The resignations and disciplinary actions come after it was revealed that certain authors and books—including R.F. Kuang's hit novel Babel—had been inexplicably deemed not eligible for the Hugo at Worldcon 2023 in Chengdu, China.
I seems if you say "Hugo Awards" three times into a mirror another scandal pops up.
"Appalling as it is, the choice to screen English-language nominees for ideological compatibility may, in fact, be a sideshow to the real scandal, which is that hundreds of Chinese voters have been disenfranchised. And—barring even more revelations—this disenfranchisement cannot be blamed on PRC sensibilities and censorship."
The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse
Appalling as it is, the choice to screen English-language nominees for ideological compatibility may, in fact, be a sideshow to the real scandal, which is that hundreds of Chinese voters have been disenfranchised. And—barring even more revelations—this disenfranchisement cannot be blamed on PRC sensibilities and censorship.
After the 2023 Hugo Awards debacle, Adrian Tchaikovsky announces on his website: "I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site." #HugoAwards
No Blaft book has ever won an award of any sort. Very few have even been eligible for any (there aren't a lot of anthology awards, our books are often multi- or cross-genre, we have a lot of co-authored/co-translated stuff, often there are multiple nationalities, not published in US/UK, etc.)
I occasionally worry about this--should we be trying harder to win prizes?--but right now, reading about the #HugoAwards omnishambles makes me kind of glad we haven't bothered!
As someone who reads science fiction and occasionally updates my blog built with a static site generator... the #Hugo hashtag is a bit confusing these days. Maybe #HugoAwards and #GoHugo are less ambiguous?
"Some books, like Kuang’s “Babel” — which won the 2023 British Book Award for Fiction — appear to have been excluded simply for taking place in China. Zhao’s novel “Iron Widow” was flagged as being a “reimagining of the rise of the Chinese Empress Wu Zetian.”"
Unpopular opinion: The censorship of the 2023 #HugoAwards by the administrators is appalling. But the smug, self-congratulatory language employed particularly by Chris M. Barkley in the report, only just stopping short of declaring that only majority-white western countries should be allowed to host a Worldcon, really fucking grates.
News from #hugoawards#chengdu#censorship scandal:
"WIP officials announced that director Dave McCarty and board chair Kevin Standlee have resigned " The linked article also gives an overview on the developments that led to the resignation.
The #Glasgow2024#HugoAwards nomination process is now open, and I'm proud to say that the nomination site is an “I built that" thing; I was asked to provide the software rather last minute, and I'm pleased to see it in use like this.
Some time during the Greater Melbourne Lockdowns (cue "pandemic time" handwave) I stopped reading fiction. In the last few years of the 2010s I was a member of somewhere between two and four book clubs (three of them were kind of the same crowd but with different themes and schedules) and I had finally returned to my childhood dream/cosplay of becoming a librarian. In 2020 the book clubs moved to Zoom and a dearly departed friend started yet another online reading group. After a year or two, fiction took a back seat as I focused on study – to be expected – and both screen-reading fatigue and Zoom fatigue took root – also to be expected.
But graduating and starting to cautiously return to the outside world didn't change my reading habits. Sure, I had been spending more time with audiobooks during my permitted-outdoor-exercise time and then during my hour-long tram commute, but something had happened to my attention in those indistinguishable days. "Serious" reading became a work thing – as both an information professional and a professional intersectional queer – so when it came to leisure time I turned away from the long pages and towards my renewed interest in comics. I didn't feel guilty or ashamed that I was reading less prose, but I missed the days when I had the attention span to spend a whole weekend absorbed in a novel.
One positive personal outcome of the current #HugoAwards ... thing ... is that it lit up a part of my brain that said, "remember when you read science fiction and hung out with people who ran conventions?" That, and catching up on how fiction magazines are being crushed by both Big Tech's urge to make every a streaming service and by spam from large language models, prompted me to look for what I'd been missing. I found my @WeightlessBooks login and grabbed the latest issues of Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Forever. Maybe I'll even consider replacing some of my streaming-TV subscriptions with magazine subs.
The story to break my reading drought was "Marginalia" by @maryrobinette, a name I recognised and the first story in the current Uncanny. But I'm looking forward to discovering many new writers and new worlds.
The best solution for the Hugo/World Con fiasco is simple.
Change the constitution so that starting with Chengu, any nation that censors for "compliance with local laws" gets on a list that must be presented for FIFTY YEARS of "Before you vote for this finalist know that this nation has engaged in previous censorship of the awards."
Let China wear the cone of shame for two and a half generations
In #chismes from the world of #books. The more details revealed about it, not that there are that many given the awards people are just not really talking, the worse it looks.
>Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors
Old News but Worth Mentioning: Resignations, Censures Follow in Wake of Hugo Awards Controversy (www.publishersweekly.com)
The resignations and disciplinary actions come after it was revealed that certain authors and books—including R.F. Kuang's hit novel Babel—had been inexplicably deemed not eligible for the Hugo at Worldcon 2023 in Chengdu, China.