It's sad to see what's happened to the Hugo Awards, but I don't think this is right:
really, the long and short of it is that just like elections, vaccines, vehicles, football, taylor swift, climate change, coffee, budweiser, gaming, journalism, polling, and everything else, The Hugo Awards got eaten by social media, and I'm not sure how we go back https://t.co/XTSxpTKrto
— robert the omelet lad says: buy the tainted cup (@robertjbennett) February 19, 2024
The Hugos are a victim not of social media, but of highly motivated bad actors. Their problem is that they're just too small.
The Hugos are an entirely amateur affair. A few thousand science fiction fans vote each year for best novel, best film, and so forth, and then show up at the World Science Fiction Convention where the winners are announced. A famous author is corralled into hosting, and when it's over everyone heads back to their rooms for a night of riotous filking. Just a bunch of nerds having some nerdy fun every year.
Decades ago these fans made a deliberate decision to stay small and cozy (unlike the San Diego Comic Con), and recently that's come back to bite. The problem with being small is that you can be easily attacked by a fanatic with a beef. So Vox Day and his crew of sad puppies were able to mount an effective sabotage of the awards several years ago with only a few hundred committed followers. Then, in 2021, a group in Chengdu, China, was able to land the 2023 convention site because it doesn't really take many votes to win the competition. It's not like becoming the host city for the Olympics.
It's still not 100% clear what happened at the Chengdu convention, but some combination of inexperience, cowardice, and fear of Chinese government pressure caused the organizers to rig the voting to prevent any politically disfavored writers from appearing on the ballot. In the end, it was clear that the entire vote was fraudulent, and knowingly so.
It would be remarkable if the Chinese government really cared enough about a tiny fan convention to pressure the organizers, but that's not really at the heart of what happened. Too many people have discovered that the Hugos are small enough to be easily manipulated and (just barely) large enough and prestigious enough to be worth it.
It's a damn shame. For chrissake, people, it's a few thousand nerds who get together each year for a little fun. Just leave them alone and peddle your deranged political bullshit elsewhere. It's not like there's a lack of outlets for this stuff.
"It would be remarkable if the Chinese government really cared enough about a tiny fan convention to pressure the organizers"
I dunno, that seems to be a hallmark of autocratic (and autocratic-leaning) governmental-types everywhere: once you stop caring about actually governing well, and instead care only about staying in/increasing power, every battlefield, no matter how small and trivial, becomes a necessary opportunity to push the autocrat's message.
You see this in stupid ephemera like Tucker Carlson whinging about the (lack of) sexiness in m&ms, and Putin's people going after Pussy Riot. Real governance is actually quite dull, and and it's often unclear when people trying to govern well are successful. But excluding voices critical of China from a western-flavored literary award probably earned some politburo flunky an accolade from the martinet one level up, all in service of getting a smile/promotion from somebody still higher up down the line.
It's not entirely clear (nothing is in this case!) whether anyone from the Chinese government ever actually pushed for the censorship. But it's been pointed out, that's part of how they work: they leave the line of what's unacceptable very vague and the punishments severe to get people to perform self-censorship just to avoid getting in deep trouble. So the nominees were vetted (by the WorldCon committee) on whether they "might" be too controversial for the Chinese government, which is a heck of a nebulous standard.
Oh, well stated!
Yes, enough light touches and you'll still be strangled. Or even strangle yourself.
I think you're exactly right. The Hugos have grown too big for the organization that runs them, and it all fell apart.
The issue appears to be even bigger than the self-censorship of disqualifying of a handful of eligible nominees for political reasons -- an overwhelming number of Chinese nominees were tossed out because the administrator felt a Chinese fan magazine was pushing fans to vote for a slate. It's not clear that it was, and certainly doesn't seem that he had the power to throw out these nominees even if they were, and worst of all, the current thinking is that he just pasted Western titles over the Chinese titles, totally making the vote tally meaningless. It's just the worst mess that you could imagine when a tiny handful of administrators can do pretty much whatever they want.
From what I've heard, almost no one who actually won a Hugo in 2023 should have been on the final ballot based on the votes. So now everyone is upset. The Chinese government is mad that they were embarrassed, WorldCon and WSFS are horrified, winners feel guilty, losers are upset.
If the Hugos are meant to mean something, you need an organizational structure that can provide oversight and transparency and guardrails and rules that are clear and that you stand behind.
For there to be an organizational structure there would have to be an organization first.
Right now, as I understand it, there's an umbrella organization that publishes a charter and has just enough lawyers to protect the intellectual property (trademarks, etc...) and that's basically it. Each convention rolls its own organization; i.e., if you win a bid, then you get to create the committee for that year -- charter sets out rules but beyond that the committee can do what it wants.
It's a fair bet that there aren't enough rules in place for how to cope with authoritarian governments and people are now realizing there need to be.
It's probably also a fair bet that upcoming bids from Saudi Arabia and Dubai are going to go down in flames.
Among the many other problems - all of which appear to have been self-inflicted wounds by incompetent racist Westerners - it’s become pretty clear that they in fact had nowhere near enough lawyers to protect their intellectual property, and the haphazard way they’ve structured things, along with the incredibly damaging “we couldn’t possibly enforce license terms even if we wanted to” “defense” some of them have been using, plausibly could amount to abandoning of the marks.
Yup. The naïveté of good people will always be exploited by those with...a lesser desire to see everybody happy. And so you need a Kzin on that wall.
Not sure how you get to "racist" there. There were a number of Chinese citizens on the convention committee.
I would 100% go with incompetent. Dealing with the Chinese government is not an easy thing to be competent at. But the assumed they were, and McCarty (their public face) is definitely the type to double-down on his errors, while being a jerk about it. He did that, and so did extra damage instead of mitigating the situation.
If you read the details of the reportage and the leaked emails, you’ll see that the disqualification decisions were made by the Western members of the committee without actual discussion or consultation with the Chinese members beyond one member vaguely invoking some general “guidance” he’d received which led them to engage in what appears to be pre-emotive censorship - so they appear to have been acting based on ill-informed assumptions about Chinese law and culture, so much so that they decided to disqualify works that had actually been approved for publication in actually-existing China by actually-existing Chinese people.
And as for the “let’s just paste Western authors over all the Chinese ones who actually led the nominations” part, I’m not sure how you explain that one with incompetence alone.
I don't appreciate the reflexive dissing of nerds. And by implication, wonks and geeks. Probably most of your blog readers fall into one or more of these categories. These are the folks who have made the modern technological world.
I didn't see any dissing, he seemed to approve of nerds doing nerdy things.
as a nerd, i didn't take any of that as dissing. it seemed much more like a nerd (kevin) talking about nerd shit to other nerds (his readers). i consider myself a huge sci-fi nerd and i had to look up filking, so hats off to kevin on his subculture fluency.
I don't know if you've ever seen it, or heard it, and if you haven't, you're in for a treat. Filking filmed and fan made for the future: https://youtu.be/rSIXFlOPeH4?si=1s3n5Cpzn7xKCFGF
haha! nice
As a geek who hopes to be mistaken for a wonk or a nerd I didn't detect any dissing, but perhaps I'm not hip enough to pick up on it. Thanks for defending us, I guess.
What the f*** are you talking about, moron?
You seem nice.
As a nerd and semi-regular Worldcon attendee, I did not feel at all dissed. On the contrary.
kinda makes me want to finally join the wsfs to help couteract this nonsense. since i was a kid the hugo's were a great way to find the best sci-fi and fantasy writing and writers and it really is depressing to see it all getting f'd by right wing a-holes gaming the system.
The question of whether or not the Chinese government cares about the Hugos depends to a considerable extent what you mean by "the Chinese government". Running a totalitarian government over a population of 1.4 billion calls for a very large bureaucracy; the official Chinese civil service outnumbers the total population of California. The top levels of the Chinese government almost certainly did not notice the Hugos, but there are certainly a few lower level bureaucrats who did notice and who may have taken steps to avoid having anything happen that might embarrass them with their superiors. In other words, while "the government" as a whole probably didn't have anything to do with what happened at the Hugos, some government authority very probably did.
The small ingroupishness of the Golden Globes seems to have been fixed. Perhaps something similar can happen with the Hugos. There's always the Nebula Awards.
Even if you're disagreeing with him, I'm just glad to see you're amplifying Robert Jackson Bennet. One of my favorite writers in sci-fi fantasy.
“Then, in 2021, a group in Chengdu, China, was able to land the 2023 convention site because it doesn't really take many votes to win the competition. It's not like becoming the host city for the Olympics.”
Near as I can tell there are 106 IOC members who vote on such matters.
It took many more votes than that to win Chengdu.
Since when did science fiction become the Nevada primaries?
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