The detailed statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards voting are finally out, and they’ve triggered a controversy. A number of nominees were declared ineligible without explanation.
Kevin Standlee, who has played important roles in running many fan conventions, noted:
An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing.
File 770 reports:
R. F. Kuang’s novel Babel, winner of the 2023 Nebula and Locus Awards, was ruled “not eligible” without explanation, even though it had the third most nominations. The EPH point calculation used to determine the Hugo finalists shows the count for Babel was stopped in the first round, and it accrued no more points when other works were eliminated in the automatic runoff.
Paul Weimer was another “not eligible” kept off the ballot without explanation, despite having been a Best Fan Writer finalist for the past three years. Weimer had the third most nominating votes this year – and in that category the EPH calculation was completed, showing he ended up with the second highest point-count.
A third such “not eligible” was Xiran Jay Zhao, ruled out of the Astounding Award. As noted here in a comment on the announcement post, it should be impossible for a first-year-of-eligibility Astounding Award finalist to be ineligible the following year unless either they already won the award or the original Hugo committee (Chicon 8) erred in their eligibility determination.
It isn’t hard to put two and two together. If you live in China, you don’t do things the government disapproves of unless you’re willing to have your life wrecked. Even if you don’t live there, the Chinese government has a long arm; Disney put a lot of money into the movie Kundun but then killed its distribution because the Chinese government didn’t like being portrayed as the bullies they are.
Some of the members of the 2023 Hugo committee are Chinese. Granting awards to people the government or CCP suggested shouldn’t get them would have been a dangerous move.
When you hold a Worldcon in a country whose government allows only approved opinions, this is what you have to expect.
Additional notes, Jan. 22:
Here’s a detailed look on Cora Buhlert’s blog at the numbers and the disqualified works and people. The piece notes briefly at the end that the UK, where the 2024 Worldcon is being held, also has some pretty serious free speech issues. At the end of the article are lots of additional links, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole. I got the link to that article from a Mastodon boost by Neil Gaiman, so the issue is getting mainstream attention within fandom. Even this post has gotten far more views than usual for my blog.