The “Puppies” are a coalition of right-wing and white-supremacist groups who pushed a slate of ideologically pure nominees onto the Hugo Award ballot, complaining that you could no longer judge books by their covers, and that science fiction had changed to reflect the world since the 1970s.
One Puppy leader, the openly racist, misogynist owner of a micropress whose works the puppies got onto the ballot, has threatened to destroy all future Hugo Awards if the attendees at this year’s World Science Fiction Convention vote “NO AWARD” in the categories that his followers have hijacked.
To help assuage him, science fiction fans and writers created the #NewHugoCategories hashtag, and have been populating it with awards for works that fit the puppies’ narrow conception of what imaginative literature should be.