Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 865 points – Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China
nbcnews.com

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.

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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?

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

Indeed. Quite decent.

See, Chinese fandom is relatively isolated from western fandom. And the convention committee didn't realize that there was this thing called the WSFS Constitution which set out rules for stuff they had to do. I gather they didn't even realize they were responsible for organizing the nomination and voting process for the Hugo awards, commissioning the award design, and organizing an awards ceremony, until about 12 months before the convention (which is short notice for two rounds of voting. commissioning a competition between artists to design the Hugo award base for that year, and so on). So everything ran months too late, and they had to delay the convention, and most of the students who'd pitched in to buy those bids could no longer attend because of bad timing, and worse ... they began picking up an international buzz, which in turn drew the attention of the local Communist Party, in the middle of the authoritarian clamp-down that's been intensifying for the past couple of years. (Remember, it takes a decade to organize a successful worldcon from initial team-building to running the event. And who imagined our existing world of 2023 back in 2013?)

The organizers appear to have panicked.

lolyikes

The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).

Weird that the Hugos wouldn't have excluded John Ringo and crew for being literal fascists, unless they open their slackened jaws for... Not even criticizing China? Depicting mecha Wu Zetian?

ringo and the sad puppies were only "acknowledged" because of the mass backlash. Otherwise, it was business as usual.

That is why I think the issue is less the works and more the venue. Because having a racist piece of shit present is one thing. People get mad. They move on because they need the blurb to get another printing from their publisher. But if the CCP gets angry? People start disappearing faster than Jack Ma.

I did not know any of that. I always just figured Hugo award books would at least be good, and that was about as far as my thinking went.

I mean, they almost always are. You just have to understand that, much like with the Oscars (?), it is the SFF (mostly SFF writers) community voting on themselves. And, memes aside, good movies usually win at the Oscars. Sure they favor period pieces and character studies but those are generally well acted and directed. They may just not be "entertaining" to the masses.

That said, ever since Martin decided he should talk about how great a bunch of transphobes and racists were while butchering the names of up and coming authors because he couldn't be bothered to read a pronunciation guide, a lot of great authors have started doing their own "awards" blog posts. Which are always nice.

This is probably the most helpful comment for me. I enjoy reading scifi and I've often used the Hugos as a barometer. Not anymore. Time to start checking blogs of good authors

Any recommendations?

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 ironic thing about parent comment is that for as much as it bashes the Hugos for being part of the "old guard," they've actually been very good about surfacing and including queer- and minority- centric stories and works by authors with identities that have historically been excluded from the discussion. Arkady Martine won Best Novel in 2020 and 2022 with two entries in a series featuring a lesbian main character, with imperialism's effects on those who are colonized as a major driver of the plot. Between 2016 and 2018 N.K. Jemisin swept the Best Novel award for successive entries of her Broken Earth trilogy, which revolved around themes of racism, environmental cataclysm, and slavery. The year before that the winner of Best Novel was Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem which was the first time a work originally published in Chinese won, and then the year before that Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice won, which created a massive uproar amongst the more reactionary types in SF fandom for positing a civilization where the only recognized gender was female (this is super unfair to the book, through, because there's so much more going on thematically beyond that one small world-building choice!).

In fact, the way that the Hugo voting has swung noticeably towards exploring issues of imperialism, colonialism, and identity is what prompted the Sad Puppies campaign that OP mentions. What he doesn't mention is that the Hugo voters overwhelmingly rejected that campaign, and the organization made changes to prevent any future attempts. That part of what makes what happened with the 2023 Hugos so surprising and appalling -- it's completely out of character with the recent history of the awards and the organization to meekly knuckle under and self-censor for fear of angering Chinese authorities, when it's been so bold in standing up to outside influences so recently. I expect that steps will be taken to prevent a repeat occurrence.

Not sure why you are painting me as some intentionally misleading anti-hugo monster (or why you are caping for the Hugos) but... okay. You probably missed the part where I pointed out it is still a prestigious outlet that carries a lot of weight and even that the buy-in voting is a necessary evil. But hey, I am sure you missed that part while you decided to paint me as some mustache twirling villain.

Yes. More people of color and fewer cishet stories have been spotlighted. In large part because that is where SFF has gone. The very nature of SFF is to explore fantasy worlds through the lens of social issues. Always has been. And that is why the sad puppies "movement" became a thing. Because you basically had "This is the world as it is becoming" versus "Yeah, but what if strong men were still the heroes". It was a symptom of the ever increasing conflicts that manifested as Gamergate in the video game space and the alt-right in "politics proper" as it were.

And yes. Jemisin swept in 2018. In 2020 we had George R R Martin shitting on the "ethnic" names while making it a point to talk about all the great transphobes and bigots who came before. Which continues to be the Hugo's problem. Because they can't control how the people vote. But they can make sure to highlight that it is still an old guard institution.

Amd, much like with the Oscars needing to give a rapist who fled the country a standing ovation every chance they get, any author who wants to have a career needs to grin and bear it because that translates to publisher deals and money.

And that is why I encourage people to actually go to the blogs of their favorite authors (because many have them these days) and read what they are recommending. It doesn't have the same weight but it is also a way to sift through the bullshit without the vibe of "We aren't racist. See, we gave an award to the black chick"

That part of what makes what happened with the 2023 Hugos so surprising and appalling – it’s completely out of character with the recent history of the awards and the organization to meekly knuckle under and self-censor for fear of angering Chinese authorities, when it’s been so bold in standing up to outside influences so recently.

Has there been a change in organizational staff to account for this?

Given that the news only just broke and organizational business has to be voted on at the next convention, it's a bit soon to look for big moves -- but Glasgow 2024 did make a statement that their Hugo Administrator who was involved in the 2023 awards was removed from her position.

I was actually asking about when the 2023 administrator started her position (was she there for a long time or newbie), in relation to when the event in China happened, but your information is actually good to know too, so thank you.

I had not been following this at all, so I was just wondering if new management came in and then this happened immediately, or was it old existing management that for whatever reason changed their mindset to allow something like that to happen later on.

Ah, my bad... There's a core of people attached to Worldcon Intellectual Property who are supposed to support the hosting convention's committee. This included Dave McCarty (who was removed from his position within WIP back in January as this situation evolved), and it seems like he pulled together a support team of experienced hands when it became clear that the Chengdu committee had not realized the extent of their responsibilities and couldn't assemble a local Hugo committee capable of handling everything in the time available. So while it would be convenient to say "hey, the local committee is ultimately responsible for the way the Hugoa are run!" that's only sort of true at the best-run of cons, and certainly not true in the case of Chengdu.

People who've been doing this for a long time and should have known better ran scared from the Chinese government's censorship bureaucracy, for shortsighted and poorly justified reasons. The good news, such as it is, is that as that has been revealed the folks responsible have been removed from their positions, but it's still disappointing to find out about. I worked with Dave McCarty in the runup to a previous Worldcon and I would have expected better of him.

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.

Weird comparison. I don't think the least Tory-lite leader of the Labour Party in the last 30 years was voted in as a Chinese conspiracy, as you are implying.

No, China didn't have anything to do with Corbyn. Just, right before he took control of the party, the party leaders tried to vote him out. There are over 10 million labor voters, but at the time there were only 100,000 paid labor memberships, who were responsible for voting in the party leader. Corbyn got 50,000 (out of the 10 million) new paying members on the rolls and went over night from being on the edge of being expelled to becoming the party leader.

Same thing happened here: a very large group (all scifi readers) assuming that paying members would have ideals proportional to the larger group - but that smaller group can be manipulated through a large influx of single issue voters.

Firstly, I'm not really sure where you are getting your figures. There were 200,000 paid members under the previous leader and it went up to 600,000 just before he was elected.

Secondly, it seems like you're attributing this sharp increase to a third party nefarious action. I would assume that it were simply a larger portion of those 10m voters deciding to register membership in order to vote in a leader more in tune with their party values.

I take the point that a small group only needing paid membership to vote is open to manipulation. However, I don't really see a comparison between these two events.

I misremembered the number of members - looks like it went up much more drastically than I recalled. And I never said that either were "nefarious actions", just that a huge influx of new voters with different opinions can alter outcomes.

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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.

How do we know that? It might well have been part of the agreement to host the awards, a direct or indirect request not to allow certain authors, books, or topics deemed offensive to the CCP.

file770 article written by two journalists who reviewed the committee's emails after one of said committee leaked them to atone for her role in the controversy.

Feel free to read the whole thing. It doesn't take long. If you prefer primary sources, the work-product they refer to is linked within the report. The conclusions the authors draw seems sound based on the evidence. Sure it's possible that the CCP meddled "off-the-record", but to assume that in contrast to what the evidence states seems like hunting for a Boogeyman to confirm our prejudices.

but to assume that in contrast to what the evidence states seems like hunting for a Boogeyman to confirm our prejudices.

Sorry, that dog ain't going to hunt.

You realize the gaming industry went through something similar along these lines not so long ago? There's a repeated pattern of this happening.

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.

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.

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?

The more popular an artist, the louder the haters /shrug

well I must say Sir, my head is also wobbling with indignation

You should look into that. I'll take those notations any time now.

only a total twat would sit on the internet doing that kind of shit, or asking for it 😂

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Obviously the organisers didn't want to piss off Winnie the Pooh lest he takes away their honey.

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.

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 liked the ideas in the books more than the books itself. as a peice of literature I thought the writing was mediocre at best, characters with the depth of cardboard. maybe some nuance is lost in translation, but I don't quite understand the hype. but the concepts like I said, fantastic

I think the concepts are what is getting people. Like you say, the characters are shallow, but the ideas are food for thought and feel decently novel, at least to me.

Much of this could be said about one of the iconic figures, Isaac Asimov. Many of his characters were very two-dimensional, and all but a couple of the female characters had only one. The concepts, though!

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.

Every Chinese person will be cautious about some topics but the book is fine.

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

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.