"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo | Hacker News Reader

"Rabbit Test" Unwins the Hugo

samtasticbooks.com

121 pointsprimax58 comments

Related ongoing thread:

Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 - Feb 2024 (301 comments)

> the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! proactively! and incompetently!) vetted potential finalists for political statements relating to China, and then the main administrator presumably used that info to mark some of them ineligible. It should be said: there’s no indication that Chinese censors even cared about the content of the English work. Some of it had already been translated into Chinese for goodness’ sake! So the Western members of the committee appear to have been flailing about based on what they thought China wouldn’t like, and preemptively self-censored, rather than, oh, I dunno, refusing to censor anything in the first place.

That's how censorship works, though. A country with mostly free speech will clearly and unambiguously ban a list of works (or types of content). There are always some limits to speech, but debates are possible as long as the rules are clearly defined.

Authoritarians expect self-censorship and have vague rules because they expect you to be making an effort to do what they want (or at least to pretend you are). Having platforms do the censorship, and banning the platforms that do a poor job is a lot more scalable than making it all centralised.

In an authoritarian state you can't get a decent official list of banned works, and in a distopian state you can't even get a list of alllowed works. Incompetence in how censorship is applied by platforms is expected, if not always tolerated.

Back on topic:

> The way that things currently stand, I don’t think I can fully consider myself a Hugo winner.

Not a writer, but I expect any Hugo is partly hard work and talent, and partly luck. Very few winners can consider themselves objectively the best.

There's a video on YouTube called "Last man standing", about Steven Bradbury's 2002 Winter Olympics gold medal. He was the slowest, but everyone else fell over. So what? He should have won a medal in 1994 but was pushed over. He stood a chance in the 94 World Cup but almost died from blood loss in a crash, and it severed his quadriceps. Then he crashed again in the 1998 Olympics and broke his neck in 2000. And he still won his heat in the 2002, he wasn't a total amateur.

Sure, the Hugos don't have as much physical hardship, but there's luck and hard work in every win. As long as you're playing fair, and asking for the committee to keep it fair, a win is a win.

> and asking for the committee to keep it fair

That kind of break your whole argument. They did not.

Or do you mean that it's enough to just ask ??

There will always be some luck and politics, but if it's outrageous then at some point it's time to make a stand and refuse it. That's up to the author I guess. In this case, I'd say I'd respect either a grudging acceptance or a dignified refusal.

A lot of countries have unwritten (and written) rules around different types of media. The question is, who do you defer to to understand them?

Think about the west. Between Europe and the Anglosphere, there are a multitude of norms for what you can show or describe depending on the medium, the rating, the location, the platform, and the era.

In this case, there were a ton of Chinese books published by Chinese people in China, voted on by Chinese people in China, in a competition held in China. The censorship was decided by a foreigner.

One might assume that those multitudes of Chinese authors, Chinese publishers, and Chinese fans would be best positioned to know where the line sits in China.

It would be a shame if the result of a foreigner deciding to exclude all Chinese authors from one competition was the community deciding to avoid hosting in China in future.

Some previous discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 (295 comments)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132185 (74 comments)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012127 (67 comments)

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 - Feb 2024 (301 comments)

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)

Funny timing with all this is that I just read Folding Beijing (https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/) a few days ago, which won a Hugo in 2016. Great story, but I can't help but think that this year's committee would've axed it too.

Well, that summarily rekt my sleeping schedule this evening. Truly a great story and glad I stumbled upon your remark. Thanks!

I feel like the author deserves a unique Hugo for their graciousness, all things considered.

Wow, that was a classy response to an awkward situation.

Genuinely

Yeah I've never even heard of this author before, but this response is so nicely written and well considered that I'll be checking out their books now!

Her short stories, including "Rabbit Test", can be found on this page: https://samtasticbooks.com/short-fiction/

> I’m embarrassed to have been used in this way — as a nice “no issues” name on a list, in order to further what appears to have been a xenophobic quest to keep the awards firmly American

I disagree

You disagree with what? The author's embarrassment? I'm not even being snarky - I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.

I feel like all of last year's fake finalists should be given a Hugo* award, which is like a Hugo award in that people did vote for them at the finals, but with the big obvious askerisk.

Plus that would make it easy for authors to fix their new book covers, just overprint a large asterisk and it's all good!

Considering how badly that whole thing went, I hope people don't give up on the underlying concept of including China in global science fiction awards or even more generally. It seems important for everyone's security to integrate culturally. My impression is that there is a significant amount of that already happening, being driven by forward-thinking writers, artists, academics etc.

Have any writers tried to bridge the ideology gap between China and the West? Maybe Taiwanese authors. I think I read an article saying that one of the top Chinese officials with enormous power had been in the US and although initially supposedly open to western ideas had found a lot of negatives that ended up reinforcing more opposing beliefs.

Neil Clake (editor of the well known magazine Clarkesworld) publishes Chinese voices all the time.

Do you "get" that stuff? I always feel there's a cultural gulf and I'm missing a lot of subtext.

(Not a criticism of the magazine or the authors, it's just where I am).

I think it’s important to note that _most_ of the ratfucking appears to have been Dave McCarty just out on his own making crazy decisions, and it seems than the Chinese fans and Chinese authors were some of the worst treated in the whole scenario.

Obviously, the level of censorship from the PRC is hugely problematic, and something to seriously consider when deciding where to hold the award ceremony, but the fact that this one was a disaster should reflect mostly on McCarty and the other administrators. This shouldn’t be evidence that Chengdu was a problem.

This is clearly evidence that China is the problem. It's exactly what everyone predicted. And it's what I've witnessed in the past few years at scientific conferences. This is how the system puts pressure on outsiders, it gets the locals to explain how dire the consequences would be for them.

15 years ago conferences were legitimately free and everyone felt free. I felt comfortable visiting China.

Now, I get emails asking for slides ahead of time to make we don't say anything. Chinese faculty members show up with minders. I get pleading comments in private to make sure to never say anything political because my hosts would be punished.

Heck, we had to change the ethics section of a paper recently to make my student comfortable in case he plans to return home because employers and the government would hold him accountable for what it said originally. Nothing crazy by the way, nothing even directly mentioning China, just about the general idea of freedom.

15 years later, I don't feel comfortable going to China anymore or letting any of my students go to conferences there anymore.

The only thing you know about Dave McCarty's actions is that he was extremely concerned about the locals. I could have said something in my talk about the Uyghurs and Hong Kong when I was there. And if it was a Chinese funded event in the West I would have. But it would have been my innocent friends and their families who were hosting us at the conference that would have paid the price for that. You're really buying into exactly what the system wants you to think here.

Freedom only exists is when it is periodically exercised and consistently defended without compliance or compromise.

> I could have said something in my talk about the Uyghurs

What a laugh to point a finger at Chinese treatment of Muslims when the NATO countries are arming the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Sounds a lot like you’re trying to argue that you can only be against one evil at a time, which is exactly how people have convinced themselves that you must support terrorism from either Israel or Palestine if you criticize the other.

Funny how you blame Palestine crisis on the "West" instead of the insane Iran and Ruzzia actually sponsoring that hellhole for almost a century and smuggling terror weapons there, and both of these Axis of Losers countries being supported by the same China.

The latest news is the McCarty swapped a “slate” of votes for Chinese authors (that was actually a recommended reading list, published by a magazine), and just replaced those votes for votes for western authors.

This goes well beyond just ham-handed and incompetent attempts to preemptively appease Chinese censors, and into outright manipulation to deny Chinese fans their votes at all.

If we were still just in the world of “McCarty is attempting to preemptively censor to appease the government”, I’d agree with you. But we went past that point, and at this point McCarty’s hands are so dirty, it’s hard for me to assume he was just looking out for his local contacts.

It's cute that you think this wasn't a sign of the smaller West being integrated into the larger Communist Chinese world.

Lol no, the Hugo awards won’t be held in China again for a long while, and other event organizers will stay away after seeing this debacle.

> I think I read an article saying that one of the top Chinese officials with enormous power had been in the US and although initially supposedly open to western ideas had found a lot of negatives that ended up reinforcing more opposing beliefs.

You might be thinking of Wang Huning's "America Against America" (1991). Scott Alexander's June 2023 blog post on the subject hit the front page of HN last month. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/assistant-dictator-book-clu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051100

The Hugo awards (and the Nebula awards) have become highly political. Works seems to be chosen more for their political viewpoints than for the quality of their writing. The article is a perfect example: The story "Rabbit Test" (according to the author's website) is all about "the past, present, and future of abortion rights in America".

Abortion rights are important, but that's not what the awards should be about. If I want to read a political screed, there are plenty of other sources. The Hugos should be about cracking good SciFi/Fantasy stories.

It used to be that I would run out and buy anything that came up as a finalist for a Hugo or a Nebula, if I hadn't already read it. Nowadays, I take them more as a list of authors to avoid.

What short fiction do you recommend in each of the past several years instead? Also, what do you mean, the awards have gotten political? Rabbit Test is about abortion, but the year before it, “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” is a fake literary analysis of a ballad collectively performed in an online sort of format. The year before that, “Open House on Haunted Hill” is literally a story about a house that is sapient and has been empty for a long time and wants to be occupied?? I guess the story before that, “Give The Family My Love” assumes that the world becomes uninhabitable due to anthropogenic climate change— but by that logic any futuristic idea is political?

Scifi has always addressed social issues. Like, probably the only sci-fi novel that most people have read is 1984.

I think there _was_ a period, maybe from the 50s to the 90s, where there was some degree of split, with scifi covering social issues (1984, Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) self-consciously considering itself _not scifi_ (Atwood was particularly emphatic about it), but even then it wasn't a clean split; a lot of Clarke's stuff covered social issues, say.

Followup: And Larry Niven, how could I forget! Albeit most notably over something which turned out not really to be a real-world issue (Niven was absolutely obsessed with the idea that authoritarian states would be incentivised to execute people for the purpose of harvesting their organs; organ transplantation was just beginning to show up when he started writing these.)

Also Heinlein, obviously.

Where is the freedom in China.

Could you imagine if the US Congress called the heads of its most prominent universities in, and lambasted them for not cracking down on student groups critical of US imperialism, and then those university heads were fired? Things like that don't happen in the land of the free.

China, please look to the American example of freedom.

> for not cracking down on student groups critical of US imperialism

My understanding is that the controversy you are referring to was regarding what circumstances it is ok for students to call for genocide against Jews, and whether that specific speech would violate the universities' policies against hate speech.

I don't think it's accurate to reframe that controversy as "critical of US imperialism".

The original Likud charter said from the river to the sea should be Jewish domination. Netanyahu recently affirmed that.

Funny to speak of genocide when the self-described Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza and is being brought up on charges of genocide at the ICJ. The words Jews and genocide will be linked from now and in the future - the genocide the Jewish state is committing against the Palestinians.

In November the UN voted recently Palestinians have the right to self-determination. The only countries who voted against were Israel, the US, US compact member Micronesia, and the 10,000 population island of Nauru which gets a UN vote although the US blocks Palestine from having one. 70% of Americans want a ceasefire incidentally.

The world and 70% of Americans stand in horror against the genocide the self-described Jewish state is committing.

You can read the transcripts of the testimony here [1].

Regardless of your position on Israel, it is inaccurate to frame the speech that was being debated as students who are "critical of US imperialism".

Whether that speech is protected, whether it violates university's hate speech rules, and the Israel/Hamas conflict are completely different subjects.

Language matters. The post I replied to inaccurately characterized congressional testimony as part of an attempt to make a partisan political point.

Debating and discussing these subjects is important, and it's also important that we do so accurately.

Manipulating language to maximize outrage reaction detracts from our ability to discuss subjects objectively.

[1] https://rollcall.com/2023/12/13/transcript-what-harvard-mit-...

> Could you imagine if the US Congress called the heads of its most prominent universities in, and lambasted them for not cracking down on student groups critical of US imperialism, and then those university heads were fired?

The difference between the US and China is that in the US, political hacks can call for people to be fired from their job.

In China those same people instead are put in front of a firing squad.

I mean, when I was a student I organized an anti-war rally in 2003. I was called into the president's office and the president of the university told me to cut it out.

So, not hard to imagine that happening further up the chain.

I mean, I didn't get shot or put in jail, so there's that. At the same time, the US ignored rather large protests and proceeded to get around 1M folks killed.

I think that's a reasonable summation of freedom in the US- the folks with the power know they have it, so it's more a question of "stern talkings-to", and then they do whatever the folks who own the place want to do.

Which, I suppose is "freedom". Not a very satisfying freedom, at least from my point of view.

Ouch. Thats rough.

Pity - always thought its a credible award.

I would argue it has been (and still is) a credible award because it is generally quite open about its policies. The choice to host the awards in Chengdu was not the act of some shadowy cabal, but a simple result of easily exploited policy. Charles Stross writes about it at length[0], but the simple gist is that it only costs $50 to vote on where the next year's awards are hosted, and there was a successful campaign to get SF fans in Chengdu to vote for their city.

Hopefully, as it has done in the past, the Hugos will update policy in a way that mitigates this sort of thing in the future. I don't see an easy solution, but I wish them the best.

[0]: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon...

Readers should remember that for every one of these travesties that leak, there are probably more that don't.

> what appears to have been a xenophobic quest to keep the awards firmly American

The mental gymnastics required to reach this conclusion are truly impressive.

If we are writing about writing can we please write? “Unwin”?

Ever since the same author won the award three years in a row the Hugo awards have been an utter joke.

Hugo awards have been more about agendas than SciFi or Fantasy. This is just another variation.

Judging by most of the comments over the submissions today, people are really not comfortable with someone pointing out how consistent with past behavior this is. We just happened to get proof leaked this time.

They are as relevant as the Oscars. Nowadays if I see a book has won a Hugo or an Oscar, I am biased against it.

The slogan for this year, "Hugo's so cowardly" springs to mind

For what it’s worth, I quite enjoyed Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once, “despite” the fact that they won Oscars.

Yes, but they were outliers. And Hugo is much more political than the Oscars. Always was.

They've been a joke for over a decade, at first it was just politics but the quality of writing is well below that of Hunger Games.

What novels would you suggest instead published in each of the last 10 years?

I quite enjoyed the broken earth trilogy, and took no issue from each entry winning. Which book would you have preferred win from those years?

I also quite liked the trilogy but do kinda think that Yoon Ha Lee got robbed back to back to back and should have won at least one of those three years.

nothing against jemisin either, and I enjoyed the trilogy, but I was rooting heavily for "a closed and common orbit" in 2017.

Huh? People have won it _twice_ in a row, repeatedly, and the three times in a row thing nearly happened before (with Heinlein). Like, you could have a rule that the previous year's winner wasn't eligible I suppose, but I'm not sure I particularly see the point.

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