Kudos

For the past several years I have endeavored to read award nominated literature as a way to broaden my SF horizons.  But popular voting for the Hugo and Nebula awards is vulnerable to "trolling", and this apparently has come to fruition this year for the Hugos.  The nominees are mostly from organized right-wing nut jobs.  Free SF Online usually collects links to the freely available nominees, but this year Richard Cisee, the curator of the site, declined to do so.  For that he gets kudos.

So I won't be wasting my time this year with the Hugos.  Don't know yet if I'll try out other awards (Clarke, Tiptree, Locus, etc).  But I am in agreement with other bloggers that this may be endemic to popular voting--crowdsourcing wisdom only works as long as the majority of people involved care enough about the topic in question to seriously consider their choices according to their individual judgment.  Says something about democracy in general--the trolls have come up with a winning strategy.  And addressing them directly with the same tactics still feels like losing.  Giving up on democracy also is losing, as it's what the Right wants (see Bastiat).  

Still and all, if you want quality awards (as opposed to quality politics), the way to go now is curated awards, and hopefully you find an award (or review source) that fits your tastes and expands them.