Comment by themacguffinman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themacguffinman | Hacker News Reader

themacguffinman

This time it didn't seem to work out well for the organizers. The organization behind the Hugo Awards "Worldcon Intellectual Property" announced resignations and censures in response to this:

> 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-...

Please note that Kevin Standlee is a good egg here, and was not involved with this iteration of the Hugo awards and everything which went wrong with it.

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!)

Thanks for this. Kevin has been a part of the Bay Area SF fandom community for a very long time, and I’ve never known him to be anything other than a good, honorable person. I was saddened to see his name on the list of people associated with this, and would have a hard time believing he’d ever act intentionally to undermine Worldcon or the Hugos.

I think this is important to note, and a good call-out.

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.

Glad to see this, but then I have to wonder why the organization decided to have the event in China in the first place?

Three Body Problem isn't good enough to legitimately win a Hugo. There's clearly money lining pockets to promote their culture and political cant.

While not my favorite book, I think it's certainly Hugo quality. What would you pick for 2015? Besides, winning would seem fair, nominations possibly not?

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)

Personally, I enjoyed Goblin Emperor much more

I read "The Three Body Problem" due to all the promotion it received at the time. In fact, I proposed it as the first book for our small reading club. We all agreed that I should have simply bought some beers and read whatever book another member had proposed. While the book presented two very good ideas (the nature of the history loop and the "computer architecture"), it was marred by excessive repetition, flat characters, and poor writing (at least, in the Spanish version). Some characters' reactions to certain events were utterly ridiculous, and the deus ex machina resolution was disappointing. The structure was so repetitious that it seemed as if half of the book was the same chapter repeated over and over. I found it quite boring.

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 concur on all your points. The writing was so bad - basically middle of the line fanfic level - that at first I thought that it was a low-quality English translation; but I was assured that it was faithful to the original. When it was announced as Hugo winner, I was speechless.

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.

It’s crazy how much people adore that novel though, despite the OBVIOUS flaws.

I think Liu's writing is not bad (Chinese version), but the economics may not be good

Funnily enough, in his interview with Jim al-khalili, Liu Cixin describes roughly what you conjectured as how he gets inspiration for his works

2015 was the first year of the Rabid Puppies, as can be seen from "No Award" actually winning the Best Novella and Best Short Story categories, among others.

We'll never know who would have won in the absence of all that ballot stuffing.

I disagree. I thought it was great, had creative ideas and concepts, enjoyed it reading the English translation.

Yeah I really enjoyed the whole trilogy.

Your opinion on the novel aside, the Hugo's are awarded by popular vote and winners do not have to be 'good'.

> the Hugo's are awarded by popular vote

Except this time around, of course. :(

This is ultimately subjective, but I thought the Three Body Problem trilogy was the best sci-fi novels in 20 years.

3 Body problem is the novel that made me go from reading one sci Fi novel every couple years to ferociously reading multiple per year for a while trying to recapture the feeling I had reading it. Have read some good ones after but nothing so far that captured me in the same way.

The 3 Body Problem love reminded me of someone who's never read Lovecraft, reading Lovecraft for the first time.

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.

Again this is subjective. I think 3BP is better than the Culture novels, and I like the Culture novels and have read 6 of them.

same, and I have read far more Culture novels than I have read Cixin Liu. 3BP was refreshing in a way very few books are.

Refreshing is perhaps the best word to describe the book. Excellent out of not, it’s barely good, but quite different from western sf, which earns it extra credit.

> which earns it extra credit

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.

The protein unfolding technobabbel in the end just killed any interest in reading the sequel for me.

Nonsense.

> Three Body Problem isn't good enough

Look, I personally hate it, but it comes up here as a top recommendation constantly.

Yeah. I didn't exactly find it memorable[1], but I was recommended it by relatives whose literary tastes don't usually include scifi

[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...

I personally didn't super like it, but lots of people do. It definitely has the fan base to win a hugo, and a lot worse books have won in the past.

N.K. Jemisin won three years in a row, which is far worse. (Three Body Problem was actually okay, though it seemed to me that books 2 & 3 were far better than the first.)

At this point, I'd say just about anything is legitimately good enough to win a Hugo.

Jemisin gets a lot of flak for her politics and the way she weaves it into narratives, but as far as quality of writing itself goes, I'd say she's vastly better. Characters behave like, well, people, not like cardboard cutouts that are there to say the line that author needs to be said.

Broken Earth is absolutely awesome. I don't like everything Jemisin wrote, but her hugo win was 100% deserved.

It was ok, but not earth shattering.

I personally enjoyed it a lot, although the later books were better.

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.

The translation had zero impact on one character who is a sociopathic murderess and faces zero consequences after confessing to the authorities.

It didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Each to their own.

The author probably put that in there to make a point.

There was a good discussion on Reddit about it. I don’t have the link but it should be easy to find.

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.

The risk of government intervention (read: penalties for everyone involved) is what drives self-censorship. There's no meaningful distinction between the two.

> read: penalties for everyone involved

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-...

> 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.

China’s whole censorship legal framework is based on self censorship, so there would not be much difference.

There is no actual organization that makes decisions. It's a fan convention with no governance structure other than that whoever shows up at the convention gets to vote on things.

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.

Why not?

Considering that China is the most populous country on the planet, and that some of its sci-fi has recently attracted worldwide attention, it makes sense that China gets a shot at hosting.

And then... they screwed it up.

Well to be fair, it looks like the non-Chinese organizers screwed it up.

There probably was no way to hold this in china without not screwing it up.

As others have said, between competing bids for who'd host Worldcon in 2023, China got the most votes (from registered fans at an earlier Worldcon).

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.

That's an obvious scam that any trained eye spots in 5 seconds, and very typical for more primitive undemocratic societies like Russia and China. I am curious why nobody reacted since at least few must have realized this.

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.

According to Charles Stross's explanation of how Worldcons work, you don't really need to fake votes - you can just buy them at $50/pop:

> 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.

Because the world should NOT be splited more and more.

Let us do it in Russia or here communist china. It is not you or split it up guys or ladies. It is one side attack the basic and foundation values of you.

How about North Korea, Iran or even Hong Kong … just happen all on USA adversity list …

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