Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
Leaked emails show organizers of the prestigious Hugo Awards vetted writers’ work and comments with regard to China, where last year’s awards were held.
Leaked emails show organizers of the prestigious Hugo Awards vetted writers’ work and comments with regard to China, where last year’s awards were held.
Organizers of the Hugo Awards, one of the most prominent literary awards in science fiction, excluded multiple authors from shortlists last year over concerns their work or public comments could be offensive to China, leaked emails show.
Questions had been raised as to why writers including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer had been deemed ineligible as finalists despite earning enough votes according to information published last month by awards organizers. Emails released this week revealed that they were concerned about how some authors might be perceived in China, where the Hugo Awards were held last year for the first time.
Wow, what a great argument to never host anything in China, ever.
These events keep getting held in places like China and Saudi Arabia, where the organizers know they are going to have to make major concessions to those governments, because the organizers care far more about money than they do the event. At least that's my theory.
using money to project their influence and values overseas, sport-washing and peddling fossil fuels…
It's a better argument to not trust the awards admin with anything from now in, given that they did that independently and removed a ton of Chinese authors from the ballots.
This isn't the first time the Hugo has been subject to controversy, about a decade ago most of the awards went to "no award" and the nominees got "asterisk awards" because a group openly coordinated to nominate a slate of works (which they claimed others were doing less publicly in the past). The voting rules were changed over this one.
What the fuck, Hugo? Why hold it in a country that has no human rights?
I'm $ure the deci$ion was completely unbia$ed.
Oh reall¥?
The Hugos have always been a clusterfuck. Explaining all the nuance is beyond a single comment (I can't even find a good writeup) but it boils down to the voting committee largely being opt/buy-in. If you buy a membership to the World Science Fiction Society, you get to vote on where WorldCon will be held which means you are voting on where The Hugos will be held. You ALSO get to vote in the Hugos themselves
Yes, that sounds really shitty but it is also why the Hugos are a lot more prestigious than a Goodreads award. People need to give enough of a shit which, historically, has resulted in more people who actually have read multiple entrants.
Of course, a couple years back we had the "sad puppies" incident where a bunch of racist incels basically voted as a bloc to shut down people of color and non CISHET male voices.
And... a lot of signs point toward "China" having gamed the system again. Whether that is a focused effort by the CCP or just passionate Chinese SFF fans is up for debate*.
As for excluding authors? I very much assume that is just a function of operating in China. The CCP cracking down on the event would not end well for anyone involved.
Personally? I think this is yet another indication that the Hugos, like most "old guard" SFF, can fuck off. It was just a few years back that George R R Martin rambled and talked about the good old days while butchering every single "ethnic" name on the ballot. I think the issue of "who gets to vote" is still a major issue but I also think there is absolutely zero reason that an event about celebrating forward thinking should restrict itself to an in-person gala. That shit should be going above and beyond vtubers and focusing on new voices who might have a day job because being "a full time author" is increasingly impossible for any newbies.
*: Because China actually has a ridiculously strong SFF community. In large part because there are authors who are very much pushing the boundaries of what they can and can't say to actually tell interesting and thought provoking stories in the way SFF has always been able to.
Decent writeup by Charles Stross:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon-in-the-news.html
The mode of operation of WorldCon/the Hugos seems interesting as in "May you live in interesting times"
Edit: fixed auto-co-wrecked spelling of Charles Stross
What's some good "new guard" SF you'd recommend? I don't read much anymore but I randomly stumbled upon and really enjoyed Megan O'Keefe's Protectorate trilogy which is a typical space opera but with a female protagonist and openly queer characters and a couple interesting twists (unlike the Three Body Problem whose plot was as pretentious as it was bland and did not live up to even a hundredth the hype but I digress).
The worst thing is that the organization censored things that even the CCP doesn't - several of the excluded books are freely sold in China. Self-censorship is a hell of a drug.
Same way Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the labor party: Only those with paid memberships can vote on stuff (e.g. where the awards will be presented in the future). China paid for enough new memberships to flood the vote with people that voted to hold it in China.
Fuck China and their censorship, the Hugos should be ashamed to bow down to it. Literally the genre that calls their nonsense out.
It's bigger than "China and their censorship."
The problem, as always, is maximizing profit. As long as people put profit before everything else, whoever has the most money is going to control what happens.
Fwiw, this is not a case of China stepping in and censoring anything about the awards. Rather, it's a case of the Hugo administration in the West self-censoring their nominees because they feared China might step in if they didn't get ahead of the curve.
Of course, that doesn't really change the situation, but we shouldnt get the story twisted here. The blame falls on the administrators who were so afraid of a threat that they imagined that they caved to non-existent demands, rather than the Chinese (at least for direct fault, since you could argue the Chinese government's policies indirectly led to this situation and I wouldn't fight you on that).
Your point would be more reasonable if we didn't have a precedent of things like that happening with them before. I'm not saying the administration isn't to blame, as well. But acting like they shouldn't be concerned about repercussions is disingenuous, at best.
Fwiw, this is not a case of China stepping in and censoring anything about the awards. Rather, it’s a case of the Hugo administration in the West self-censoring their nominees because they feared China might step in if they didn’t get ahead of the curve.
You're making an assumption that verbal conversations, 'off the record', didn't happened beforehand.
China didn't have anything to do with it. They censored books that were already translated and selling in china, and Chinese authors.
China = Censorship.
It's impossible to believe that a pro-China author might have been censored at a western organized and operated media event. There's no way that a wildly popular domestically written and published and Galaxy Award winning sci-fi novel "We Live In Nanjing" got left off the list because it was too pro-China!
No. If novels and authors were excluded from the list - if R. F. Kuang and Jiang Bo didn't make the list - it must be due to the villainous Chinese censors doing Evil China Stuff, and not a bunch of elderly Euro-Americans felt like trimming the pool back to an almost exclusively western and white author pool.
Way to lose all credibility in one event
I mean, that depends.
There was a campaign from 2013 to 2017 by rightwingers to game the Hugos by buying non-attending memberships to worldcon and nominating works they deemed to be sufficiently non-woke. Thing is, there's one nominee they couldn't game: "none of these."
So most of the time where the only nominees were gamed, membership voted that there was to be no award in that category that year. The exceptions were authors that likely would have been nominated anyway due to name recognition, like Neil Gaiman.
The award can maintain its integrity despite the committee's lack thereof if Worldcon members vote for no award to be given in the categories leadership fucked with.
That's a great example and entirely valid.
On the flip side though I can't imagine many countries where awards would be vetted simply because it might upset the host. It's a terrible idea IMO and does take away from whoever actually won this year. They'll be left to question whether they won fairly because a competitor was excluded for China's benefit.
I think this specific example does damage the integrity of the awards.
Hocus pocus, Hugo's a joke to us
I really used to think highly of the Hugo Awards. Now I just see them as an empty scheme to make rich people richer. The Hugo awards should not be taken seriously at this point.
No awards should if they're connected to industry insiders.
I'm legitimately flabbergasted every single year by the sheer number of people who think shit like the Oscars or the Emmy's mean anything given the degree of bullshit that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it out in the open.
They're industry circle jerks for marketing and giving favors to friends. It's insane we give them any credit at all. But if the Game Awards have proven anything, it's that the only thing you need to make an award show "legitimate" is a lot of money to market it enough year after year.
"This is not a pipe"
It's amazing how often people are told, en masse, to like something or give it credence simply because it's being marketed as something that they should like or trust, and they just sort of go along with it. Of course, if it didn't work, the advertising/marketing industry wouldn't be as big as it is...
Xiran Jay Zhao is posting about this on their Instagram a lot, which gives an insight into this from the POV of a Chinese person.
Organizers also flagged comments that authors, including Barkley and Sanford, had made about the merits of holding the awards in Chengdu and whether they signed or shared the open letter.
Even if you don’t criticize China explicitly in your works, you are still subject to the Chinese social credit score for everything you say online.
Science fiction is supposed to be about looking to the future in creative ways. Stifling creativity for state interests is repugnant.
Well, there's going a lot of credibility going poof.
Ask lemmygrad why this happened, they'll have a
theoryabsolute factual reason why China was right to do this.They say China's and American's capitalism with beastly grin is to blame
The Hugos has been targeted for political manipulation for at least a decade now. Go back and look up who the "Sad Puppies" were, as an activist organization trying to influence nominees/winners.
I don't think its unfair to say these awards have become dogshit over time, thanks to the way they've been manipulated by outside agitators to push this or that political message. I think its a stretch to say the problem is "capitalism" per se, but it is absolutely about conflating economic success with legitimacy of message. Hugo awards are a marketing tool for authors and boosted sales mean higher profiles which means more money for the next round of novels.
This creates some real perverse incentives when it comes to submissions/awards, particularly when "China Good/Bad!" readings of certain novels become this cause du jour for activists with little actual interest in the literature itself.
Tankies can justify anything
from the excellent antipope article posted earlier:
A commenter just drew my attention to this news item on China.org.cn, dated October 23rd, 2023, right after the worldcon. It begins:
Investment deals valued at approximately $1.09 billion were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.
The deals included 21 sci-fi industry projects involving companies that produce films, parks, and immersive sci-fi experiences ..."
That's a metric fuckton of moolah in play, and it would totally account for the fan-run convention folks being discreetly elbowed out of the way and the entire event being stage-managed as a backdrop for a major industrial event to bootstrap creative industries (film, TV, and games) in Chengdu. And—looking for the most charitable interpretation here—the hapless western WSFS people being carried along for the ride to provide a veneer of worldcon-ness to what was basically Chinese venture capital hijacking the event and then sanitizing it politically.
Follow the money.
"she was dimly aware of somebody screaming, and after a few moments realised the sound was coming from her" - Neil Gaiman; every book.
I've only read a couple of his books but don't remember this specific trope. Can you give notations?
And even if you dislike this trope and think it's lame does that mean he should be booted out of the Hugo awards?
Yeah, he does like to play around with the sometimes confusing, fragmentary, and disorienting nature of subjective experience, especially during traumatic events, doesn't he
He's not bad.
Someone's never read Sandman.
Since most industries treat their awards ceremonies as no more respectable than industry galas + appointing lists of insider-approved "most notable content" awards, I treat them that way! IE I got back into sci fi this year after a hiatus of many years. I looked over the Hugos from the last ten years to find some interesting titles to get me started. While I wasn't disappointed in the slightest by any of them, I could also tell there's no way these were actually the best of the best sci-fi from the last 10 years.
And, you know, if the people throwing the gala are smart, they'll understand it as an advertising event for the whole industry, so the dog and pony show counts, unfortunately. They can, and many do, shit out lists of recent notable titles put together by editors for advertising purposes, but who checks those? Who cares? But holding an award ceremony with judges, that's something you can get media coverage of. There are pictures to take, controversies to be had, etc. The more unique and interesting it is, and the more credible the dog and pony show, the more excited people get about it.
You can't sustain that angle of an awards ceremony if it's obviously just wheeling and dealing. But since it's all just wheeling and dealing these days, what can you do but throw out the baby with the bathwater? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'd agree. Redshirts and Three Body Problem was my Rubicon moment when the Hugos became irrelevant.
I could also tell there's no way these were actually the best of the best sci-fi from the last 10 years.
This is about the same timeframe since they changed their voting rules to put an end to an evil right wing white supremacist campaign that felt exactly that way. When said campaign actually got their picks nominated, every award they were nominated for went to no award.
The Hugos are a bit different in that voting for the shortlist and the awards is open to anybody who is a WSFS member and attended Worldcon (either digitally or in-person), and that includes a significant chunk of fandom and not just authors and industry folk. In some ways that gives them a bit more credibility than other industry awards because (in theory) there isn't that sort of payola you're suggesting in the background. On the other hand that opens them up to manipulation via slate voting campaigns a la Sad/Rabid Puppies, and the more prosaic case of an author with a big fan following winning with a middling entry just on the strength of popularity and name recognition (see Redshirts in 2013, or Nettle and Bone last year). That's been a problem in the past, but this level of blatant censorship and manipulation is new, and it's good that it's attracted the sort of attention and condemnation that it should.
Back when SF and fantasy fiction were more niche interests this maybe wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the genre has moved mainstream in a huge way in the last decade or two and the Hugos get significant media attention outside of fandom. Winning the Hugo can bring attention and prestige, and make for a significant sales bump for authors in a genre that still doesn't really sell enough to pay an author's bills in most cases. Authors in particular need the Hugos to be on the level, or it hurts their ability to get noticed in the larger publishing industry and make a career out of their passion.
Obviously the organisers didn't want to piss off Winnie the Pooh lest he takes away their honey.
Fuck the CCP "yeah you know me".
So stupid question, but beyond the fact that the Hugo awards were held in China, why should they care what Chinese government thinks? I mean hell, I’m an American and I don’t give crap what my government thinks half the time.
There was about a billion in production contracts signed during the Worldcon in China, money talks. The organizers didn't want to disrupt this by being principled, so they didn't.
just another awards show to not take seriously, what else is new. nobody should believe in "credibility" any more.
Book banning, this is what a chilling effect on free speech looks like.
If you ever have any doubts who the fascists are, look at who's banning books in school and elsewhere.
Even if Science Fiction is more popular now it is still kinda a niche area, so disappointed to get one of the good sources do this
A bit off topic but Rebecca rocks
Can someone tell me whether Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem series is stained by Chinese communist propaganda? Because I find the story very appealing, but am wary of the many awards that the series won in Communist Pseudo-China. Are there any undertones I missed?
I was amazed he got away with the first part of the first book which describes aspects of the Cultural Revolution in great detail and doesn't shy away from the whole teenagers murdering their teachers aspect. He is publically pro-goverment in the way you'd better be as a public figure in China. The books, especially the first one, are good.
I don't recall any overt tones. I think it is so highly awarded because it isn't anti-CCP, though I don't remember ever feeling like it took any time away saying it was good, either.
You can tell the book is written from within China. It has some different perspectives to what you’d normally find in a “western” book, but not in a propaganda way. Worth the read
Every Chinese person will be cautious about some topics but the book is fine.
I'd say that it's substantially about the cultural revolution and imo gives it an overall negative treatment that happens to align with the present transition away from hardcore Maoism in China. Cultures are not so monolithic as to be functions of their local propaganda. Much like, say, the US is producing a lot of good science fiction despite having an unhealthy love of capitalism.
I believe it was the third book of the series where he essentially describes a unified humanity that was basically a mix of China and the USA. I'm doubtful that aligns well with the expectations of the Communist Party of China, but maybe? 😆
So indirect fear of Chinese reprisals is news, but the West directly censoring an exiled Chinese artist over his criticism of israel is "free speech'.
Exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: 'Censorship in West exactly the same as Mao's China'
That webpage immediately tried to fingerprint me via DRM...