this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Leaked emails show organizers of the prestigious Hugo Awards vetted writers’ work and comments with regard to China, where last year’s awards were held.

Organizers of the Hugo Awards, one of the most prominent literary awards in science fiction, excluded multiple authors from shortlists last year over concerns their work or public comments could be offensive to China, leaked emails show.

Questions had been raised as to why writers including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer had been deemed ineligible as finalists despite earning enough votes according to information published last month by awards organizers. Emails released this week revealed that they were concerned about how some authors might be perceived in China, where the Hugo Awards were held last year for the first time.

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[–] [email protected] 181 points 9 months ago (6 children)

What the fuck, Hugo? Why hold it in a country that has no human rights?

[–] [email protected] 150 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm $ure the deci$ion was completely unbia$ed.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 96 points 9 months ago (4 children)

The Hugos have always been a clusterfuck. Explaining all the nuance is beyond a single comment (I can't even find a good writeup) but it boils down to the voting committee largely being opt/buy-in. If you buy a membership to the World Science Fiction Society, you get to vote on where WorldCon will be held which means you are voting on where The Hugos will be held. You ALSO get to vote in the Hugos themselves

Yes, that sounds really shitty but it is also why the Hugos are a lot more prestigious than a Goodreads award. People need to give enough of a shit which, historically, has resulted in more people who actually have read multiple entrants.

Of course, a couple years back we had the "sad puppies" incident where a bunch of racist incels basically voted as a bloc to shut down people of color and non CISHET male voices.

And... a lot of signs point toward "China" having gamed the system again. Whether that is a focused effort by the CCP or just passionate Chinese SFF fans is up for debate*.

As for excluding authors? I very much assume that is just a function of operating in China. The CCP cracking down on the event would not end well for anyone involved.

Personally? I think this is yet another indication that the Hugos, like most "old guard" SFF, can fuck off. It was just a few years back that George R R Martin rambled and talked about the good old days while butchering every single "ethnic" name on the ballot. I think the issue of "who gets to vote" is still a major issue but I also think there is absolutely zero reason that an event about celebrating forward thinking should restrict itself to an in-person gala. That shit should be going above and beyond vtubers and focusing on new voices who might have a day job because being "a full time author" is increasingly impossible for any newbies.

*: Because China actually has a ridiculously strong SFF community. In large part because there are authors who are very much pushing the boundaries of what they can and can't say to actually tell interesting and thought provoking stories in the way SFF has always been able to.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Decent writeup by Charles Stross:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html

The mode of operation of WorldCon/the Hugos seems interesting as in "May you live in interesting times"

Edit: fixed auto-co-wrecked spelling of Charles Stross

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Indeed. Quite decent.

See, Chinese fandom is relatively isolated from western fandom. And the convention committee didn't realize that there was this thing called the WSFS Constitution which set out rules for stuff they had to do. I gather they didn't even realize they were responsible for organizing the nomination and voting process for the Hugo awards, commissioning the award design, and organizing an awards ceremony, until about 12 months before the convention (which is short notice for two rounds of voting. commissioning a competition between artists to design the Hugo award base for that year, and so on). So everything ran months too late, and they had to delay the convention, and most of the students who'd pitched in to buy those bids could no longer attend because of bad timing, and worse ... they began picking up an international buzz, which in turn drew the attention of the local Communist Party, in the middle of the authoritarian clamp-down that's been intensifying for the past couple of years. (Remember, it takes a decade to organize a successful worldcon from initial team-building to running the event. And who imagined our existing world of 2023 back in 2013?)

The organizers appear to have panicked.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

lolyikes

The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Weird that the Hugos wouldn't have excluded John Ringo and crew for being literal fascists, unless they open their slackened jaws for... Not even criticizing China? Depicting mecha Wu Zetian?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

ringo and the sad puppies were only "acknowledged" because of the mass backlash. Otherwise, it was business as usual.

That is why I think the issue is less the works and more the venue. Because having a racist piece of shit present is one thing. People get mad. They move on because they need the blurb to get another printing from their publisher. But if the CCP gets angry? People start disappearing faster than Jack Ma.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I did not know any of that. I always just figured Hugo award books would at least be good, and that was about as far as my thinking went.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean, they almost always are. You just have to understand that, much like with the Oscars (?), it is the SFF (mostly SFF writers) community voting on themselves. And, memes aside, good movies usually win at the Oscars. Sure they favor period pieces and character studies but those are generally well acted and directed. They may just not be "entertaining" to the masses.

That said, ever since Martin decided he should talk about how great a bunch of transphobes and racists were while butchering the names of up and coming authors because he couldn't be bothered to read a pronunciation guide, a lot of great authors have started doing their own "awards" blog posts. Which are always nice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This is probably the most helpful comment for me. I enjoy reading scifi and I've often used the Hugos as a barometer. Not anymore. Time to start checking blogs of good authors

Any recommendations?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What's some good "new guard" SF you'd recommend? I don't read much anymore but I randomly stumbled upon and really enjoyed Megan O'Keefe's Protectorate trilogy which is a typical space opera but with a female protagonist and openly queer characters and a couple interesting twists (unlike the Three Body Problem whose plot was as pretentious as it was bland and did not live up to even a hundredth the hype but I digress).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The ironic thing about parent comment is that for as much as it bashes the Hugos for being part of the "old guard," they've actually been very good about surfacing and including queer- and minority- centric stories and works by authors with identities that have historically been excluded from the discussion. Arkady Martine won Best Novel in 2020 and 2022 with two entries in a series featuring a lesbian main character, with imperialism's effects on those who are colonized as a major driver of the plot. Between 2016 and 2018 N.K. Jemisin swept the Best Novel award for successive entries of her Broken Earth trilogy, which revolved around themes of racism, environmental cataclysm, and slavery. The year before that the winner of Best Novel was Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem which was the first time a work originally published in Chinese won, and then the year before that Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice won, which created a massive uproar amongst the more reactionary types in SF fandom for positing a civilization where the only recognized gender was female (this is super unfair to the book, through, because there's so much more going on thematically beyond that one small world-building choice!).

In fact, the way that the Hugo voting has swung noticeably towards exploring issues of imperialism, colonialism, and identity is what prompted the Sad Puppies campaign that OP mentions. What he doesn't mention is that the Hugo voters overwhelmingly rejected that campaign, and the organization made changes to prevent any future attempts. That part of what makes what happened with the 2023 Hugos so surprising and appalling -- it's completely out of character with the recent history of the awards and the organization to meekly knuckle under and self-censor for fear of angering Chinese authorities, when it's been so bold in standing up to outside influences so recently. I expect that steps will be taken to prevent a repeat occurrence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That part of what makes what happened with the 2023 Hugos so surprising and appalling – it’s completely out of character with the recent history of the awards and the organization to meekly knuckle under and self-censor for fear of angering Chinese authorities, when it’s been so bold in standing up to outside influences so recently.

Has there been a change in organizational staff to account for this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Given that the news only just broke and organizational business has to be voted on at the next convention, it's a bit soon to look for big moves -- but Glasgow 2024 did make a statement that their Hugo Administrator who was involved in the 2023 awards was removed from her position.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I was actually asking about when the 2023 administrator started her position (was she there for a long time or newbie), in relation to when the event in China happened, but your information is actually good to know too, so thank you.

I had not been following this at all, so I was just wondering if new management came in and then this happened immediately, or was it old existing management that for whatever reason changed their mindset to allow something like that to happen later on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Ah, my bad... There's a core of people attached to Worldcon Intellectual Property who are supposed to support the hosting convention's committee. This included Dave McCarty (who was removed from his position within WIP back in January as this situation evolved), and it seems like he pulled together a support team of experienced hands when it became clear that the Chengdu committee had not realized the extent of their responsibilities and couldn't assemble a local Hugo committee capable of handling everything in the time available. So while it would be convenient to say "hey, the local committee is ultimately responsible for the way the Hugoa are run!" that's only sort of true at the best-run of cons, and certainly not true in the case of Chengdu.

People who've been doing this for a long time and should have known better ran scared from the Chinese government's censorship bureaucracy, for shortsighted and poorly justified reasons. The good news, such as it is, is that as that has been revealed the folks responsible have been removed from their positions, but it's still disappointing to find out about. I worked with Dave McCarty in the runup to a previous Worldcon and I would have expected better of him.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thank you for your time/ explanation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Not sure why you are painting me as some intentionally misleading anti-hugo monster (or why you are caping for the Hugos) but... okay. You probably missed the part where I pointed out it is still a prestigious outlet that carries a lot of weight and even that the buy-in voting is a necessary evil. But hey, I am sure you missed that part while you decided to paint me as some mustache twirling villain.

Yes. More people of color and fewer cishet stories have been spotlighted. In large part because that is where SFF has gone. The very nature of SFF is to explore fantasy worlds through the lens of social issues. Always has been. And that is why the sad puppies "movement" became a thing. Because you basically had "This is the world as it is becoming" versus "Yeah, but what if strong men were still the heroes". It was a symptom of the ever increasing conflicts that manifested as Gamergate in the video game space and the alt-right in "politics proper" as it were.

And yes. Jemisin swept in 2018. In 2020 we had George R R Martin shitting on the "ethnic" names while making it a point to talk about all the great transphobes and bigots who came before. Which continues to be the Hugo's problem. Because they can't control how the people vote. But they can make sure to highlight that it is still an old guard institution.

Amd, much like with the Oscars needing to give a rapist who fled the country a standing ovation every chance they get, any author who wants to have a career needs to grin and bear it because that translates to publisher deals and money.

And that is why I encourage people to actually go to the blogs of their favorite authors (because many have them these days) and read what they are recommending. It doesn't have the same weight but it is also a way to sift through the bullshit without the vibe of "We aren't racist. See, we gave an award to the black chick"

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago

The worst thing is that the organization censored things that even the CCP doesn't - several of the excluded books are freely sold in China. Self-censorship is a hell of a drug.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Same way Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the labor party: Only those with paid memberships can vote on stuff (e.g. where the awards will be presented in the future). China paid for enough new memberships to flood the vote with people that voted to hold it in China.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Weird comparison. I don't think the least Tory-lite leader of the Labour Party in the last 30 years was voted in as a Chinese conspiracy, as you are implying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No, China didn't have anything to do with Corbyn. Just, right before he took control of the party, the party leaders tried to vote him out. There are over 10 million labor voters, but at the time there were only 100,000 paid labor memberships, who were responsible for voting in the party leader. Corbyn got 50,000 (out of the 10 million) new paying members on the rolls and went over night from being on the edge of being expelled to becoming the party leader.

Same thing happened here: a very large group (all scifi readers) assuming that paying members would have ideals proportional to the larger group - but that smaller group can be manipulated through a large influx of single issue voters.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Firstly, I'm not really sure where you are getting your figures. There were 200,000 paid members under the previous leader and it went up to 600,000 just before he was elected.

Secondly, it seems like you're attributing this sharp increase to a third party nefarious action. I would assume that it were simply a larger portion of those 10m voters deciding to register membership in order to vote in a leader more in tune with their party values.

I take the point that a small group only needing paid membership to vote is open to manipulation. However, I don't really see a comparison between these two events.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I misremembered the number of members - looks like it went up much more drastically than I recalled. And I never said that either were "nefarious actions", just that a huge influx of new voters with different opinions can alter outcomes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago