#Hugo Awards

[sixth-light]

Holy shit someone finally leaked what went down with the Hugos and from a quick skim it appears to be the worst possible scenario: that is, Western award-runners PREEMPTIVELY censoring anything they thought the Chinese government might not like. Clownery AND fascism.

[lilithsaintcrow]

“What this means is that the entire 2023 Hugo scandal is something completely different from what we've understood it as during the last month.”

[drchucktingle]

more on the hugos (not just 2023)

i am sorry buds but it has to be said: lots of talk about the 2023 hugo awards being fraudulent because of actions of leader dave mccarty. this is true. but if we are going to be REALLY honest there is a difficult truth to accept, ANY past hugos dave ran are likely fraudulent

i do not want to have to say this as it casts a lot of doubt and i honestly do not think there is any action that needs to be taken, we should keep trotting along and give credit to winners, but it should at least be addressed. THIS DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN ONCE, IT GETS NOTICED ONCE

just went back into old emails and dave was IN FACT in charge of both the years i was nominated. will i ever know if there is any legitimacy to those results? was it politically best for me to be nominated but MAKE SURE i dont win? who the heck knows.

of course i am not saying my trot is MORE DESERVING or BETTER than the winners these year (and like i said we should respect these results), but acting as though actions of dave and the committee only effect 2023 seems a little short sighted i am sorry to say. it is much much worse

heres the thing that really bothers me when scoundrels treat outsiders and marginalized buds like this (same feeling i got from texas library banning) CHUCK is suddenly the one who has to wrestle with 'should i speak on this? will i ever be nominated again for ANY award now?' THAT is insidious part

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil,

Sorry if this is trivial but I'm a bit confused re: the Hugo Award. Isn't it an American award? What does it have to do with Chinese censorship?

Thanks!

The Hugo Award isn't an American Award. It's an award given by (and at) the World Science Fiction Convention, which moves around. In 2023 the Worldcon was in Chengdu, China.

In previous years the Hugo process has been commendably transparent.

This year a number of books, people, and things that people nominated, in order that they be on the voting ballot, were declared "ineligible" and did not appear on the voting ballot.

No explanation has been given for why this was or why any of the individual works were ineligible. No explanation has been given for why no explanation can be given, other than "after we reviewed the constitution and the rules we must follow, we determined the work was not eligible," with no explanation of what the "rules they must follow" are.

There is a not-unwarranted suspicion here that it has to do with Chinese censorship. Other explanations would happily be entertained but the complete lack of information is difficult to deal with.

[jayblanc]

Chinese Censorship of the 2023 Hugo Award Nominations

Back before the 2023 Hugo Nominations were conducted, I noted that the Chengdu Worldcon Hugo committee had inserted a worrying clause indicating that local government officials could invalidate nominations for breaching the norms and standards of China. I suspected this would result in arbitrarily applied censorship to control the ballot. I am sad and unsurprised to discover I was correct.

The 2023 Hugo Nomination vote data has been published (https://www.thehugoawards.org/2024/01/2023-nominating-and-final-ballot-statistics-published/), and includes notation where nominations were excluded from the ballot. Those with normal reasons, such as being in the wrong category or not being published in 2022 are identified with their reasons for exclusion. This time there are a number of nominations that are merely marked at "Not eligible".

Here is the list of those nominations, that would otherwise have been placed on the final 2023 Hugo Award Ballot.

Babel - R.F. Kuang - Best Novel: Very likely excluded for referencing student revolution, and the use of language and translation as coercive tools of oppression. Color the World - Congyun "Mu Ming" Hu - Best Novellette : A story about perception of, aid of, and discrimination against disability. Congyun Hu has left China and now lives in New York. Fogong Temple Padoga - Hai Ya - Best Story : Either there is something in the original Chinese that was not translated, there's a taboo subject that elides my reading, or this otherwise innocent looking near future tale of cultural building restoration was written by the wrong person. The Art of Ghost of Tsushima: Dark Horse and Sucker Punch Games - Best Related Work : The video game Ghost of Tsushima was subject to directed social exclusion for it's depiction of the Mongol invasion of Japan. Sandman, Amazon Studios: Best Dramatic Presentation (Long and Short) - A diverse and divergent cast, includes subject matter and social issues that are currently taboo in China. Paul Weimer - Fan Writer: Publicly Critical of holding a Worldcon in China. Xiran Jay Zhao - Astounding Award: Qualifying work "Iron Widow" is reimagined story of Chinese Empress Wu during a fantasy/mechanical alien invasion.

This raises a lot of questions as to if this basically taints the process, and what can be done about it.

[dduane]

[burn-throughout-eternity]

The Hugo Awards nominating statistics don't add up

tl;dr Along with works arbitrarily being deemed ineligible for the Hugo Awards the underlying numbers for the nominating data don't add up. The nominating statistics are junk.

Yesterday the Hugo nominating statistics for 2023 were released. Initial discussion focused on several nominees including R.F. Kuang's Babel being deemed ineligible for seemingly no reason.

After people started looking at the actual statistics a number of oddities were apparent. Heather Rose Jones has released a blog post with some graphs neatly illustrating this.

She suggests a number of hypothesis for what's going on: bloc voting, certain nominees below the cut-off being omitted or the one I now think must be true "The math is bogus. That is, the reported nomination statistics include large numbers of nominations attributed to the "top group" that do not arise from an actual nomination process."

In a previous post I discussed Peter Wilkinson's comment that showed that there are mathematical impossibilities in the statistics:

As (I think) a quite separate final remark for now, I think I have found a small mathematical impossibility in the Best Novel nomination statistics as given. Because of the way EPH works, every valid ballot gets counted in the first round of an EPH count, but ballots get eliminated as and when the last nominee on the ballot gets eliminated. It is therefore quite impressive that, of the 1,637 ballots received for Best Novel, 1,652 remained after all but the final 15 candidates had been eliminated.

To elaborate on this each nominators is given a single point divided equally between the works they nominate. In the first round the number of points equals the number of nominators.

In subsequent rounds if a work is eliminated the point is redistributed between the nominators remaining nominees. If no nominees remain it isn't redistributed. In essence the number of points represents the number of nominators who have nominees remaining on the ballot.

The number of points should never be higher than the number of nominators.

The only explanation I can see is that the statistics are made up.

Following on from Peter Wilkinson's comment Marshall Ryan Maresca ran the numbers for all categories:

His results match the ones I have previously checked. I posted about novel and fanwriter in the previous linked post and had checked novella as well.

I've now checked the other two categories where he showed the result is over 100% and my numbers add up to the same as what he has shown.

I've posted my workings below for reference.

First lets look at best novel which had 1637 nominating ballots:

My calculation matches what Peter and Marshall found.

Best novella had 1393 ballots:

This again matches Marshall's result and is the only category I checked where the points sum to less than 100% of the ballots.

Best short story has 1500 ballots but 1568.96 nominating points, again matching Marshall's results:

Best fan writer which I discussed yesterday has the largest relative difference with only 241 people nominating but 364.01 nominating points (again matching Marshall's results).

Finally let's look at the Lodestar which had 280 nominating ballots:

Again my result matches what Marshall found.

Heather Rose Jones has illustrated why the nominating statistics are anomalous. Peter Wilkinson showed that the numbers for best novel reflected a mathematically impossibility.

Yesterday after seeing Wilkinson's comment I ran the numbers and got the same result and found the even larger discrepancy in the fan writer category.

Marshall Ryan Maresca separately saw Peter Wilkinson’s comment and went through the categories much more systematically and has shown several are unusually high and that four have impossible numbers based on the reported number of ballots.

I've double checked the categories where Marshall demonstrated that there were over 100% of votes being reported and got the same results.

I do not see how the above is possible without extra votes being added to the totals. The math doesn't add up.

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Big Congratulations to Rob Wilkins for winning the Hugo Awards for writing Terry's biographyTerry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes in the Best Related Work category! 🥳🥳🥳❤❤❤

[fandomsandfeminism]

Oof yall. The 2023 Hugo controversy has gotten much, much worse.

The Hugo's are another big Scifi/Fantasy book award, basically only second in prestige to the Nebulas. It's held by WorldCon, so who runs the awards changes each year- its handled by whatever group is doing the con.

And in 2023, it was held in China. And at the time, the finalist list took FOREVER to come out, and when it did, Babel (which had won the Nebula and Locus awards already) wasn't even nominated. Which everyone thought was *suspicious*

And NOW the actual nomination ballot data has come out. And not only do some of the counts... seem.....weird. BUT we've found out that not only Babel, but also Xiran Jay Zhao (who wrote the Chinese Yugioh book lol), and Sandman were disqualified late in nomination for being "ineligible" with no explanation for WHY.

The obvious explanation is Chinese censorship, either for the queer content, though other queer works were still included (including Legends and Lattes and Nona the Ninth), or some other political themes. Kuang and Zhou have content in their books that the Chinese government might not...love. but I dunno why Sandman got snubbed then? This is all speculation, but since the people actually running 2024 WorldCon are refusing to answer questions, what should we think? Neil Gaiman apparently tried to get answers and was basically brushed off.

And people are piiiiiiiissed

Mostly, I feel bad for T Kingfisher, who won Best Novel at the Hugo's for Nettle and Bone. Nettle and Bone was a great book! And now this win is always going to have this sheen of ick on it.

[incorrect-house-of-nine]

Heck yeah! Congrats to TazMuir. The noms are well deserved. Fingers crossed they win. (cheers to Sin.)

[colleendoran]

For Your Consideration

The Hugo Awards has a graphic novel category, and I humbly submit Neil Gaiman's Chivalry, adapted and illustrated by me, lettered by me and Todd Klein, and published by Dark Horse Comics, as eligible in the graphic novel category. Any registered member of the Worldcon can nominate and vote.

Also, for your consideration, the Ringo Awards, open nomination and voting for anyone who chooses to do so. Chivalry is eligible in cover, lettering, art, and graphic novel categories. You can place your nominations here.

Eligible for nomination as well is my cover work from the past year, Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes, (and our short story "Song for Eric" with Derek McCulloch also for Tori Amos: Little Earthquakes, for your consideration in that category,) and my covers for Chivalry, and Detective Comics.

Thank you very much for supporting our work, and I realize there are many, many outstanding works produced every year. We are honored to be among them.

[falliblefabrial]

Bigolas Dickolas was NOMINATED and then DECLINED TO BE ON THE BALLOT for the best related works category of the 2024 Hugos.

(Full shortlist: https://glasgow2024.org/hugo-awards/2024-hugo-award-finalists/)

[drchucktingle]

back when chuck made the hugo awards 'illegitimate'

this REPORT OF LEAKS regarding what actually happened at hugo awards shows a disgusting way. years of buckaroos working in and around hugo awards popularizing phrases like 'chuck tingle made the hugos illegitimate' when the rot was starting with them.

it is much easier to point at a queer nuerodivergent buckaroo who is an outsider and make the narritive ‘this is whats wrong with the hugos’ when behind the scenes they are doing things like this AND THEN GETTING REHIRED to work the next awards. ENTIRE THING NEEDS NEW STAFF

i was not planning on talking about this anymore but now that everything is out in the open i have to add something from the TOP ADMIN that has stuck with me. as a nuerodivergent bud we ALL KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. we all know what you wanted to say when you said this instead

EDIT:

i would like to add something important here which is in the report but not clear from my post (and i know on social media we dont always trot in and read whole thing plus it is pretty long). it was NOT the government that did the censoring here, it was the western staff. here is a great thing to keep in mind from mary robinette kowal

[renthony]

From the article:

Esther MacCallum-Stewart, chair of Glasgow Worldcon 2024, has issued an apology on behalf of Worldcon for the acts of censorship that impacted the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards at last year's convention in Chengdu. In addition, Kat Jones has resigned as a Hugo Award administrator from Glasgow Worldcon, and has been removed from the Glasgow team across all mediums.

[jayblanc]

Further news on the Chengdu 2023 Worldcon Scandal

The more we know, the less honest the Hugo results look. And there's some questions about how the Chendgu 2023 Worldcon was organised.

First of all, the Numbers Don't Add Up. Literally.

Second, it appears that the Chendgu 2023 Worldcon might have been coopted by Chinese Publishing companies. And that their corporate promotion lists might have been used as voting slates. This comes after a game of musical chairs, relocation and alterations from the original winning bid organisation to a new holding company. I have asked Kevin Standlee, chair of the WSFS Marks Protecttion Committee, to clarify what due diligence was taken to protect the Worldcon and Hugo trademarks. (Information via Arthur Lia and other commenters.)

Third, Chinese fandom is also upset over this. Using carefully selected phrasing to express their displeasure at "unspeakable factors". (Via Ersatz Culture at File 770)

Finally Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty categorically declares that the Ballot was conducted properly. He also declines to explain any of the discrepancies, or explain the precise reason for the unexplained disqualifications. He also stated that those who had any further questions "can't understand plain English" and "are slow".

This all strengthens my concerns, and widens them to the possibility that the name of the Hugo Awards and the Worldcon was deliberately coopted by a publishing business group in China. There's the strong possibility that this means that an unfettered licence to the trademarks that protect the Hugo Awards might have slipped into the hands of people willing to abuse them.

I note that Saudi Arabia, Tel Aviv, and Uganda all have bids for future Worldcons.

[dduane]

That took less time than I thought it would...