#hugos
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more on the hugos (not just 2023)
i am sorry buds but it has to be said: lots of talk about the 2023 hugo awards being fraudulent because of actions of leader dave mccarty. this is true. but if we are going to be REALLY honest there is a difficult truth to accept, ANY past hugos dave ran are likely fraudulent
i do not want to have to say this as it casts a lot of doubt and i honestly do not think there is any action that needs to be taken, we should keep trotting along and give credit to winners, but it should at least be addressed. THIS DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN ONCE, IT GETS NOTICED ONCE
just went back into old emails and dave was IN FACT in charge of both the years i was nominated. will i ever know if there is any legitimacy to those results? was it politically best for me to be nominated but MAKE SURE i dont win? who the heck knows.
of course i am not saying my trot is MORE DESERVING or BETTER than the winners these year (and like i said we should respect these results), but acting as though actions of dave and the committee only effect 2023 seems a little short sighted i am sorry to say. it is much much worse
heres the thing that really bothers me when scoundrels treat outsiders and marginalized buds like this (same feeling i got from texas library banning) CHUCK is suddenly the one who has to wrestle with 'should i speak on this? will i ever be nominated again for ANY award now?' THAT is insidious part
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The majority of censorship is self-censorship
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!
I know a lot of polymaths, but Ada Palmer takes the cake: brilliant science fiction writer, brilliant historian, brilliant librettist, brilliant singer, and then some:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#terra-ignota
Palmer is a friend and a colleague. In 2018, she, Adrian Johns and I collaborated on "Censorship, Information Control, & Information Revolutions from Printing Press to Internet," a series of grad seminars at the U Chicago History department (where Ada is a tenured prof, specializing in the Inquisition and Renaissance forbidden knowledge):
https://ifk.uchicago.edu/research/faculty-fellow-projects/censorship-information-control-information-revolutions-from-printing-press/
The project had its origins in a party game that Ada and I used to play at SF conventions: Ada would describe a way that the Inquisitions' censors attacked the printing press, and I'd find an extremely parallel maneuver from governments, the entertainment industry or other entities from the much more recent history of internet censorship battles.
With the seminars, we took it to the next level. Each 3h long session featured a roster of speakers from many disciplines, explaining everything from how encryption works to how white nationalists who were radicalized in Vietnam formed an armored-car robbery gang to finance modems and Apple ][+s to link up neo-Nazis across the USA.
We borrowed the structure of these sessions from science fiction conventions, home to a very specific kind of panel that doesn't always work, but when it does, it's fantastic. It was a natural choice: after all, Ada and I know each other through science fiction.
Even if you're not an sf person, you've probably heard of the Hugo Awards, the most prestigious awards in the field, voted on each year by attendees of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). And even if you're not an sf fan, you might have heard about a scandal involving the Hugo Awards, which were held last year in China, a first:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/science-fiction-authors-excluded-hugo-awards-china-rcna139134
A little background: each year's Worldcon is run by a committee of volunteers. These volunteers put together bids to host the Worldcon, and canvass Worldcon attendees to vote in favor of their bid. For many years, a group of Chinese fans attempted to field a successful bid to host a Worldcon, and, eventually, they won.
At the time, there were many concerns: about traveling to a country with a poor human rights record and a reputation for censorship, and about the logistics of customary Worldcon attendees getting visas. During this debate, many international fans pointed to the poor human rights record in the USA (which has hosted the vast majority of Worldcons since their inception), and the absolute ghastly rigmarole the US government subjects many foreign visitors to when they seek visas to come to the US for conventions.
Whatever side of this debate you came down on, it couldn't be denied that the Chinese Worldcon rang a lot of alarm-bells. Communications were spotty, and then the con was unceremoniously rescheduled for months after the original scheduled date, without any good explanation. Rumors swirled of Chinese petty officials muscling their way into the con's administration.
But the real alarm bells started clanging after the Hugo Award ceremony. Normally, after the Hugos are given out, attendees are given paper handouts tallying the nominations and votes, and those numbers are also simultaneously published online. Technically, the Hugo committee has a grace period of some weeks before this data must be published, but at every Worldcon I've attended over the past 30+ years, I left the Hugos with a data-sheet in my hand.
Then, in early December, at the very last moment, the Hugo committee released its data – and all hell broke loose. Numerous, acclaimed works had been unilaterally "disqualified" from the ballot. Many of these were written by writers from the Chinese diaspora, but some works – like an episode of Neil Gaiman's Sandman – were seemingly unconnected to any national considerations.
Readers and writers erupted in outrage, demanding to know what had happened. The Hugo administrators – Americans and Canadians who'd volunteered in those roles for many years and were widely viewed as being members in good standing of the community – were either silent or responded with rude and insulting remarks. One thing they didn't do was explain themselves.
The absence of facts left a void that rumors and speculation rushed in to fill. Stories of Chinese official censorship swirled online, and along with them, a kind of I-told-you-so: China should never have been home to a Worldcon, the country's authoritarian national politics are fundamentally incompatible with a literary festival.
As the outrage mounted and the scandal breached from the confines of science fiction fans and writers to the wider world, more details kept emerging. A damning set of internal leaks revealed that it was those long-serving American and Canadian volunteers who decided to censor the ballot. They did so out of a vague sense that the Chinese state would visit some unspecified sanction on the con if politically unpalatable works appeared on the Hugo ballot. Incredibly, they even compiled clumsy dossiers on nominees, disqualifying one nominee out of a mistaken belief that he had once visited Tibet (it was actually Nepal).
There's no evidence that the Chinese state asked these people to do this. Likewise, it wasn't pressure from the Chinese state that caused them to throw out hundreds of ballots cast by Chinese fans, whom they believed were voting for a "slate" of works (it's not clear if this is the case, but slate voting is permitted under Hugo rules).
All this has raised many questions about the future of the Hugo Awards, and the status of the awards that were given in China. There's widespread concern that Chinese fans involved with the con may face state retaliation due to the negative press that these shenanigans stirred up.
But there's also a lot of questions about censorship, and the nature of both state and private censorship, and the relationship between the two. These are questions that Ada is extremely well-poised to answer; indeed, they're the subject of her book-in-progress, entitled Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet.
In a magisterial essay for Reactor, Palmer stakes out her central thesis: "The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power":
https://reactormag.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
States – even very powerful states – that wish to censor lack the resources to accomplish totalizing censorship of the sort depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They can't go from house to house, searching every nook and cranny for copies of forbidden literature. The only way to kill an idea is to stop people from expressing it in the first place. Convincing people to censor themselves is, "dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do."
Ada invokes examples modern and ancient, including from her own area of specialty, the Inquisition and its treatment of Gailileo. The Inquistions didn't set out to silence Galileo. If that had been its objective, it could have just assassinated him. This was cheap, easy and reliable! Instead, the Inquisition persecuted Galileo, in a very high-profile manner, making him and his ideas far more famous.
But this isn't some early example of Inquisitorial Streisand Effect. The point of persecuting Galileo was to convince Descartes to self-censor, which he did. He took his manuscript back from the publisher and cut the sections the Inquisition was likely to find offensive. It wasn't just Descartes: "thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial."
This is direct self-censorship, where people are frightened into silencing themselves. But there's another form of censorship, which Ada calls "middlemen censorship." That's when someone other than the government censors a work because they fear what the government would do if they didn't. Think of Scholastic's cowardly decision to pull inclusive, LGBTQ books out of its book fair selections even though no one had ordered them to do so:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/06/books/scholastic-book-racism-maggie-tokuda-hall.html
This is a form of censorship outsourcing, and it "multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power." The censoring body doesn't need to hire people to search everyone's houses for offensive books – it can frighten editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers and librarians into suppressing the books in the first place.
This outsourcing blurs the line between state and private surveillance. Think about comics. After a series of high-profile Congressional hearings about the supposed danger of comics to impressionable young minds, the comics industry undertook a regime of self-censorship, through which the private Comics Code Authority would vet comings for "dangerous" content before allowing its seal of approval to appear on the comics' covers. Distributors and retailers refused to carry books without a CCA stamp, so publishers refused to publish books unless they could get a CCA stamp.
The CCA was unaccountable, capricious – and racist. By the 60s and 70s, it became clear that comic about Black characters were subjected to much tighter scrutiny than comics featuring white heroes. The CCA would reject "a drop of sweat on the forehead of a Black astronaut as 'too graphic' since it 'could be mistaken for blood.'" Every comic that got sent back by the CCA meant long, brutal reworkings by writers and illustrators to get them past the censors.
The US government never censored heroes like Black Panther, but the chain of events that created the CCA "middleman censors" made sure that Black Panther appeared in far fewer comics starring Marvel's most prominent Black character. An analysis of censorship that tries to draw a line between private and public censorship would say that the government played no role in Black Panther's banishment to obscurity – but without Congressional action, Black Panther would never have faced censorship.
This is why attempts to cleanly divide public and private censorship always break down. Many people will tell you that when Twitter or Facebook blocks content they disagree with, that's not censorship, since censorship is government action, and these are private actors. What they mean is that Twitter and Facebook censorship doesn't violate the First Amendment, but it's perfectly possible to infringe on free speech without violating the US Constitution. What's more, if the government fails to prevent monopolization of our speech forums – like social media – and also declines to offer its own public speech forums that are bound to respect the First Amendment, we can end up with government choices that produce an environment in which some ideas are suppressed wherever they might find an audience – all without violating the Constitution:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
The great censorious regimes of the past – the USSR, the Inquisition – left behind vast troves of bureaucratic records, and these records are full of complaints about the censors' lack of resources. They didn't have the manpower, the office space, the money or the power to erase the ideas they were ordered to suppress. As Ada notes, "In the period that Spain’s Inquisition was wildly out of Rome’s control, the Roman Inquisition even printed manuals to guide its Inquisitors on how to bluff their way through pretending they were on top of what Spain was doing!"
Censors have always done – and still do – their work not by wielding power, but by projecting it. Even the most powerful state actors are not powerful enough to truly censor, in the sense of confiscating every work expressing an idea and punishing everyone who creates such a work. Instead, when they rely on self-censorship, both by individuals and by intermediaries. When censors act to block one work and not another, or when they punish one transgressor while another is free to speak, it's tempting to think that they are following some arcane ruleset that defines when enforcement is strict and when it's weak. But the truth is, they censor erratically because they are too weak to censor comprehensively.
Spectacular acts of censorship and punishment are a performance, "to change the way people act and think." Censors "seek out actions that can cause the maximum number of people to notice and feel their presence, with a minimum of expense and manpower."
The censor can only succeed by convincing us to do their work for them. That's why drawing a line between state censorship and private censorship is such a misleading exercise. Censorship is, and always has been, a public-private partnership.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos
#pluralistic#ada palmer#worldcon#hugos#china#science fiction#fanac#publishing#censorship#systems of information control during information revolutions#scholarship
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Oof yall. The 2023 Hugo controversy has gotten much, much worse.
The Hugo's are another big Scifi/Fantasy book award, basically only second in prestige to the Nebulas. It's held by WorldCon, so who runs the awards changes each year- its handled by whatever group is doing the con.
And in 2023, it was held in China. And at the time, the finalist list took FOREVER to come out, and when it did, Babel (which had won the Nebula and Locus awards already) wasn't even nominated. Which everyone thought was *suspicious*
And NOW the actual nomination ballot data has come out. And not only do some of the counts... seem.....weird. BUT we've found out that not only Babel, but also Xiran Jay Zhao (who wrote the Chinese Yugioh book lol), and Sandman were disqualified late in nomination for being "ineligible" with no explanation for WHY.
The obvious explanation is Chinese censorship, either for the queer content, though other queer works were still included (including Legends and Lattes and Nona the Ninth), or some other political themes. Kuang and Zhou have content in their books that the Chinese government might not...love. but I dunno why Sandman got snubbed then? This is all speculation, but since the people actually running 2024 WorldCon are refusing to answer questions, what should we think? Neil Gaiman apparently tried to get answers and was basically brushed off.
And people are piiiiiiiissed
Mostly, I feel bad for T Kingfisher, who won Best Novel at the Hugo's for Nettle and Bone. Nettle and Bone was a great book! And now this win is always going to have this sheen of ick on it.
#hugos#2023 hugo awards#hugo awards#rf kuang#babel an arcane history#xiran jay zhao#t kingfisher#neil gaiman
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Bigolas Dickolas was NOMINATED and then DECLINED TO BE ON THE BALLOT for the best related works category of the 2024 Hugos.
(Full shortlist: https://glasgow2024.org/hugo-awards/2024-hugo-award-finalists/)
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What books other than Nona did you nominate for the Hugos?
Babel, by R.F. Kuang
Last Exit, by Max Gladstone
Wrath Goddess Sing, by Maya Deane
Saint Death's Daughter, by C.S.E Cooney
Things I didn't nominate but almost did:
Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo
The Thousand Eyes, by A.K. Larkwood
The Oleander Sword, by Tasha Suri
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The 2023 Hugo awards disaster has finally made it into the mainstream press. NBC did a small but mostly accurate piece on it, but still manages to make the whole thing sound 45% less horrifying.
Maybe NBC is worried about offending China?
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If you're part of the SF/F fandom or have been following the whole Hugo awards nomination debacle from a more popcorn-eating perspective, welp--here's more popcorn, because jiminy christmas what a goddamn ugliness this is.
SUPERBLY unhappy for everyone hurt by this situation, not least the Chinese fans whose safety in fandom is now potentially endangered.
(Also, not best pleased by the persistent misspellings of the Asian authors' names. This is why editors are important. RF Kuang is not SL Huang, and it's Zhao, not Zhou, and the fact that someone In SF didn't catch it over and over again on an important story is not super impressive.)
#hugo awards#chengdu worldcon#SF/F#worldcon#hugos#science fiction and fantasy#science fiction#fantasy#writing
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2024 Hugo Nominees
They're out! And the video is delightful:
youtube
Congrats everyone! I am so thrilled for all my friends!
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You lay down with dogs, you get fleas
To nobody's surprise, a report has revealed that the eligibility requirements for the 2023 Hugo awards, were pre-emptively influenced by China. With some of the same people involved in the 2024 Hugo awards in Glasgow, I wonder if we'll see some resignations over this shameful exercise.
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Might actually be a worldcon voter this year just so I can finally get my hands on a digital copy of Rose/House.
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back when chuck made the hugo awards 'illegitimate'
this REPORT OF LEAKS regarding what actually happened at hugo awards shows a disgusting way. years of buckaroos working in and around hugo awards popularizing phrases like 'chuck tingle made the hugos illegitimate' when the rot was starting with them.
it is much easier to point at a queer nuerodivergent buckaroo who is an outsider and make the narritive ‘this is whats wrong with the hugos’ when behind the scenes they are doing things like this AND THEN GETTING REHIRED to work the next awards. ENTIRE THING NEEDS NEW STAFF
i was not planning on talking about this anymore but now that everything is out in the open i have to add something from the TOP ADMIN that has stuck with me. as a nuerodivergent bud we ALL KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS. we all know what you wanted to say when you said this instead
EDIT:
i would like to add something important here which is in the report but not clear from my post (and i know on social media we dont always trot in and read whole thing plus it is pretty long). it was NOT the government that did the censoring here, it was the western staff. here is a great thing to keep in mind from mary robinette kowal
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Reblog for sample size and such blah blah blah
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This is.....dang.
This is a very weak novel slate.
#spare man was fun but mostly forgettable#nona was delightful but is the third book in a series and does NOT stand alone#so I feel weird about that#haven't read em but the scalzi and baldree I know are straight fluff#haven't read nettle and bone yet but I do like kingfisher#haven't read dr moreau yet but I couldn't get into the moreno-garcia I tried to read#is this because of the boycott? is this because people are only reading fluff right now because of the political situation?#hugos in group nonsense?#I looked back at my books read from last year and this and......honestly I read very little fiction that I thought was good#nona and what moves the dead were pretty much it#I'm not voting this year because I forgot but also boycott#tam.txt#2023#hugos
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My Hugo Award thoughts:
Best Novel: Nettle and Bone
this makes sense to me! It was my second choice (and my first choice, Nona the Ninth, is a controversial entry in controverial series) (controversial in that people tend to either love or hate them). I think I've made it clear that I think this year's Novel nominees were weak: while this was at the top of the nominees it is nowhere near the best sff novel of last year.
Best Novella: Where the Drowned Girls Go
this one confuses me. I very much like Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, but I don't think this was one of the best of that series, and it is heavily context dependent. It's a good novella! But the novella category was so strong this year that I don't know why it won. This was actually my lowest ranked novella. My first choice was Ogres, with Into the Riverlands as a close second.
Best Novelette: The Space-Time Painter
Confession time: I did not read this or include it in my rankings. There was no English translation provided, and I was running low on time and energy and didn't machine-translate it myself. Sorry. That said, I've heard good things about it elsewhere, and it is of course nice to have a work from the host country/language win. My vote was for Murder by Pixel, and in general I thought this was a good category.
Best Short Story: Rabbit Test
yeah this was always going to win. Excellent short story, well written and topical, it was my top vote. I'm interested to see how the voting metrics break down: this category was a mix of chinese and english entries, and I'm curious as to how that impacted results.
Best Series: Children of Time
YES! YESSSSS! This category was incredible this year, six well-deserving nominees, very hard for me to choose between them. But this was my top vote (a hard decision), and I'm delighted it won. Three hefty volumes of the best kind of drawn out philosophical science fiction, deeply moving, with incredible worldbuilding and alien minds. This was absolutely the highlight of works I read because they were nominated.
Best Related Work: Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes
No surprise here, Terry Pratchett is beloved and this book was well written. This was in my top three, which I had a very hard time choosing between and all I would have been happy to see win. My own top vote ended up going to Chinese Science Fiction, an Oral History, which was also the only work I couldn't read, aside from the translated introduction and table of contents. I voted for it on the grounds that what was translated made an excellent case for it being an important work, not just a good one, digging into the history of science fiction in China in a way that had never been done before, and I felt that nonfiction about a specific person or movie, no matter how well-written or informative, couldn't compete with that scope.
Professional Artist: Enzhe Zhao and Fan Artist: Richard Man
this is fine! Neither was my top pick, but both were near the top, and I will freely admit I know little about art.
Lodestar (Not a Hugo): Akata Woman
Not my top pick, but a perfectly good winner. I suspect my ranking of it suffered from a) being in a reading slump that made me have to push to get through it and b) this being the conclusion of a trilogy I last read six years ago, and remember very little of. There were a lot of moments of resolving emotional conflicts that I had no context for, which left the book a little flat. My top vote was for The Golden Enclaves, which I think was by far the best nominee, but also dubiously qualified (while the books, especially the earlier ones, certainly feel like YA, and center around teenagers in a magical high school, they are published as adult fantasy). My runner up was Into the Serpent's Wake, the sequel to Tess of the Road, a book I am still bitter did not win in the first year of the Lodestars.
Astounding (Not a Hugo): Travis Baldree
... ok. I do not get the hype for Legends & Lattes, and by extension Travis Baldree. The book was delightful! But it was also fluff, not something that provoked any strong thought or emotion, not any great work of prose, not innovative or creative in any new way that would mark a rising new author. This was my lowest ranked nominee (leaving out Weimu Xin, whose work did not have an english translation). This would be less disappointing, given I found most of the nominees so-so, were it not for Isabel J. Kim, whose short stories were miles above any of the other nominees.
Other Awards:
I didn't vote in the other categories, or read/watch/listen to their nominees. Nothing in their results jumps out at me, though I'm happy EEAAO won.
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Hi Frank! The 2023 Oscars were tonight, and Everything Everywhere All at Once won 7 awards! Do you have any opinions or hot takes about the winners?
Thanks for reminding me! I'm in the mood for Oscar analysis, so I might respond tomorrow when I have the time.
ETA: here's a link to the full list of winners https://variety.com/2023/film/tickets/best-picture-2022-award-winners-live-streaming…
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