Apparently the 2023 Hugos (held in Chengdu, China) were as much of a shitshow as the Puppies version.
TL:DR - a couple of Chinese diaspora authors, among others, were declared “not eligible” for completely spurious reasons…
It’s funny, I had stopped paying attention to sci-fi for a couple of years, but this whole nasty mess has me reading Babel right now.
Scalzi also re-posted this Abigail Nussbaum blog commentary on bluesky.
I’m curious to hear what the response will be, when those responsible for the decision give their reasons.
It’s not 100% clear to me that they’ll ever do that.
The Chinese government stuffed the Hugo site nomination ballot box in order to secure a propaganda win. This “disqualification” thing is only the latest fallout.
There’s a conspiracy theory (that’s actually rather plausible) that the organizers deliberately let the numbers look suspicious to let people know there’s something hinky going on without directly confirming.
It’s also raising questions about the 2028 Worldcon bid from Uganda, a country that is also known to have some severe censorship laws. It’s a laudable goal to want to expand beyond the US/Canada/Aus/Western Europe geographic footprint but that does have to be balanced against the basic treatment of members of the community
The story has reached a major news outlet.
Did anyone else read the attached blog commentary and think that with only a slight change of words the discussion might be about Trump? The violation of norms that had existed for decades, the silent response to questions, the lack of guilt, the failure to punish, all are textbook examples of a totalitarian system intruding into a democratic trust system. The end is all, the means are irrelevant.
The cure is the same. Punish the guilty where feasible but more importantly never vote yourself into a system with a such a high expectation that norms will be shattered. Warnings were available ahead of time. Heed them
I know I’m not part of the community, but what are they doing in China anyway? I wish the west would stop kowtowing to China, stop coveting their money. One’s values should supersede the money.
It is China-They got what they wanted, and they feel they have no obligation to explain themselves. Their original bid proposal was a shitshow, their getting the bid by votes generated from email address memberships(which was never allowed before) was a scam, Their weak-ass assurances that there would be no problems with human rights was a bad joke (“You will have no problems with the convention staff at all!” “What about from the government?” “…Next question?”), and the online experience that people paid good money was extremely limited (when people could get in at all) and concentrated on Chinese business ventures.
Where Worldcon is held is voted on by members of the Worldcon two years (I believe) previous.
For the organizers, it’s less about the money and more about a large community largely ignored or underrepresented by the West. Likewise, there’s a serious bid for Worldcon in Uganda in 2028 that should be re-evaluated in light of this mess.
One example of a breakthrough Chinese novel was “Three Body Problem”, which won the Hugo for Best Novel back in 2015 and has an upcoming Netflix series. It’s legitimately a deserving winner and just one example of Chinese SF, which is very different from what we typically see in the West and for which there is now a large body of work that can and should be made more widely available.
There are now writers from other backgrounds making significant inroads in representation - Native American, African, Afro-Caribbean, LBGTQ - and they are very different from the SF dominated for decades by Campbell and his successors. Having Worldcon not limited to the US or Canada or Western Europe is a laudable goal in the abstract.
But in the specific, this experience should very rightly have people thinking about how Worldcon bids are evaluated and how to proceed going forward.
I agree about the larger world. In this case, I’m only referring to China.
Have Chinese books and stories eligible. I got no problem. But don’t let China dictate the rules of the game. Don’t give them the power.
Yeah, I largely agree.
The rules pre-existed but there are intimations that Chinese officials leaned on the organizers to make some exceptions and that objections could have put their local Chinese contacts in danger. If so, it’s a tough spot. There are LOTS of local Chinese SF fans and they deserve to have an equal place in the discussion (and there’s more than a little racism in some corners of Western SF fandom) so balancing them against their often repressive government looks like something that didn’t fully work out this time.
The rules have largely been set by the volunteers and adjusted when necessary (overcoming the Puppies’ was the last major set), so now the community is mulling some more changes
I’m sorry, but…let them? What China did was totally legal in China, and there was nothing that could be done once they got the bid, because you have to follow the laws of the bid city and country. The real problem was allowing them to bid in the first place-the qualifying rules are too damn lax in the first place. BTW, if a bid comes from Florida and they pull the same shit or something similar(censorship, discrimination etc.) there is nothing that can be done about it under the present rules.
All in all, people bent over backwards to accommodate China…and ended up kissing their own asses.
Why the holy hell would SF writers want to support China like that? Ah, I see- ballot box stuffing.
Ah, that explains that.
Yep “stuffing the ballot box” is a tradition, but…
Nice, thanks-
The Worldcon organisers “should have taken our concerns about the awards being held in China seriously from the beginning. We knew something like this was going to happen,” said Xiran.
Sadly, this all makes sense.
However, I have looked into Babel, and it is Speculative Fiction (which I really do not like at all) not true SF (there is no hard and fast borderline, that is true).
I concur.
Yes, that looks like to be a bad idea.
The Worldcon is dictated by an extensive set of rules that pretty much fit what you would expect a set of rules designed by a committee of nerds to be. (Think of the rule sets for RPGs.) They are complex, arcane, and designed to resist change. Changes to any of the rules must be voted on and implemented over a period of two years, and anything that meets the letter of the law must be carried out.
To choose a site for a Worldcon interested hosts must put together a proposal package for what they can offer, then the paid membership votes to pick a location. A group in China submitted a bid, and suddenly a couple of thousand new paying members in China joined and voted for China. At that point, the rule-bound Worldcon was bound by the rules.
Worldcons in the past have been mid- to low-level events at lesser venues. The 2023 Worldcon was bought by China to showcase a huge, expensive new convention center with a sience/science fiction theme that was still being built right up to the date of the convention, and treated and advertised it like a Comicon-scale event. See this day’s entries for example from the link I posted above:
And this excerpt in particular stands out:
I had seen the aerial view of the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum on the official website, which is quite shocking. It looks like a huge piece of silver metal foil flying down by the lake. I once joked that I would never be able to witness this form of the venue with my naked eyes – after all, I can’t fly. From the ground, the venue looks like a huge alien aircraft, with a silver-white outer shell and mostly icy blue light inside. From an aesthetic point of view, this sci-fi feel is relatively avant-garde, rather than being something from the present day…
There were many young people and children at the event, which I had never thought about before. Groups of primary school students visited this event under the guidance of their teachers. There was also an award ceremony for the essay competition in an exhibition hall on the second floor. I can’t do anything other than praise Chengdu’s education sector! Maybe the next Liu Cixin will emerge from these children?
There were many college students on site, including booth staff and student media interviewing guests. As a person who was very capable of making waves when they were in college, I can’t help but sigh and think that it’s great to be young! Many of these college students have not yet shed their youthfulness, and they are full of bookishness and strong idealism. After all, science is “fantastical”. If you don’t have a little bit of the second spirit, how can you have the ambition to conquer the stars and the sea?
SF writers don’t choose the Worldcon site. It’s chosen by fans at the Worldcon two years previously.
To be fair, some SF writers are also fans 
But yeah, why would a bunch of SF fans want to be inclusive and welcome a large community of mostly like-minded fans who had been previously underserved (or even mistreated in some cases) by the broader SF community?
Which is completely irrelevant to the WSFC. Plenty of Hugo winners have been pure fantasy.