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 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.
So.