There must be some context I'm missing, because the article isn't clear at all about what's going on. It's addressed to people who are insiders I think?
This reddit post provides a lot of the missing context, specifically the top comment
The Hugo Awards are for SFF, and are voted on by members of this year's WorldCon. After an epidemic of slate voting a while back, a ranked choice system called E Pluribus Hugo was installed, and has been reasonably well-accepted.
The 2023 WorldCon was held in China, for the first time. (It's traditionally outside North America every other year.) There were lots of Chinese-language works on the ballot, which was to be expected -- lots more Chinese-literate people attending.
The rules say that the statistics must be released within 90 days of the convention. Usually they are released the next day. This time, it went all the way to the limit, and arguably beyond.
The statistics, at a first glance, look like they have been coerced.
Several works were adjudicated to be ineligible. Some of them were plausibly inelegible, and a reason was supplied for each. (First published in a prior year, for example.) Some of them were obviously eligible, and no reason was supplied. E.g. R.F. Kuang's novel _Babel_.
The Netflix series The Sandman was ruled ineligible, both in the long form (whole series) and short form (episode 6). The rules say that the admin can choose which category to put a work in if it looks like there's a lot of support for both -- but here the admins decided to drop it from both.
Paul Weimer was dropped from the best fan writer award. No explanation.
Finally, only one member of the admin staff has answered questions at all, and he has been repeating "We acted in accordance with the constitution and the rules we had to obey" over and over again, without further explanation.
I'm coming at it thinking it's their award process then who do they have to answer to except themselves and their own standards? Also that as an outsider, I don't know all the demands they're trying to satisfy, or what imperfect process they're accommodating.
Maybe I'm making too much of shameful - where this could be undesirable, unsatisfying, evidence of standards we don't like, or even cause to create a different award program, but shame is about when you know you've done something wrong and violated your own code of ethics
It’s shameful to lie and undermine the will of the voters, and to kowtow to voters who seek to undermine the enterprise of the conference and its constitution and bylaws, which seems more likely than not from what cstross has alluded to:
From my original comment thread:
> I've also seen it alleged that the concom [conference committee] offered some attendees "special guest" treatment … and stole their Hugo voting rights in return, without telling them about that part of the "deal" first. (I will not cite a source on this until the attendee in question goes public.)
It's not their award process. They administered the awards this year. They are supposed to execute the process according to the WSFS constitution, not to make decisions according to their own wishes.
I find it really ironic that they disqualified Babel considering that it was pretty anti-imperialistic and pro-China (though pre-CCP). They just hate Kuang because her grandfather fought against the CCP.
Too many people discussing this topic are focusing on what the authors wrote and not who the authors are.
Zhao made enough anti CCP comments on her youtube videos breaking down Asian media represtation in media with 100,000s views. Kuang is graduate from Georgetown School of Foreign Policy.
Their background/online behaviors will inherently trigger enough folks on selection committee / slate voting factions to disqualify them on background/affliation alone. They're basically PRC sad/rabid puppies. There's nothing more that male PRC nationalists hate than diasphora Chinese women who carry water for western narratives / propaganda. PRC nationalists enjoys trolling female Chinese reporters working for western media platforms. Male skewing SFF crowd likely has large nationalist overlap since SFF is being elevated in PRC propagada. Chinese organizers likely have no problem doing some big digging in these authors backgrounds and disqualify then out of their own accord. This felt entirely predictable/inevitable.
The 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics Have Finally Been Released – And We Have Questions
This post was brought to my attention via Mastodon via HN user cstross, who posted an entire thread about this here, the initial post of which I quote:
> Chengdu worldcon Hugo nomination statistics suggest the 2023 Hugo awards were rigged:
> [link to OP]
> I've also seen it alleged that the concom offered some attendees "special guest" treatment … and stole their Hugo voting rights in return, without telling them about that part of the "deal" first. (I will not cite a source on this until the attendee in question goes public.)
[Above repost, including my original comment, upon request via second chance pool. More info about that here:
I did not initially realize the Hugos worked this way, so I really felt compelled to check out the Broken Earth trilogy.
Now, I'm one of the last people to cry "woke", but those books were awful IMO. There is no way the award went to those books based on quality (again IMO). It's not hard to imagine what other factors might have affected the outcome.
In case anyone else is thinking about picking up the Broken Earth trilogy, I'll offer another opinion. The Fifth Season still stands out to me as one of the best sff novels I've read in many years and I recommend it wholeheartedly. I remember feeling sorry for authors who had novels published the same year, because The Fifth Season was so obviously going to sweep the awards (on merit).
Had a similar reaction to R F Kuang's Babel, but different outcome there, obviously.
Ok fine... these replies are making me feel like I should read some more NK Jimison. Broken Earth did not land for me at all, but I hear all the enthusiasm and I'll keep an open mind.
The awards went to those books because people voted for them. They may or may not have voted based on the books' quality, and they may evaluate quality differently to you. But that is how voting works.
To put it another way, yes, the Hugos often recognise shit work, and have done for decades, but they do so fairly.
Mileage varies a LOT. I don't always love the Hugo (or Nebula) winner, because I think people who only read SF tend to value SF concepts over prose and narrative and that's sometimes reflected in the winners, but holy hell I loved both Broken Earth and Inheritance. The Great Cities twofer is mighty fine, too.
Not for nothing, but Jemisin is also a MacArthur fellow.
They're good books, but IIRC there was heavy discussion on how her... Dragon Age fanfic winning was political, especially with the Hugo hattrick. I enjoyed the books, but her wins were definitely... contentious along the expected culture war drama.
Yes, and that was the only evidence supplied to why they were 'awful'. The post should have been ignored on that basis alone, but because it wasn't its easy to see why GP might have extrapolated their response.
I read all three and had enough hope at the beginning to push through. I really hated the second person, the stream of consciousness prose, the random all-caps, and the relentlessly bleak tone. I think NK Jimison may be a talented writer but the style drove me nuts and the story went nowhere.
Reading the replies is making me rethink my initial comment. There a lot of people rushing to defend the books, so maybe it's just not for me. Perhaps I overestimated the impact of the social context on the outcome.
For what it’s worth, I did not know that, and I find it disappointing. Is there evidence that previous nomination processes were rigged in a way similar to what is suggested here?
For reference, 2015 was the year the "Sad Puppies"/"Rabid Puppies" slates tried hard to skew the vote for the alt-right, and managed to distort the set of nominated works. "No Award" won many categories that year as a protest vote by WorldCon attendees.
(Many jokes were made that year about "Noah Ward", multi-Hugo-winning author extraordinaire...)
There was an extensive campaign in favour of a particular faction circa 2013-17 organized by two loose groups (the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies) which in retrospect were best understood as dry runs for Gamergate, but they flopped (all they could do was rig the shortlist: but the Hugo voters are allowed to vote "no award" if they don't like the menu, and they did so with gusto until the rules could be reformed to make nomination-brigading impractical).
And even in the case of those campaigns "rigging" meant campaigning to get people to vote in a way that many people found distasteful and that was probably against the spirit of the awards, not that any actual rules were violated.
That's very different than this case where there is evidence of fraudulent tabulation of votes and gross misapplication of the eligibility rules.
For the benefit of HN readers who are not familiar with the Hugos, this is bullshit. Until this year, there has been no suggestion that the votes or their counting has been manipulated by the organisers.
There have been sort of political or social tussles over the awards, in the "Puppies" era, in particular, with organised slate voting by one faction, and then changes to the voting process by the other. But all of that happened in full compliance with the rules, and the rules for changing the rules. It's not comparable to what seems to have happened this year.
In theory (one is a popular award, the other is a 'jury of your peers', though of course there is some overlap of the voting populations), but in practice, there probably isn't very much difference.
I don't understand. isn't the awards group for the Hugo everyone who buys a ticket for the con? and the nebulas are voted by all 2000+ members of the science fiction and fantasy writers association. it's not some secret cabal we are talking about here.
I don't get it. Just read it and it's a fine story to me. What's so terrible there that it shouldn't be nominated? (i.e. that nobody should think it deserves the award)
I hope another award system will arise that will not be as subvertable, will stay true to its origins, and so forth. But don't mind me, I thought pulling the bust of Lovecraft off of the World Fantasy Award was also a lousy move.
Where a group of people all nominate the same set of candidates. The Hugo system [1] starts with nominations - every voter can nominate up to five works in each category. The six works which get nominated the most (in some sense) become the shortlist. There is then a ranked ballot vote amongst the shortlist in each category.
Until 2017, nominations were evaluated by counting the number of nomination ballots that each work appeared on. A hundred people nominate a work, it scores a hundred. The thing is, there are a lot of books published every year, so there are a lot of candidates, and so nominations are quite spread out. In 2015 [2], to get to the top of the shortlist for best novel, a book needed ~400 nominations, from ~1800 ballots; for best short story, ~300 nominations, from ~1200 ballots. So if you can get together a group of 400 voters, and they all agree to nominate the same five works in each category (a slate), then you can get all of those five works onto the shortlist. 400 is not a small number, but it's no more than a third of all voters, and that third can take over the shortlist, and dominate the contest (although their nominations are quite unlikely to actually win - but it is still very annoying!).
In 2017, the system was changed, to do some sort of more proportional evaluation [3] that should reduce the power of slates. Consensus seems to be that it worked.
It grew out of the Sad Puppy movement a few years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies#2015_campaign, linked to the year that was most organized and has the best description, but the whole article is worth a read) - a right wing anti-diversity voting campaign the Hugos dealt with from 2013-2017.
Slating was a group of voters organizing to all vote for the same group of works (or slates).
I know barely nothing about the Hugo process or Sci-Fi awards in general, but unfortunately this rings a bell when I think of my experience as an academic researcher (i.e. "paper writer") regarding some of my Chinese colleagues. No matter how much we want to believe that science (and especially scientific reporting) is objective, the truth is that there are certain unwritten, informal, and subjective rules in the world of academic writing / research reporting that one is simply expected to follow; it is impossible for every reviewer to check every single detail about every paper they accept to review. There are ethical/common sense aspects that are just supposed to be there: the data you report is supposed to be real; the method you report is supposed to have been conducted accurately; etc.
However, when it comes to a large part of Chinese-authored publications, one cannot help unfortunately but to have sometimes a kind of a ear-scratching sensation that one is not 100% sure these aspects are really there. First, because we're absolutely flooded daily by Chinese-authored drafts, and I'm not talking about simple, small-scale research results; these are big sprawling research results, involving large datasets and lots of subjects, all coming in at a staggering rate, non-stop. We don't have enough volunteers to review these papers accurately and carefully, especially given that modern open-access journals want to have reviews (100% volunteered, without any pay, mind you) sent back in ridiculous times, like one week. And yes, many of these journals are either Chinese or managed by Chinese colleagues. So in summary we simply cannot manage to review them in time with the care that is necessary, which means that some undesirable work will invariably pass the check (statistically speaking, it will happen). One cannot also help but think that it seems unrealistic that all these research projects are being carried at such incredible pace and with so much efficiency.
One thing that compounds this problem is that papers come initially with a very low quality. Slowly they become better; you may find yourself reviewing the same paper 5 or 6 times until you get so sick of it that you have no other choice but to say, "I have nothing else to add, just publish the goddamn thing." This is not how the system was designed to work; usually, the authors (and the PhD supervisor) are supposed to work on the paper a bit before submitting, so that they don't submit a horrible thing for reviewers to work with. I think this works usually on the basis of reputation and "name", but my impression is that the Chinese authors could not care less about this. As I usually say to my local colleagues, we are supervising the Chinese PhD students (via paper reviews) without getting paid for it.
Some of the most incredible researchers and smartest people in the world are certainly Chinese and some of their research reports are just amazing. But the numbers are so staggering that invariably the classic system ends up breaking. And one cannot help but think that many of them have found optimized ways to take advantage of the system in exactly those parts were one cannot really point the finger at, because they are based on informal and subjective common-sense rules that are just expected to be there (or else the system does not work).
“The seemingly random ineligiblity is believed to be due to the affected nominees being considered politically undesirable in China, especially since two of the affected nominees, R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, are American and Canadian Chinese respectively. However, nothing I have read by R.F. Kuang suggests that she would be overly likely to criticise the Chinese government.
…
However, if there was political influence on the Hugo ballot (and note that this is a big ‘if’ at this moment) and if Dave McCarty or Ben Yalow allowed this to happen, then fuck them and fuck Chengdu! I don’t blame any of the Chinese organisers for going along with possible political pressure, because they have to live in China and face genuine risks. But McCarty, Yalow or any other western SMOFs involved should have sounded the alarm or at the very least resigned. The Chinese government has no power over them. So shame on them, if they went along with this. Also shame on them, if they thought that burying the data would mean people wouldn’t notice the problem.
Note that this is all just theory and conjecture at this point. We don’t know for sure what happened. And this is why we need answers and an explanation and we need it now. The people who were randomly declared ineligible needs answers and the finalists who made the ballot or won also need answers, because this is tainting their nominations and wins as well, if they don’t know if they really made the ballot or won organically.”
Hugo (technically, the WSFS) held its Worldcon in Chengdu, China. There is speculation and preliminary evidence the 2023 awards were rigged.
you seem to think that Dave and Ben have any control whatsoever over the Chengdu worldcon.
They don't.
World science fiction conventions are autonomous and independent of one another, apart from (in theory) having to abide by the WSFS constitution. There is no permanent floating worldcon organization that oversees these events. It has worked up until now -- through 81 conventions in a variety of countries -- because everyone abided by an unspoken agreement to observe the rules.
The Chengdu concom appeared to be following the rules right up until they didn't any more and went "rules? what rules?"
> apart from (in theory) having to abide by the WSFS constitution
Wasn't the concern that they _didn't_ abide by the WSFS constitution?
> The Chengdu concom appeared to be following the rules right up until they didn't any more and went "rules? what rules?"
Right, but WSFS then seemed to loudly proclaim that they have _no ability_ to enforce that each Worldcon obeys the rules? Which, if false, is a lie to avoid accountability, and if true demonstrates a deep level of organization ineptness.
It seems like the WSFS has fallen down either on the enforcement side, or on the contractual relationship with the Worldcoms if enforcement isn't possible.
if true demonstrates a deep level of organization ineptness
It's true, but your mistake is in assuming an actual organization exists.
WSFS is just a club, the membership of which consists of the paying members of the current worldcon. The WSFS constitution is a set of rules for the WSFS business meeting which handles stuff like the bidding process for the next-but-one worldcon, and running running the Hugo awards. But there's no continuity of WSFS membership or governance from one worldcon to another except insofar as some people may be members of two or more consecutive worldcons.
It worked for 80 consecutive worldcons, then broke when it ran up against folks who didn't abide by the norms of behaviour that the rules presuppose.
Right, which I understand could be a huge legal problem, because it means they cannot effectively police their trademark. Policing a trademark is often a requirement of holding a trademark, so there's some concern that this legal "structure" of the WSFS and the way that it has chosen to license its trademarks to subsequent worldcon's could put the trademark itself at risk.
Basically, "the WSFS rules presume norms of behavior" may not be compatible with "holding a trademark". If that's the case, it could mean other non-worldcon entities could put on their own "Hugo Awards".
I've understood that the WSFS does not really exist. That there is nobody who could act on its behalf outside limited circumstances. It's kind of like a meme in the original sense of the word. It's a parasite that attaches itself to a convention. That convention then holds a WSFS business meeting and does a few other things, and its attendees vote for a future host.
> Right, but WSFS then seemed to loudly proclaim that they have _no ability_ to enforce that each Worldcon obeys the rules?
Where are you seeing that the WSFS has loudly proclaimed that?
As far as I know, there isn't even anyone who is authorized to make statements on behalf of the WSFS with the exception of getting a resolution passed at the business meeting at Worldcon, but that doesn't happen until August.
> The WSFS Constitution depends upon its members to abide by it. There is no external enforcement mechanism. There is no Strong Man who comes in and imposes their will upon committees. And the members have nearly always rejected anything that would make it more enforceable.
(It’s hard to point to specific links, because a lot of it is back and forth conversations that have taken place over several days)
I assume Kevin Standlee is a reasonable authority on this because of this infodump:
> Further disclaimers: I am the current Chair of the legal entity that owns the service marks of the World Science Fiction Society (“Worldcon,” “Hugo Award,” etc.)
The concern from the IP attorneys I was following on Bluesky was that the fact that the WSFS cannot require that the Worldcon follow its rules, puts the trademark at some level of risk. That is, if WSFS and the MPC cannot effectively police the trademark there is a risk that they could lose the trademark.
Which is why is position on the MPC is relevant, in this context. The lack of _ability_ to enforce the WSFS constitution, _threatens the validity_ of the trademark.
But, that's a good correction, that it's not a formal position of the WSFS as a body.
This reddit post provides a lot of the missing context, specifically the top comment
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/19cvlt3/big_controve...