I thought maybe it had gotten lost in the mail, but no, that wasn’t it: the organizers of this science-fiction award had apparently gone nuts, disqualifying authors for stupid reasons. Also it probably helped that I didn’t write a science fiction novel last year, but that seems to have been a lesser problem than being at all critical of the Chinese government, or being supportive of gay people. The organizers were a combination of being incompetent, being bigoted, and trying to pander to an oppressive regime.
When the Hugos took place in Chengdu last October, it wasn’t immediately clear that the something was amiss. Shit hit the fan months later, when the awards committee finally released its long-awaited nominating statistics. The volunteer body typically releases the numbers the same evening as the ceremony, or within days of the event, but for this year, the stats didn’t arrive until 91 days after the event, per Esquire. Finally released on January 20, 2024, the reports showed that Kuang’s Babel, an episode of Gaiman’s The Sandman, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer all received more than enough preliminary votes to be finalists for awards, yet an asterisk denoted each of their works as “ineligible” for award consideration.
McCarty antagonized critics in multiple Facebook comments that day amid a fan uproar over the artists’ apparent disqualification. He first shared last year’s nominating statistics to the public and derisively attempted to shield the Hugos from criticism. “Are you slow?” he responded to a comment asking him why certain works were deemed ineligible based on the World Science Fiction Society’s constitution. “Clearly you can’t understand plain English in our constitution,” he wrote to another, per Esquire.
Speculation that the Chinese government played a role in censoring the votes grew. Comic-book writer Gaiman has previously voiced criticisms of the government for incarcerating writers. Both Kuang and Zhao were born in China and now live in the West, and their books tackle social issues in allegorical fantasy worlds. However, McCarty denied the notion in a Facebook post in the days following the release of the nominating-statistics release. “Nobody has ordered me to do anything …” he wrote per the Guardian on January 24. “There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.”
After reading much of this stuff, I don’t think anybody should believe anything this Dave McCarty says — he’s a liar and all-around nasty person.
There are lots of specific examples and quotes from the organizers’ internal emails on BlueSky. The arrogance of these guys was appalling.
These Hugo dossiers are disgusting.
“Author openly describes themselves as queer, nonbibary, trans… I don’t know how that will play in China (I suspect less than well)”
They wrote that in writing.
…
The gaslighting the Hugos organizers did, telling everyone they were stupid for not getting that the works were i eligible due to “the rules” and it turns out the authors criticized a human right violation once, or ate Tibetan food, or said a Taiwanese Batman hotel looked cool.
Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford wrote a detailed dissection of the whole mess. Not recommended unless you enjoy lengthy discussions of bad behavior.
So what will they do to untangle this clusterfuck? I’d recommend firing everyone involved and burning their precious constitution to the ground, and rewrite the whole thing. I have no connection to any of it, so ignore me, let’s see what they’re actually doing.
Worldcon Intellectual Property, the nonprofit that runs the World Science Fiction Society, announced resignations in the immediate aftermath to the scandal on January 30, Publishers Weekly reported. Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee resigned from their respective positions, with the former censured for his public Facebook comments. Chengdu Worldcon administration member Ben Yalow, who co-chaired the 2023 event and was set to work on this year’s event in Glasgow, is no longer listed on the 2024 Glasgow staff page. He and his fellow co-chair Chen Shi were censured for their actions.
“I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress,” the current chair of Glasgow 2024, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, said in a statement on February 14. She added that the committee would be taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the awards.” While the upcoming Worldcon has apologized for the failings of the previous year’s convention, the 2023 iteration of the event has not directly apologized for its handling of the awards. Vulture reached out to the Hugos for comment.
Maybe also never hold the event in a country with an ugly repressive government, too? (Never again in the US if Trump gets elected…maybe not even if he isn’t.) I hope this is all fixed by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.
I just started reading Kuang’s Babel, it’s a great read! But I wouldn’t say it’s critical of China (and if it were, since it’s set in the 1840s, it would be critical of the Qing dynasty…) It is quite critical of the colonial attitudes of the British though!
Hey guys, just a word of advice. Maybe you shouldn’t involve cruel authoritarian governments in your literary awards. Ok?
Nice to know that I can continue to ignore the Hugo awards.
Is winning Hugo a compliment or a veiled insult these days?
Not that I will ever win a Hugo award, but if I did, I would reject it after this bullshit. They will have to work very hard to restore any credibility after this.
Oh, it gets so much worse.
When McCarty wrote “Nobody has ordered me to do anything … There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner”, this might have been technically true . . . but there might have been vague “suggestions” from certain business interests to think carefully about what works would be honored — and then McCarty made vague suggestions to fellow members of the board:
And the board came up with vague points related to McCarty’s vague suggestions . . . and built dossiers of possibly problematic content by the nominated works and creators and related persons . . . and then McCarty made some decisions, based on his gut, about which of the problematicness was just too much, and whoops, axe time.
But it gets worse, of course.
It looks like at least some nominations were axed . . . of Chinese works and individuals; disappeared entirely (but not entirely without a trace — many commentators noted that the released nomination and voting numbers were really really wonky). Because apparently McCarty decided that while he didn’t want to offend the Chinese government, neither did he want to honor Chinese SF works and fans over English works and fans. Oh, some Chinese fans and works and people made it; being thrown a few bones — but best novel? Nope. Other high profile works? Nope. Axe time.
It’s fractal shittiness. Zooming on on any part of it finds shittiness exactly as shitty as the whole thing.
Oh! And one more lolsob of shittiness: Dave McCarty is the one responsible for getting the physical awards to the “winners”. They may not ever be sent, because many of the winners are also those pointing out how deeply shitty the whole situation is.
One of the authors of the report that PZ links to in the OP is in fact the 2023 Hugo winner of best fan writer. The winner of the 2023 best novel, Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, has been documenting the shittiness and linking to other commentators and analysts on Bluesky.
https://bsky.app/profile/tkingfisher.bsky.social
Have all the various milsf whiners aged out and fucked off, yet? They did a good job of making the hugos uninteresting.
What a bunch of sad puppies. ; )
An award named after Hugo Gernsback- I get he was one of three students from Heidelberg University, Germany, to simultaneously set up SF magazines around the world, but by our modern standards none of the three might have passed muster for being politically correct.
Maybe name an award after some genuinely nice SF author- there must be many- and make strict ethical rules for the administrators.
Something important to remember when criticizing this massive screwup: The Hugo Awards are run by each year’s convention, there isn’t a permanent body handling the nominations and voting. The people directly involved are already gone, (and it seems like the folks running it for Glasgow are doing the right things).
It sounds like the Chinese government didn’t do anything specific by there was a rather terror among those who were running the thing that the government might not approve of the awards? Am I right there?
Nuts: “but there” not “by there”.
… by the time my science fiction novel is done, which presumes that I ever start writing one.
Does that mean we’re forever stuck with Colin Wilson and Adrian Tchaikovsky for arachnoidal sf? :-O
I’d love to read a science fiction novel written by you. I’ve loved all your alien biology insights over the years.
Calling it “terror”, as you do above, may or may not be appropriate. What is important is that McCarty, and everyone else on the Hugo awards team, wanted to comply with Chinese law and politics. Clearly, they were aware that China does not have freedom of speech or freedom of political opinion, but rather instead has laws with teeth, and that political dissidents have been arrested for their expressed opinions and jailed for indefinite terms, and that awareness surely weighed on them and affected their decisions. Were they actually terrified? I’m not sure. But there was certainly a strong motivation, whatever that might be called.
One of the more interesting results of the debacle is that Ada Palmer, a professional historian (and also a published SF author (Too Like the Lightning)), was inspired to write an essay on a topic that she has been researching: How censorship has worked historically, and continues to work in the present.
Tools for Thinking About Censorship
And one of the things that happens in a censorious regime is preemptive compliance. People want to avoid trouble, and censor themselves, or start performing the censorship that they think the regime wants without even being ordered to do so.
Quote from her article:
The WorldCon consitution is fine. You can read it here (PDF). The rules for Hugo eligibility, nominations, and voting are all laid out clearly. The possibility of offending regimes is NOT a consideration for eligibility or nomination. The Beijing WorldCon committee did not follow the consitution.
Charles Stross had a recent post about this; he knows a bit about SF and fandom.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html
Pullquote from his OP:
Given that in The West™ there have been, in the past five months, large numbers of people fired/blacklisted for being critical of Israel or failing to demonstrate sufficient hatred for Muslims, the US, France, the UK, and Germany should all be ineligible any time soon. (Come to think of it, the UK got a head start on everybody else in that regard — the initial manufactured “controversy” in the ouster of Jeremy Corbyn by the right-of-center Keir Starmer was his solidarity with Palestinians, which was claimed to be antisemitism. I have to admit, I did not realize at that time how much of a harbinger that was in the media.)
Who do you imagine is the trademark holder, Vicar the Singular?
(You were halfway to being witty, there)
@John Morales:
The Media, of course, it’s even their initials. (Actually, flippancy aside, when you see people talk about “the West” meaning the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, it’s always some idiot media pundit of the sort who was a cheerleader for the Iraq War, the Libyan War, and the Israeli Genocide. So, yes, The Media.)
I’m glad to have been halfway to being witty; it distinguishes me from people like you who are merely half-witted.
Vicarish one, fine, you reckon you’re not witty; I entirely concur.
So. Your claim “the West” is composed of countries with ugly repressive governments is noted.
Here: are you aware that PZ is among the people who has been critical of Israel and failed to demonstrate sufficient hatred for Muslims? How exactly do you imagine the government is repressing him?
BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_by_country
John Morales @ ask Norman Finkelstein about that or watch the movie Trumbo to see how it works here.
John’s Scalzi’s take: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-and-where-we-go-from-here/
He’s a great follow on matters sf and otherwise.
As I posted there, the WorldCon jokers violated historian Timothy Snyder’s very first rule for fighting authoritarianism:
“1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.”
https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/20-lessons-from-the-20th-century-about-how-to-defend-democracies-from-authoritarianism.html
@25:
It’s a fine ideal, to be sure, but I think it’s absolutely fair to worry about how many kidneys you’re going to be leaving with.
Feels like the German term “Vorauseilender Gehorsam” has some relevance here: basically translates as “anticipatory obedience”, and was coined for people living in oppressive regimes, when these people did or didn’t do or say things because they assumed that’s what the leaders would want, without such a rule ever being officially stated.
Well, I hope they enjoy all the Chinese readers, I won’t be using Hugo recommendations anymore. Disappointing.
@Pierce R. Butler (14): well, there’s John Lymington’s The Green Drift, which doesn’t sound very spidery, but its Dutch title translates literally to The Green Spiders Came Tomorrow.