So the Puppyfascists lost, with No Award beating them in every category where they were the only nominees, and with Guardians of the Galaxy their only actual winner (a shame, as it’s a horrible film, but it’s a horrible film that would have won without them).

I am very glad. There were three separate, good, reasons to vote against the Puppyfascists:
1) They were fascists, using the Hugos to push their own evil politics. They are violent bigots, trying to turn a field which has always been one that respected a diverse set of views into one which only allows a range from right-libertarian through to Nazism and theocracy. Their threats of violence (including an attempted SWATting of the convention itself by Lou Antonelli) and their turning a literary award into a tool for advancing their evil should have got them all disqualified even absent everything else.
2) They were cheats. Using slate voting — and especially slates voted on by entryists from other hard-right bigot movements like Gamergate rather than actual fans — is a deliberate attempt to game the system. Basic game theory says that defectors in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma need to be punished.
3) They were crap. The very best things on the Puppyfascist slates were Skin Game and Totaled, which were competent of their type but didn’t even rise to good, let alone award-worthy.

Any one of these would have been a reason to cheer last night’s results.

We now also know the people who *would* have made the list were it not for the Puppyfascists. I intend to buy, read, and review all the fiction and related work finalists I’ve not already read, as these are the real finalists to my mind. The real finalists kept off the ballot in those categories are:

Best novel
John Scalzi — Lock-In (I’ve already read and reviewed this. I’d have ranked it above no award, but below the eventual winner)
Robert Jackson Bennett — City of Stairs

Best novella
Patrick Rothfuss –The Slow Regard of Silent Things
Ken Liu — The Regular
Nancy Kress — Yesterday’s Kin
Rachel Swirsky — Grand Jete (The Great Leap)
Mary Ricker — The Mothers of Voorhisville

Best novelette
Seanan McGuire — Each to Each
Kai Ashante Wilson — The Devil In America
Ruthana Emrys –The Litany of Earth
Tom Crosshill — The Magician and Laplace’s Demon

Best Short Story
Ursula Vernon — Jackalope Wives
Aliette de Bodard — The Breath of War
Amal El Mohtar– The Truth About Owls
Eugie Foster — When it Ends, He Catches Her
Max Gladstone –A Kiss With Teeth

Best Related Work
Jo Walton — What Makes This Book so Great
Various — Chicks Dig Gaming
Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler — Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology (I’ve already read this and wasn’t hugely impressed)
Jim C. Hines — Invisible: Personal Essays on Representation in SF
Anita Sarkeesian — Tropes vs Women: Women as Background Decoration

I hope many others will do this too. I’ve always used the Hugos as a way to discover new, good, work, and don’t want the Puppyfascists to spoil that, too.

Now I just hope that Worldcon vote in favour of E Pluribus Hugo, so next year will be the last time we deal with this nonsense.