Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement – 22 July, 2024
glasgow2024.org
glasgow2024.org
The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is £45 [1]. Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships: £16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.
Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.
[1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/, WSFS Membership.
Maybe the "winner" sticker drives some paper book sales?
https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ has some data for one year. "They do have an effect, but probably no more than a few thousand sales for most books, maybe over ten thousand for the luckiest, and then only in exceptional years."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_the_H...
Look at juried awards like the Clarke award if you want something that isn't just a popularity contest.
"Prove you voted for me and you get access to a big download of everything I made in the past decade, which would cost $300 to buy normally" comes to mind as a way to cover a chunk of that. Crowdfunding!
One possibility I could think of is a certain state trying to boost their up and coming Science Fiction industry, but even that seems a rather far fetched prospect.
$22,000 is cheap in the world of literature award purchasing.
Authors will often hire services to buy their books by the thousands to get on to best seller lists. The cost can be on the order of $100,000.
I know one author who had purchased many boxes of his own book with the intention of getting them back into his publisher's system somehow and recouping some money. Apparently he didn't plan it out fully, because not only did the book not sell well but he was stuck with boxes and boxes of his own book. He couldn't even give them away after a while.
For a certain time some producers and their label magically went into the top 10 in their not so small niche. Ok-ish stuff, but very short lived.
What a beautiful marketing machine in a very expensive and taste driven industry. It seems to appear a great way to launder money.
In Germany there was also a small scandal around a singer who’s producer had to admit to vinyl buying practices as a side note in a court case.
Or maybe Paramount are desperate to beat Doctor Who in Dramatic Presentation, Short Form?
Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be detected.
Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.
The FCC fake-comment fraud involved literally millions of real identities and real names [0]. It was caught for a different reason: many of the comments had identical text strings.
[0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-james-...
It's a very interesting example, to me: the telecom companies set up an arms-length arrangement with the criming entities, the "social media consultants", such that if the fraud were caught (and it was), the people who benefited from the crime, and intended for the crime to happen, could plausibly plead ignorance. US law apparently has no good solution to this type of "wink-and-nod" white-collar crime.
Not at all clear, actually. They wouldn't have been discovered by this exact heuristic, but that's not to say this was the most complex fraud the Hugo committee were capable of detecting.
It is of course completely impossible that while one person was arranging fake votes using obviously fake names, they or someone else might have arranged fake votes using more realistically fake names.
Like, I agree that there's not a lot that the committee can do here, but the Hugo voting process in its current form does not warrant this level of confidence. We simply cannot be sure whether the people who "won" did so fairly or not.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
We can't have nice things.
Then in 2023 there was the self-censorship incident for the Chengdu Worldcon (and also some question about the ballot for selection of Chengdu in the first place, I believe).
Now this.
The Hugos are really having a lot of trouble recently.
That was as much a part of the controversy of the Chengdu WorldCon as any of the mistakes they made. The WorldCon was built to welcome that sort of diversity of opinion from an entirely under-represented part of the world in voting to that point. Even if the Chengdu WorldCon hadn't made silly mistakes it still would have angered a lot of people by how much it proved the Hugos actually aren't about "groupthink" and try to get a diversity of opinions.
I had been to several worldcons before sad puppies happened and that is literally what was being said about the nominees and winners.
Just compare to the lists of books from the 60's to 80's to the ones from 2000 onward. It's hard for me to say the quality is still.
I've read ~half the winners from 1960-1980, and a slightly larger proportion from 2000-2020. I found the more recent novels had more interesting concepts and vastly improved writing. The quality overall has increased significantly. Pretty painful to try to read eg Asimov nowadays
I wouldn't go that far, Asimov is still awesome, with all the weaknesses that have always been in his works but with all the strengths, too.
That said, I agree that the SF/Fantasy scene has gotten some really amazing works lately. I don't agree with all the Hugo winners of the last few years, but that's because we have so much good competition lately :)
Sad puppies at least was completely honest about it. I don't agree with what they did, but it's honest. Everyone's pretending like they're voting for things nobody has read because they read them and not because the author has been "blessed" as appropriate for accolades. Also, not saying it should be a strict popularity contest.
Also, 2000's looks pretty normal and it doesn't seem to kick off until 2010+.
I could be convinced, though. It's hard to pick out a book from the last 15 years which which will be on the read list 30 years from now. Except The Three Body Problem, which I loved and I think will last.
So, I'll check back on this in 30 years and see how it's aged.
If I were asked to pick winners from the last 15 years that will still be recommended reads in 2050, I'd pick Ancillary Justice and The Fifth Season. From nominees not winners, perhaps Seveneves or Too Like The Lighting would qualify. The most recent book I can say will definitely be on the to-read list is 2000's winner, Vernor Vince's A Deepness In the Sky
Some of the Chinese controversy about the Chengdu's WorldCon last year was as much about that natural sway in attending membership simply by being hosted in a controversial country like China no matter what else happened. It's called WorldCon for that reason and that sway in voting membership was always somewhat intentional to keep the Hugo Awards worldly and diverse. Some people were always going to have issues with a Chines WorldCon, even if they didn't also end up very publicly making mistakes.
The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.
Whoever did it, it almost certainly wasn't because they were trying to make money from increased sales.
Outside, for example buying for a friend or colleague, I imagine it sounds like a generic literary award and they'd expect it was judged excellent by some number of experts, as with say a Booker.
It's also a nice ego boost of course. If you like that kind of thing anyway. If you're Greg Egan or something it's probably dreadful.
That being said, Victoria Goddard has been robbed (give her alllll the Hugos!)
Three-Body problem is one of the greatest SF books of all time, IMO.
I found them fun and engaging (I wouldn't have read the second one otherwise) but ultimately not outstanding.
> Three-Body problem is one of the greatest SF books of all time, IMO.
This is an opinion I am constantly baffled with. I found it awful, simply devoid of redeeming features; no interesting plot, no interesting technical ideas, no interesting characters, no interesting writing. (The worldbuilding could've perhaps been interesting if it hadn't been so thin.)
I was personally not a fan of the Three Body Problem (apart from the vivid flashback to the Cultural Revolution) because of the language (not clear whether it suffered in translation or whether it was the writing style of the original), and because the physics of it seemed ludicrous to me. But it's one of those "grand idea" series that to me would clearly qualify as winner tier, and it had many fans from across the political spectrum and quite a bit of commercial success.
Blackout/All Clear has been criticized for being rather loose with historical and cultural details, and for splitting up what might have fit into a single novel into two books, but I thought it was an excellent book otherwise.
I thought both the Ancillary Justice trilogy and the A Memory Called Empire trilogy were amazing works. I disagreed with the hectoring pro-Human Spaceflight messaging of The Calculating Stars, but as a book, I again thought it was good.
I was a fan of Anathem, Ninefox Gambit, and The Goblin Emperor (which was my preference to win that year) as well; could not get into Too Like the Lightning at all (but had no doubt that it belonged).
Her most successful series is about an introvert "murderbot" and his closest friend who is a spaceship AI.
(Highly recommended)
I don't think it was very covert–the conference organizers are required to release their data, which they did, and the voting issues were immediately apparent.
[1] https://fancyclopedia.org/Permanent_Floating_Worldcon_Commit...
No mention of who "Finalist A" is.
Not very transparent, really.
It's not even possible for reforms to take place until the 2025 Worldcon because two consecutive business meetings need to ratify any changes.
It’s a fan voted prize, and you get a vote for being a member, and you can become a member with a fee.
If some person, people, or organisations attempted to masquerade as multiple non “natural” persons they seem to have been found out, which I would not call a “loophole”.
By the way, as a member it seems you get a copy of all the books and stories, which makes the fee pretty decent.
Some entity or entities doing this in a very dumb way has been found out. Why should that give us any confidence that no other entities did this in more sophisticated ways?
That is an extremely misleading summary of what was uncovered.
> several authors being declared ineligible without explanation [...] Leaked emails revealed that the authors were excluded due to self-censorship by the Hugo Award administrators in order to appease the Chinese government
Is Wikipedia incorrect here?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hugo_Award&oldid=...
The entries supposedly eliminated at the behest of the Chinese government are in many cases published in China, and there's never been any evidence that they were eliminated by anyone other than a secret committee comprising the guy who writes the closed-source voting software, which he refuses to let anyone audit. Moreover, there is clear evidence of anomalies and outright vote manipulation (with some winners having more votes allocated than were cast). Much of the vote manipulation appears to have been in order to override popular votes from Chinese fans.
The "oh it's just the evil Chinese government" appears to be as much a deflection to allow one or a few people to rewrite the votes to a slate of winners who they prefer, as anything else.
From : https://corabuhlert.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-nomination-...
"There are a couple of other landmines in the report, namely that several Chinese language works were apparently removed for alleged slating before they even made the longlist. Note that Dave McCarty was also the Hugo administrator in 2016, i.e. one of the Puppy years, where slating very definitely took place, and yet found himself unable to remove any of the slate finalists from the ballot. And while I have no idea what We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu and the other Chinese novels which appear on the eligibility spreadsheet but not on the ballot, are about, they can’t possibly be worse than such literary gems as “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris or “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness, both of which Dave McCarty allowed to make the ballot in 2016."
X doubt. Name names.