OK, that last one I agree with.
Face it, half the fun is arguing over these things.
Both of these do technically fall into the “not meeting the technical requirements” reason for being disqualified. I had not known that “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” had previously been published as an audio piece. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the requirements for the various Hugo categories, but I seem to remember that “previous presentation under another form” is one of the rules. The Silmarillon exclusion was another case of this, although as stated in the link you provided it was rather pedantic.
I haven’t nominated or voted for the Hugos in years, primarily because for various reasons I don’t have time to read a sufficient number of works in the field to make a reasoned judgement. But I do follow the results. I will be interested in knowing (assuming the information is ever released) why these works were disqualified.
It seems unlikely they will release the information; they’ve been stonewalling since the first.
Another oddity is the delay in releasing the information. Most worldcons give out the voting results within days of the ceremony (sometimes the very next day). This time, they waited three months - the final deadline set for them to release the data. The question is why? There were no votes after the ceremony.
The Human Rights Foundation has weighed in on the matter, talking about how they got the nomination and used Worldcon to promote Chinese industry and ideals.
Worldconned: How China Co-Opted Sci-Fi’s Crown Jewel Amidst the Uyghur Genocide - Human Rights Foundation (hrf.org)
So, that org is a contradiction in terms?
What?
“They” is not the HRF in that sentence.
If you are in favor of Human rights, you can not be in favor of (current) Chinese ideals. (despotism, no free press, slave labor, etc)
“They” is referencing the Chinese Chengdu bidders.
Thank you, but your sentence hardly made that clear.
If only there was a link in that post, that made the HRF’s position on the Chinese human rights record abundantly clear just from the link title, never mind the actual link content.
Alas, there wasn’t, so we’ll never know…
Pronoun trouble!
I think that there should be a basic human rights standard bidders have to agree to beforehand before the bid is even accepted, and that the bidder has to show that such a standard cannot be overruled by local, state or national laws.
I concur.
There are other cases of stories which first appeared in audio format that were nevertheless nominated for fiction Hugo awards vice dramatic Hugo awards; Kowal’s discussion here. Even the administrators thought it was an edge case.
I wasn’t aware that Audible did stories in audio before they were in print. I don’t do audio books, and always thought that they were versions of books that had already appeared in print.
and what did he say and who is Charlie? Why a naked link without a quote from it?
This is a great description:
The important thing to note is that the “worldcon” is *not a permanent organization . It’s more like a virus that latches onto an SF convention, infects it with worldcon-itis, runs the Hugo awards and the WSFS business meeting, then selects a new convention to parasitize the year after next.
Blame Discord for not making a preview box. But anyone who follows the SF fandom community likely had no problem recognizing the domain.