot with as few as 50 nominations. After failing to move the needle the first year, Sad Puppies organized around another slate of candidates and garnered an additional 70 or so votes last year to edge a few of their chosen authors onto the ballot. The overall voting membership wasn’t impressed with these choices, and awarded other work in every category. But this year, Sad Puppies, buoyed by Beale’s more extreme, Gamergate-affiliated campaign Rabid Puppies, managed to secure the extra votes needed to dominate the nominations. The result? They managed to push out those seeking to make the Hugos more representative of the diverse works within the genre.

The nominations prompted a lot of response on Twitter.* Some people seemed to commend Sad Puppies for mobilizing effectively.

Congrats and thank you, #sadpuppies You are inspiring us to take back our own award shows. — Mark Kern (@Grummz) April 5, 2015

The Hugos: GamerGate Edition! — Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 4, 2015

As the writer and critic Abigail Nussbaum, herself a Hugo nominee, points out, schisms along political lines among science-fiction and fantasy authors aren't new, nor is the subsequent ballot stuffing and logrolling in protest against awarding more literary work. The author Samuel R. Delany wrote about his experience at the 1968 Nebula Awards, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. When one of the presenters went on a long rant about how “pretentious literary nonsense” like Delany’s and Roger Zelazny’s was “abandoning the old values of good, solid, craftsmanlike story-telling,” the room got very quiet. Delany won two awards that night—and received a standing ovation for his wins. Isaac Asimov, in a misguided attempt to cut the tension of the night, joked to Delany afterward that the reason they gave him the award was because “you’re Negro,” a remark Delany read as "a self-evidently tasteless absurdity" and a "standard male trope." But it was Delany himself who noted that the worst of the racist backlash in the science-fiction community was yet to come.

The genre has since grown dramatically, and last year, work by women and people of color from a diverse range of publishers swept the Nebula Awards in addition to the Hugos. So why are so many fringe groups escalating their protests in gaming, in comics, and in the science-fiction community? Why should it matter that there was a block vote led in large part by a group whose most vociferous leader wants to disenfranchise entire groups of people?