Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
> Dave McCarty has resigned as a Director of W.I.P.
> Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the W.I.P. Board of Directors (BoD).
> Dave McCarty – censured for his public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
> Chen Shi – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
> Kevin Standlee – reprimanded for public comments that mistakenly led people to believe that we are not servicing our marks.
> Ben Yalow – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.
From https://www.wsfs.org/2024/01/31/announcements-from-worldcon-...
The list was:
https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/
The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)
The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)
Skin Game, Jim Butcher (Orbit UK/Roc Books)
The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books)
I would appreciate any suggestions for works by other Chinese science fiction authors, as I understand that it's not fair to judge such a vast culture based on a single data point.
I should also add that as reasonably hard sci-fi goes, the very notion of "sophons" (and their mechanics) as presented are not even wrong. In general, when it comes to most sci-fi elements of the book aside from the titular concept, it felt like someone just clipped whatever sounded cool from a popular science magazine and then tried to write a segment of the story around it - i.e. some things, like nanowires/sheets, are introduced not because they make sense in context, but solely for the cool factor.
We'll never know who would have won in the absence of all that ballot stuffing.
Except this time around, of course. :(
I.e.: mind blown, best book ever.
Instead of: interesting in some ways, weak in a lot of others, and ultimately on par with similar other books.
I'd put any of the Culture series up against 3BP any day.
Does it?
Maybe this is what bifurcates opinions on it!
I'd agree it's different: I just don't think it's different and good. And difference alone doesn't bump it past similar but better-written books, imho.
Look, I personally hate it, but it comes up here as a top recommendation constantly.
[1]pretty much the only bit I really remember is how the oppressive Cultural Revolution era backdrop made the idea of alien overlords seem worth considering, so I'm particularly struggling to see it as a promotion of Chinese values...
At this point, I'd say just about anything is legitimately good enough to win a Hugo.
The writing style wasn't brilliant, but it was a translation. I don't necessarily expect great literature from sci fi. The ideas were cool though and that's my main thing.
Annual meetings are apparently organized by local groups who lobby/compete with one another. China has a very large SciFi readership and the group from Chengdu was very active when it came to lobbying and gathering votes. It wasn’t until later that people started to realize this may not have been the best decision, e.g. with visa applications and so on.
As far as the actual scandal, there’s also discussion about whether there was any actual government intervention or if this was mainly the result of self-sensorship.
Read: being denied an exit visa, arbitrary detention, torture, being disappeared, being executed.
These are all things that the Chinese government does as a matter of course.
For instance, this Australian woman spent 3 years in detention and was tortured for releasing a government report a few minutes early:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/like-...
China’s whole censorship legal framework is based on self censorship, so there would not be much difference.
At each convention, fan groups that want to host the convention after the next one submit proposals and then attendees vote to choose one. Whichever wins the vote gets to run the convention.
And then... they screwed it up.
However, there was also controversy about this, as a very large number of those votes lacked an address (a minimal safety feature to give some indication that votes belong to distinct people). The responsible committee decided not to count them, but was overruled. If it wasn't for that, Chengdu wouldn't have won the bid.
Once you clarify you deal with scam no voting can overrule anything, you can easily go public and expose people if they would keep pushing for it. This is 2024, we have (at least some) tools to deal with such things in such situations.
> My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"
> They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldco...
No scam involved at all, to be honest - just regular voting-with-money.
How about North Korea, Iran or even Hong Kong … just happen all on USA adversity list …
His only fault was saying something impolitic at the wrong time, which people feared would be misunderstood due to his position as Chair. (You can see the difference in censured/reprimanded and in the reasoning behind it, but it's easy to skip over that and just retain the list of names. Kevin does not deserve to be lumped in with the others!)
I think Kevin’s statements were dangerous and problematic (from a maintaining the Hugo trademark perspective) but were more of an administrative/legal concern, regarding the organization’s ability to effectively police the trademark.
His statements also probably weren’t wrong about what was possible, but just not something that an entity that represents the Trademark holder should say in public.
But, he wasn’t associated with the disaster that was the awards presentation. McCarty and other administrators of the award committee should be banned from being near this process for life. Standlee hasn’t done _anything_ so problematic, and seems to have good intentions about the whole thing.
“I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”
Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.
That's pretty bad. But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?
Cordon off that part of the world and leave them to their devices.
The old saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
So we can't leave the devices. We need them.
I think this ties into the $7 trillion Altman quest a bit.
Maybe if you build enough reactors and chip fabs then the world becomes safer?
Given the clamoring for semiconductors right now, a more expensive state side will sell like hotcakes.
I guarantee you this won’t be seen as controversial in the world that exists after we did that. We’re going to look back at this time and think “lol what”
Just held up by a lack of leadership, lack of consensus, and paranoia
When did the Trump possy arrive at HN?
the defense industry isn't partisan and you’re totally subscribed to their faulty logic for your money
This state of matters won't change whether it's the Republicans or Democrats in the State Department, though.
in any case, although I like the government's distributed approach to merely incentivizing competition in the semiconductor supply chain in the CHIPS Act, I think a parallel more direct approach is still useful with direct construction and direct ownership of the entire supply chain - a public option if you will - in parallel to the private sector efforts. the way the US government works would still enable all sorts of private sector competition from contracting bids, as opposed to a really nationalized industry, which we tend to avoid in the US.
with that view, all of the world police funding, while our infrastructure is decrepit, is untenable. especially when our world police efforts are stated specifically to deter other actions from occurring, amongst other reasons, while all reasons are selective outrage.
Lol. If the US couldn't even boycott little old Cuba into regime change, what chance do they have with China?
Who would cordon them off?
The US probably couldn't due to their extreme manufacturing dependency on China.
China's friends and allies clearly wouldn't cordon them off, and some of them share land borders with China.
China also has a substantial coastline, which adds even more complication.
They were scared into doing the censorship. Saying they overdid the censorship implies there is an acceptable level of censorship that they could have done.
And why does anyone have to have a plan for rectifying China's authoritarianism? It's up to China to do that. In the meantime, we can incentivize China by refusing to whitewash their behavior with prestigioius cultural awards. You don't get to have cultural prestige while you destroy culture with authoritarianism.
But that is different from rectifying the bully, which I'm sure you already know is extremely costly and difficult.
Have trigger-happy and excessive punishments to violations will scare the rest of the population into self-enforcing the rules.
No censor has been able to check everything. The point has always been to get people to self-censor, and even stop thinking about it as censorship.
So here we see the west reacting on Chinese censors. As an European, I've wondered about how the supposed land of the free managed to build a culture of deep puritan self-censorship. Undoubtly, I have my own built in Europe-based self censoring and can't even notice it.
I was in fact wondering if I could post this here, without risk of downvoting, flagging or account removal. I decided to take that risk and post, because a) to hell with virtual internet points b) HN is still reasonably free. But this post would not have much chance on Disqus/Reddit, and I did think about it so censorship works.
Older example: American culture had huge puritan censorship on comics in th 1960's. The stories are heavily infantilized, and even the word for them became 'comics'. A new word, 'graphical novels' was needed to make the same things acceptable to a somewhat older public. Culture in Belgium is completely different: there is a much more natural progression, from children stories to young adult and adult ages. Adult also does not automatically imply sex. They're just books, with pictures.
I do think politicians became aware of the internet between 2010 and 2020, and covid gave them the excuse needed to start thought control and censirship on the new media.
It was only in recent years they realized it could happen locally too. It coincided roughly with COVID, but I guess before that they didn't realize how much social media shaped the political landscape (of every country that allowed them). Personally it feels like the social media censors started getting serious at that point.
In fact, this whole debacle has hurt them the most since it seems many/most Chinese authors were excluded by default since the amateur self-appointed censors couldn't actually be bothered to figure out what disqualification criteria would be, just that it could be "sensitive to China."
The organizers are just whoever won the vote to run the conference that year. There's no actual organization that persists from year to year.
Otherwise I could announce a Worldcon unilaterally and no one would have the grounds to stop me.
The Chengdu bid won the vote legitimately. They would have been massively overstepping their authority to try to prevent it. It's unlikely they could have even won a court case if they tried to prevent it.
...as opposed to professional government-appointed censors?
One could argue that when parties involved have so different population numbers, probably using the percentage of votes relative to a country population, instead of just number of votes would be a better solution.
The problem is one of effective power: do you tell people who live in these regimes, "sorry, you cannot participate in this culture because your government is bad." How much pull do they have to change things, especially this sort of thing? Or do you say "you can participate, but only at a lower tier." Either way is going to put some people into an out-group. Maybe that's the right thing to do--paradox of tolerance, for instance--for the rest of the people in the group or culture. Maybe it isn't.
I know it would hurt pretty badly to be a science fiction enthusiast in China, perhaps even someone who really does not like what their government does, and not be able to participate. On the other hand, it hurts to be potentially on the list for your work's most prestigious honor, only to be "disqualified" because you "might" have written about something that isn't permitted in the host country you couldn't have predicted.
Only the Chinese people can change China.
Yes. Sorry, that's how it goes.
If I'm running a dance competition, I should not hold the award ceremony in a country which outlaws certain types of dance, lest they arrest some of my attendees.
Similarly, if I'm running a literature competition, I shouldn't hold it in a country that outlaws certain types of literature.
This isn't about trying to change anything per se, it's just practical.
The Olympic Committee aren't quite as awful as FIFA, I don't sense plans to hold a winter games in Qatar for a fat bribe for example, but they're pretty bad.
I'm not sure how you can tell. They're both completely rotten, as far as I can see: not an honest person among them.
Rather than solve this intractable problem, simply don't host literary awards in a country that outright censors criticism of the government (or anything really)
The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.
I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a SF story!
> But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?
We're hackers, we solve things with hacks.
But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event.
But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes.
The message would be:
> we can make aggregate decisions without your interference
Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.
That seems like a hole in the concept.
For the situation where the authorities are turning up to arrest people, it's most likely they're not being arrested for winning.
It's more likely they're being arrested for other things that happened before.
So, the award situation is more being used as a useful honeypot to get them physically there.
Those people would be arrested anyway, regardless of whether they win.
If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.
Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do).
I believe Tor was created due to similar logic.
It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before.
It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc.
People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check.
----
I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset.
I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code.
Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.
Honestly a room full of SciFi nerds would probably be the right crowd for a stunt like that. Good SciFi is a critique of the time it was written, censored SciFi loses that.
I mean, I'm not suggesting anyone should take risks like this. It's their values, their stakes, I'm just some guy who has no business meddling in politics on the other side of the world. I'm just saying that if somebody somewhere wanted to make a stand against authoritarians, they'd be better served with a toolkit for aggregate coordination in the face of a capable adversary than without. And if we want to help then making that tech would be a start.
What does that mean exactly? What's the line for simply doing, or underdoing, the censorship?
More than 1 billion with a B, US dollars worth of deals was signed at Chengdu convention. Why incentivize with fear when that much money is on the line. Western media/businesses selling out to PRC is not new.
Where are you getting that figure from?
https://www.china.org.cn/arts/2023-10/23/content_116768150.h... 10%2F23%2Fcontent_116768150.htm
There's reporting from other write ups behind the scenes from apparent Chinese organizers talking about how the event got rapidly captured by commercial interests.
---
Weirdly, that link is showing an invalid https cert. The non-https version of the page seems to load ok though.
> marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.
Since when did scifi need investment for development?
>The deals included 21 sci-fi industry projects involving companies that produce films, parks, and immersive sci-fi experiences. Others were related to the development of melodramas, games, and the metaverse. Additionally, various service platforms for sci-fi franchise incubation projects and sci-fi cultural and creative funds will be developed.
For example, with a 2-billion-yuan investment, the "Chinese Stories - Sci-fi Situation Drama Incubation Base Project" aims to establish a platform using a program-park-base-academy model, consolidating top resources in the sci-fi industry chain. Moreover, with a 1-billion-yuan investment, the "Three-Body Universe Global Headquarters" project plans to develop games, films, TV shows, brands, and merchandise. Works by renowned sci-fi writer He Xi are also set for commercialization, facilitated by a strategic partnership between the author, Eight Light Minutes Culture, and Shanghai Film Group.
"Chinese science fiction is evolving from a solely text-based medium to a diverse range of formats encompassing comics, movies, games, VR, XR, toys, and film merchandise," said Ji Shaoting, the founder and CEO of the sci-fi cultural company Future Affairs Administration. "As the genre integrates into daily life and attracts a younger audience in China, it signifies a potential upsurge in its future influence. This rise also reflects a more inclusive approach, drawing inspiration from sci-fi from around the world."
If some external actor (say the Chinese government) makes that impossible then you cancel the awards. This comes down to McCarty and the people under him not upholding the values of the WSFS and appropriately they have now all been censured or sacked.
This could have been handled much much better and while it probably looked very scary and hard to an amateur, you would think the people at this level of authority in the organization would not be amateurs. The best way for things to go down probably would have been for the committee to engage early and aggressively with Chinese authorities, state their commitment to free speech assertively, make it clear that they were going to give awards to Chinese political dissidents, and then when the Chinese responded with "you're not going to get a permit for that" or whatever other signal emerged that respecting the Hugo's principles was a no-go in China, you make that information public and you cancel the awards. If it happens early enough you move the venue, if it happens too late in the game maybe you have to do them online or something. All better options than compromising the awards. Yeah the members who chose Chengdu are not going to be happy but that's better than EVERYONE losing respect for you and that's also why you engage with Chinese authorities in good faith until they admit that this thing is gonna be a no-go... let China defend its own policies don't do it for them.
I already don't buy books because they win or fail to win Hugo awards. I bet some people do, so this is marginally worse for them, because they're trusting someone else to curate books for them and now they might miss out. I guess the lesson is not to depend on which works of art (or of entertainment) get recognized for awards.
For the authors who may have missed out on a Hugo award and whatever money a Hugo nomination or award brings (probably non-zero bump in sales) I guess I'm sorry. But they'll be fine, and this kerfuffle might even bring more attention to than a nomination would have: "would this book have won a Hugo?"
The only "curation" is between the author and reader's own preference.
Beyond that I guess you can pick from authors with good reputations, specific genre enthusiast communities and friends. But awards show aren't good because the need to appeal to entire community means that what gets picked usually will appeal to the lowest common denominator.
A better albeit wordy phrasing would be “for fear of invoking retribution from China as a consequence of not conforming to their authoritarian desires”.
> writers including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer had been deemed ineligible as finalists despite earning enough votes
I'm glad the organizers for this year are tackling this issue.
> In a statement on Thursday, the organizers of the 2024 Hugo Awards, which are being held in Glasgow, said they were taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.”
Hugo Awards – A Report on Censorship and Exclusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39382323 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)
The 2023 Hugo nomination statistics have been released and we have questions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132185 - Jan 2024 (74 comments)
Hugo Nomination Report Has Unexplained Ineligibility Rulings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083571 - Jan 2024 (3 comments)
2023 Hugo Awards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012127 - Oct 2023 (67 comments)
https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...
I can recommend that report to anyone interested in digging a little deeper, and reading about the possible solutions entertained to prevent this in the future.
And a view from one well-known sci-fi author:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-a...
This and gamergate made the public aware of politics in reviews and awards, which did help push people to look for a more group review about books. There are now tons of subreddits with each genre you can see what popular books are out.
I stopped reading the hugo collections when they started to mix sci-fi and fantasy, because fantasy has more diversity, so mixing genres pushed the diversity goal. Now lots of diversity in sci-fi books, so its not really an issue of mixing genres to accomplish a goal.
Kinda sucks that clashing of politics is included in everything, when all you want to do is a read a book. But the wikipedia article really isn't the entire truth from people watching from the outside knew what was going on. Thus they had to change the rules from block voting to stop the plebs from voting.
I like some fantasy, but I strongly prefer science fiction. It's not a value judgement, one isn't better than the other - I just like reading scifi more than I like reading fantasy, and I wouldn't particularly want a collection that combines the two semi-indiscriminately. (There are stories & novels that mix the two, and those can be very interesting, though.)
(Weirdly enough, I play D&D and other fantasy RPGs - but most games set in a sci-fi or modern setting don't interest me as much. Maybe it's harder to suspend my disbelief in Shadowrun when I'm vaguely aware of how hacking works, whereas magic is magic and I don't have to think about how a fireball works unless I want to.)
But a book like "The Calculating Stars" is just so bad, I'll never trust the Hugo award again.
It's totally normal to dislike some winners, I certainly don't like them all. But that doesn't mean quality is down - it's a matter of taste, after all.
Books do exist that are objectively bad, but consider that maybe this time - and other times - this is just a matter of taste. (And it's entirely possible that the folks who pick out Hugo winners don't match yours, and that's fine.)
At least one of the winners of the Hugo Awards has already rescinded her acceptance of the award as a result of all of these shenanigans: https://samtasticbooks.com/2024/02/17/rabbit-test-unwins-the...
[1] See, e.g., https://bsky.app/profile/tkingfisher.bsky.social/post/3kln57...
The Chinese side can say 'ahhhh Sinophobia, they dropped all the Chinese books because they're afraid of China'
The Western side can say 'ahhhh censorship, they dropped all the Chinese books because they're afraid of China'
How marvellous!
If the two Chinese publisher slates should have made it through then they should have made it through, and everybody could have picked through the data later and worked out if there was something else that needs to be done to stop groups nominating slates. If the votes weren’t valid then that should have been made clear and called out. There was a lot of surprise that Chinese works weren’t better represented on the ballot when the nominations were announced. As it is Dave has probably destroyed any chance we had of having a proper debate on how well the voting system works in the face of heavily voted for slates because he just made the votes disappear.
There are a lot of folks who are scared of speaking out against Israel because according to a lot of authorities, that's now considered anti-semitic.
I wish there had been a little more examination of this statement. I don't see SF as fundamentally anti-censorship or anti-authoritarian (or the opposite). It's unrelated. If that weren't the case, there would not be SF in China at all, and there is.
Saying nothing was tragic is just reductive.
Maximum propaganda about China in the west has done people in. But people in the west still swears that they actually have press freedom. Yet, no mainstream press will ever write anything remotely positive about China or simply daily life in China.
In fact they go hand in hand, the state offers security and protection and the citizen offers up political agency and free-speech.
It takes staggering levels of privilege to claim visiting China as a US national is the same as living there as a Chinese national.
People don't understand how these authoritarian regimes work because it's so far outside of their experience. During the Nazi rule and occupation most people just continued their lives as before, especially during the first few years. What else could you do, right? And mostly, it was kind of okay. But it wasn't "safe" by any means, even for non-Jews. But people also weren't shaking with fear 24/7.
Also, define “equally” in your context.
The number of videos that westerners are receiving with positive messages about daily life in China, (or S. Korea, or Japan) on tablets, laptops or TV channels has never been so high in fact.
The problem is that this history in particular is indistinguishable from a South Park parody
Other things said may be or not be true, but as we are talking about this history, it seems backed by solid and credible evidences.
China has police presence around the world[1]. And remember how they controlled the narrative around COVID, the dubious WHO report in 2020, and this interview[2]?
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-overseas-police-service-cente...
If I was tasked with trying to balance a LITERARY award going off as intended with massive concerns about the host nation's reaction, at a certain point I might just say "I could go do anything else with my life instead" and let someone who's more pro-censorship take over. IDK, I have no aspirations to do great/important things, only things I can defend to myself, so maybe others have a harder time walking away from event organizing than I do.
As an enthusiast of etymology, particularly when examining the concept of “revolution,” I found the book’s treatment disappointing. It overlooks the nuanced and historical origins of the term, especially relevant to 17th-century England during the Glorious Revolution’s swift rotations in power between Catholic and Protestant monarchs. Instead, it opts for a simplified, pop culture interpretation that equates revolution with the notion of ‘burn everything down.’
The pro-Luddite sections also felt like a mischaracterization of those nuanced movements without a clear working of the economic factors at play there which don’t lend them to be natural allies of the protagonists. Additionally, there’s a poor grasp of the military tactics associated with barricade warfare, comparable to what one might infer from a single viewing of Les Misérables. That whole section was a bit cringe.
Which is to say the huge sections of the book had my face in my palms but I’m happy to be challenged and glad I read it to re-question my priors on a fascinating period with a fun, nerdy take on a magic system.
You wouldn't learn anything. The whole point of this article is that the people making the exclusion decisions had no idea what might or might not be sensitive, so they just excluded everything with any conceivable connection to China, such as mentioning it.
I hope they move administration of the Hugos under the WSFS and not each Worldcon. But the new revelations that lots of WSFS people were involved is disheartening. Voting should be done online in central place.
The problem with Worldcon is that have super democratic model that is open to manipulation and hard to change. Nobody fixed things after puppies. Or changed when internet made online voting and central org possible.
2020s: hugo boss gives cover for fascism
Sorry but in authoritarian state, things don't work under "laws and regulations". Everyone is subject to 规矩, which roughly translate to "unspoken rules" or "how thing supposed to work without irritate powerful people".
You are not safe by laws and regulations alone, other people can fuck you up in many ways.
This is funny, Wu Zetian lives long before the PR China even existed, why should they even what image it paints.
It's not as simple as it seems, as normal
And in the author's world-building, although magical resources are widely distributed, the only group which seems to be figuring out how to actually exploit them to increase wealth is England. But to the characters in the book, figuring out how to use those things at all, i.e. natural resource exploitation/study/efficiency improvement/industrialization is viewed as nothing more than stealing from indigenous people, rather than being a positive sum contribution to humanity. The fact that the original possessors of the silver, and other magical goods weren't doing anything with it is not mentioned. (at least in the 20% of the book I read before this scene, which basically suggests that non-white people should naturally coordinate to attack their white oppressors, led me to deleting it.)
It's also funny that in this book, she's putting out pretty basic CCP anti-western rhetoric, like many other bloodthirsty communists I've met; yet here, she is being defended by normally pro-american, anti-censorship voices, while the CCP is being cast as "oppressing" her. Kuang, an illiberal person, whose education consisted of private school (Greenhill school, today's tuition 32k->39k/year) => Georgetown => Oxford => Yale
"The Chinese censors don't like her (we're assumming), so she must be defended and China must be punished".
Ok, got it.
"No, actually, she is anti-colonialist in her basic world view, and she shows (through her main protagonist) insufficient gratitude to the white westerners who 'saved' her".
So we must burn her at the stake, lest others be influenced by this evil agenda.
Err, ok ...
I guess all that remains is for y'all to ask her "but, do you condemn the khhammas?"
But the pairing of the intentionally racist stereotype of a loutish brit (not a type I'd defend, but it really is a silly stereotype, especially here where it was totally out of nowhere) followed by a scene which, against her own case, validates that idiot's attacks, just made me lose it.
Like, if you're trying to be anti-racist, don't have your main characters immediately confirm the worst racial stereotypes that the "intended-to-be-hated" racist majority just accused them of (i.e. of disloyalty and ungratefulness to their host country, radical attempts to overthrow the governments which accepted them). It's way beyond multiculturalism - instead, it's basically saying that multiculturalism can't work because even the best newly arrived groups will naturally flip into opposition as radical terrorists. How can we build a multi-cultural society when people we're meant to sympathize with, act like that?
Anyway, good luck with the read. I may have overreacted, or it may redeem itself later. I didn't do extensive further research on her work beyond listening to a few interviews to check if I was just totally misreading.
Another trashed source of formerly unbiased reviews. Its really simple. Is the book good? Thats all they needed to do. An award for creative writing acting as censor and "rightspeak authority" is the world we live in now.
> The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).
> Beyond Seattle in 2025, the sole bid standing for 2026 (now the Saudi bid has died) is Los Angeles. Tel Aviv is still bidding for 2027, but fat chance: Uganda is/was targeting 2028, and there was some talk of a Texas bid in 2029 (all these are speculative bids and highly unlikely to happen in my opinion). I am also aware of a bid for a second Dublin worldcon (they've got a shiny new conference centre), targeting 2029 or 2030. There may be another Glasgow or London bid in the mid-30s, too. But other than that? I'm too out of touch with current worldcon politics to say, other than, watch this space (but don't buy the popcorn from the concession stand, it's burned and bitter).
If you have a pile of money and the desire to do so it is thus trivial to fix the Hugos for any given year and put a future worldcon anywhere you want.
> SF fandom is a growing community thing in China. And even a small regional SF convention in China is quite gigantic by most western (trivially, US/UK) standards.
> My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"
> They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.
...
> It needs a WSFS constitutional amendment at least (so pay attention to the motions and voting in Glasgow, and then next year, in Seattle) just to stop it happening again. And nobody has ever tried to retroactively invalidate the Hugo awards. While there's a mechanism for running Hugo voting and handing out awards for a year in which there was no worldcon (the Retrospective Hugo awards—for example, the 1945 Hugo Awards were voted on in 2020—nobody considered the need to re-run the Hugos for a year in which the vote was rigged. So there's no mechanism.
Here's the list of all posts from the last month which are primarily about this. (There are also daily roundup posts, and lots of small and relevant tidbits in there, too.)
https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-releases-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics/
https://file770.com/2023-hugo-nomination-report-has-unexplained-ineligibility-rulings-also-reveals-who-declined/
https://file770.com/chengdu-hugo-administrator-dave-mccarty-fields-questions-on-facebook/
https://file770.com/hugo-controversy-hits-mainstream-news-a-chengdu-vice-chair-comments-in-social-media/
https://file770.com/zimozi-natsuco-guest-post-the-hugo-awards-evil-fall-is-a-watered-down-affair-and-certain-issues-to-watch-out-for/
https://file770.com/dave-mccarty-makes-statement-about-his-facebook-responses/
https://file770.com/worldcon-intellectual-property-announces-censure-of-mccarty-chen-shi-and-yalow-mccarty-resigns-eastlake-is-new-chair/
https://file770.com/decoding-the-tianwen-project/
https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ (the big one)
https://file770.com/2023-hugo-awards-related-statement-by-kat-jones/
https://file770.com/diane-laceys-letter-about-the-2023-hugos/
https://file770.com/glasgow-2024-announces-kat-jones-resignation-as-hugo-administrator/
https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-wont-account-for-sponsorships/
https://file770.com/cheryl-morgan-dave-mccarty-resign-from-wsfs-hugo-award-marketing-committee/
Its impossible for me to travel to China without failing the Sunday obligations for Mass.
I’ve had to turn down jobs, conventions, study abroad opportunities, and networking events because my religion requires me to go to Mass.
When I explain this to people, I get this weird look like, “Hey that’s your choice, but you must not take your career that seriously.”
I have very little sympathy for anyone involved in this.
It’s widely accepted among even the most religious Catholics that travel and work obligations (among other situations) are acceptable reasons for not attending Sunday mass.
It’s not impossible for you to do those things as a practicing Roman Catholic in the slightest.
If there’s a Mass next door, but there’s a 50% chance the attendees will be arrested and spend 10 years in jail, you take your chances and trust God.
All it takes is fellow Catholic letting me know when/where Mass is and I have an obligation to risk my freedom and life.
Kind of cowardly of me to say, “hey the locals can risk their butts to praise God, I’ll just sit it out.”
Then again I'm not a theologian, and growing up in Italy taught me not to expect any actual consistency from any multi-millennial institution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception_Cathedra...
More recently the situation has changed, but I’m not sure how. I don’t keep up to date.
> https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN287099/
> Australia's ties with top trade partner China soured in 2018 when it became the first country to publicly ban China's Huawei from its 5G
Or they were excluded just to have a new reason to bash China.
In short supply.
I am reading Kuang's Babel right now, the Chinese version, published in China, by a publisher that would be called "state-owned" when it appears in a Western report.
I have read Neil Gaiman's work that was published the same way before.
And still, the Hugo people be like: let's censor them because they mention China.
But's let's still spotlight Robert Sawyer even though he wrote a whole trilogy that can't be more anti-PRC [1].
Meanwhile, a bunch of other people be like: Chengdu is China, Xinjiang is China, China doesn't do things to muslims in Xinjiang that the US and Israel do to muslims in the Middle East, so let's protest Sci-fi events in Chengdu!
And now we have a purge on the Hugo organizers.
Disclaimer: I'm a Chinese mainlander Sci-fi reader and I have a view on China that most of HN will likely disagree with.
That's silly; the issue isn't about Xinjiang, or Taiwan, or Tibet. It's about the organizers of a scifi award manipulating the nomination lists in the hope of pleasing the host-country, and doing it with ignorance and incompetence.
BTW: I also have opinions about China. I'm not about to share them either; but not because people would disagree with me. I'm not sharing them because they're off-topic.
The organizers must be tone deaf if they thought China would be a good place to give awards to participants that did anything remotely bad from China's perspective. Tragedy of the commons (the voting) that they should have blocked.
Funny side note: many travel agencies in Brazil are advertising "Get your Chinese visa now! No need to for interview! Instant approval"
The Hugos have long disqualified authors for being politically inconvenient. Their actions with regards to China are one hundred percent on-brand.
In Western media, anti-China prejudice can be turned into more anti-China prejudice by simple reframing.
Easily, yes.
Can you imagine Americans up in arms that someone in China doesn’t like or respect America?
But in general, Americans have hate China at a personal level. The Chinese do not hate Americans at a personal level. They see the conflict as just political - not personal. The level of anti-China propaganda in the US far exceeds the level of anti-American propaganda in China in my opinion.
Anyone who disagrees has never stepped inside China. Maybe not even in US.
In reality, in any relationship both sides must share some of the guilt for the failure in getting along.
Off the top of your head. Don’t Google.
It’s not what the news publication publishes. It’s what they choose not to publish.
Your view is distorted, it is worth considering if that distortion is motivated. Is it emotionally important to you to believe this? Would you be unhappy if you entertained the alternative?
Do me a favor, type this into Google “site:Bloomberg.com china”. Count the ratio of positive to negative articles.