The series of events that lead to that was really bizarre. To cut a long story short, a bunch of more right-leaning authors who thought the Hugos had turned int

The series of events that lead to that was really bizarre. To cut a long story short, a bunch of more right-leaning authors who thought the Hugos had turned into soapboxes for left-wing politics decided to push back by putting together a "Sad Puppies" slate of eligible works they considered good (so called for the photo of its' creators dogs looking sad they used to encourage people to support it). It met with... unexpected massive success in 2015, with quite a few of the works becoming finalists. Folks responded with a fairly effective campaign to vote every work on the slate below "no award" by signing up people en masse as Worldcon supporting members so they got votes, including paying the fees for them in some cases. They also handed out wooden asterisks to every nominee on the slate at the official ceremony to imply their nominations were all illegitimate . The thing that made this really interesting is that in the major categories, there was quite a bit of overlap with what would've likely got nominated anyway. Apparently the only reason the Best Novel winner didn't make the slate and then get pushed below no award in the finals as a result is because the people who came up with the list hadn't got around to reading it yet! (Some of the less hotly contested categories did end up with right-wing schlock being nominated though.)