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Hugo Charlie Foxtrot, 2023 / 2024 edition
Jan. 21st, 2024 03:09 pmThe Hugo nomination stats are finally available (PDF link). There are a number of problematic bits to them, notably several works were declared ineligible with no reason given. Since the Hugo administrator is not providing explicit answers, the clear implication is the the Chinese government, for reasons of their own, decided that they didn't want these works to win and directed the Chengdu Worldcon to make it happen. Thoughts:
1) I was not concerned about the Chinese government interfering in the Hugos because I thought we weren't big enough to matter. Clearly I was wrong. I think the lesson here is that, in authoritarian governments, even minor officials can be dictatorial, if only to avoid looking bad to their bosses.
ETA From this post by Ada Palmer, it's entirely possible that no government official said anything, rather we have a case of self-censorship. Money quote: "The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship."
2) I've seen allegations that the people who bid on the Worldcon were a front for the real estate company that owned the venue.
3) Given either point 1 or 2, clearly we can't hold Worldcons in countries that don't follow the rule of law. Cairo and Uganda's bids need to be rejected. Whether or not we enshrine that principle in the WSFS Constitution or not remains to be seen.
4) Part of what makes an award valuable is trust. The general public trusts that whomever is giving the award is doing so because they honestly feel it's the best of what is eligible. There's a reason the Academy Awards makes a point of hiring an accounting firm to run the voting process and highlights that fact. Unfortunately, that trust was broken and the people involved have to know that they won't be allowed to run the award again.
1) I was not concerned about the Chinese government interfering in the Hugos because I thought we weren't big enough to matter. Clearly I was wrong. I think the lesson here is that, in authoritarian governments, even minor officials can be dictatorial, if only to avoid looking bad to their bosses.
ETA From this post by Ada Palmer, it's entirely possible that no government official said anything, rather we have a case of self-censorship. Money quote: "The majority of censorship is self-censorship or middleman-censorship, but the majority of that is deliberately cultivated by an outside power.
For this reason, we cannot consider state and non-state censorship separate things. State censorship systems work dominantly via shaping and causing private censorship."
2) I've seen allegations that the people who bid on the Worldcon were a front for the real estate company that owned the venue.
3) Given either point 1 or 2, clearly we can't hold Worldcons in countries that don't follow the rule of law. Cairo and Uganda's bids need to be rejected. Whether or not we enshrine that principle in the WSFS Constitution or not remains to be seen.
4) Part of what makes an award valuable is trust. The general public trusts that whomever is giving the award is doing so because they honestly feel it's the best of what is eligible. There's a reason the Academy Awards makes a point of hiring an accounting firm to run the voting process and highlights that fact. Unfortunately, that trust was broken and the people involved have to know that they won't be allowed to run the award again.
