Evidently some members of the science fiction community are shocked, shocked that Hugo nominees at last year’s Worldcon in communist China were excluded from the ballot despite having enough votes to get on it because they might offend the CCP.
Really? Which part of “communist China” was unclear to you?
The real people to blame are the Worldcon members who voted to hold a Worldcon in a communist country that routinely rapes and tortures ethnic minorities as a matter of policy to keep them in line. Communist China’s numerous trespasses against international human rights agreements and common decency alike have been known for decades, yet Worldcon voters took a look at China’s Worldcon bid and went “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
I’m not even mildly surprised at this outcome. Worldcon and most of science fiction’s institutions already showed that they had been corrupted and infected with social justice during the Sad Puppies incident. After that, I decided that neither Worldcon nor the Hugos were worth my time, money or attention. (And keep in mind that I had had collected literally every Hugo winning novel in first edition hardback up to that time.)
The commie Hugo kerfuffle didn’t cause me to lose respect for the Hugos or Worldcon because I had already lost all respect for both.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
By choosing to hold a Worldcon in communist China, Worldcon voters declared loudly, for all to hear, that they were firmly on Team Boot.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
Tags: Communism, Hugo Awards, rape, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Worldcon
We should find a decent online vendor and get “Team Boot” t-shirts made.
Please keep in mind that a large number of the votes to hold the Worldcon in China came from voters in China itself (or, at least, e-mail addresses in China; some people have questioned whether all of those e-mail addresses represented different people). The votes from China itself were apparently sufficient to win the bid for Chengdu. Lots of voters in North America and Europe were not naive about the prospect of hosting the Worldcon in China.
That said, there were some fans from the U.S. and elsewhere who went along with what they perceived as Chinese censorship for the convention in Chengdu, including self-censoring the nominees.
And in our feminized world, the boot will be a stiletto heel and the face will have a beard.
This kind of thing, and the need for the Sad Puppies stuff, makes me extremely glad I GAFIATEd many years ago and never looked back. I still like good SF, but the people “running” organized SF fandom turned me off long ago; something tells me that if I were to lose my mind and attend a con nowadays, I’d end up in a fight or at least a screaming match almost immediately :-(
As fun as it is to engage in confirmation bias, this is not what happened. Assorted mea culpas have come out making it clear that the corruption was entirely and wholly from within the Hugo committee itself, and NOT resulting from CCP pressure. There may have been government pressure if they had not done so, and one of the excuses for doing so was fear of potential government reprisals against left-wing authors, but in this case there is no measurable evidence that the Chinese government actually did anything to produce this result.
One Chinese commentator summed it up well: “The government is probably as puzzled as everybody else.”
file770.com has all the relevant links and accounts. Yes, I know they’re left-wing; I have seen no evidence that they’re leaving anything out in this case.
Joshua K appears to be mostly correct. There was a final tranche of ballots from China that were highly questionable, in that they all came from the same address. The vote counters decided “oh, this is just Chinese people confused by the English language voting instructions”, and decided to accept the ballots and send it to China.
Sorry, can’t find the article I read that in in the last month, otherwise I’d supply the link.
But in any event, stupid and leftists as most Worldcon Site Selection voters are, the American ones didn’t make this choice, the Site Selection committee did
kaempi says:
As fun as it is to engage in confirmation bias, this is not what happened. Assorted mea culpas have come out making it clear that the corruption was entirely and wholly from within the Hugo committee itself
Really? Do tell. Do you have any links for that?
The most I saw was Dave McCarty claiming that “there was no official pressure” (emphasis mine).
Kevin Standlee got fired for saying “look, we are bound by local laws” about the whole mess.
So while the 2023 ConCom leadership, and the entire 2023 Hugo Committee deserve our complete and total contempt, the CCP doesn’t get off the hook, either
One is reminded of the ancient Aesop about the frog and the scorpion, only here we have the scorpion and the scorpion… The biter, bit.
I find it humorous as hell, TBH. Anyone who expects anything worthwhile out of an award program of any sort is clearly delusional and unfamiliar with basic human behavior. They all wind up corrupted and suborned by the parasite class that inevitably infest these things…
If you want a real laugh, consider that worldcon is actually considering holding the damned thing in deepest darkest fascist Uganda or possibly even worse, in New Zealand the rotting home of fascism forever. I don’t usually use that term but what Heinlein had to say about his visit to NZ and what happened in Uganda boggles the mind at the idea of either hosting any kind of reasonable SF con.
File 770 is pretty terrible but I still look at it from time to time. Glyer would have something if he allowed comments that were offered from any other point of view than that of the SMOF’s leadership council.
Awards are always the playthings of the politically-inclined. Doesn’t matter the intent of how they were set up, or what the intent was behind them, they always devolve into political BS. Why? Because the average idiot looks at an award and sees a proxy for actual merit… Which very often isn’t at all present.
Witness the US Army “awards system”. In that structure, fully acknowledged and even promulgated by the chain of command, they have a policy of issuing the higher awards “for merit” only to the higher-ranking. In order to get a Bronze Star in Iraq, for example, you had to be a Sergeant First Class or higher. Nothing you could do outside of playing Rambo on some nationally-broadcasted news media outlet could get you one, if you were of lower rank. That’s the way they played it; and, since those higher-ranking people were all the ones who decided who got what in the first place…?
My breaking point with the awards system came when I was but a lowly PFC. We did an annual inspection, our unit was given laudatory mentions, and my squad leader was told to write everyone up for an award. Since I had just gotten there, and was still trying to figure out which way was up in Germany, I didn’t do much to prepare for that inspection. So, he basically wrote me up for an award based on my exemplary buffing of the dayroom floor…
Care to guess which award that he wrote up was arbitrarily approved? And, who had to stand in front of the battalion to receive it, with the citation read aloud?
Oh, did I mention that the guys who actually worked hard for that award, like our squad’s driver that took a truck that had been deadlined for literal years as a hanger queen, and got it up and running perfectly…? Yeah; he got nada. Nothing. Not even a letter of commendation.
I resolved, while standing in that fiasco of an awards ceremony, to never take the ‘effing things seriously, ever again.
Side note: Left Iraq on the last tour with nothing, mainly because when they put out that “SFC and above…” BS, and wanted me to write myself up for “achievements” on that tour, I told them to piss off. Boss insisted that his boss demanded it, and I told him bluntly that if someone tried giving me an award for holding down a desk chair in the TOC for a year, there’d be some embarrassment all the way around, and that I’d make it as ugly as possible.
See, one of my guys? He actually did something that was worthy of an award, saving a civilian’s life while out on a convoy mission. He was turned down for an award because he was too low-ranking.
When the time came, they did have the balls to write me up for a lesser award, which they just handed to me while I was standing around in the TOC prior to re-deployment. Took one look at it, said something to the effect of “Are you f*cking serious…?”, and walked it over to the shredder where I ran the entire packet through. I then walked over to the Personnel section and handed fifty bucks to the NCOIC running the section and told her to ensure that my award paperwork didn’t get transmitted to DA… Did all that in front of the assholes running our unit, and they didn’t say a f*cking word to me during or after.
Funny thing, about that situation: Awards are supposed to be something you take pride in, and which others use as a marker of respect for you. By doing what I did, and for the reasons I did, the award I shredded got rather more positive attention from my subordinates in the unit than the ones that were actually awarded Bronze Stars and the like. I had guys come up to me after I did the shredding, who shook my hand and said they had to give me respect for having done that in front of the brass.
Which, for those not tracking, is kinda the exact opposite of the stated intent of an award system. The guys and girls who accepted them? Didn’t earn a damn thing from their troops; I shredded mine and refused to play the game…? Dunno how much, but I at least got a couple of appreciative hand-shakes.
Awards are politics, after about the first generation of their inception. Don’t ever forget that; it’s not what you do, but who sees it and who decides to write it up. That’s a truism of the military, and it’s a truism for anything else even vaguely award-like. How many Academy Awards are there that are looked upon as badly awarded, anyway? Most? I can think of a dozen classic movies and actors in them that got Jack and sh*t for recognition. It’s the same, everywhere; the local service club has an award they hand out, and it’s all political from top to bottom.
Actual merit is demonstrated by performance, not how many awards something earns. I’ve lost track of the number of “award-winning” anythings that have proven to be utterly useless and without actual merit of any kind.
@Greg:
>Really? Do tell. Do you have any links for that?
Too many to list here. That’s why I pointed you to file770, which has had steady coverage of the matter ever since the publication of the vote tallies. Which, being a curious and sane adult human being and interested in data regardless of your preconceptions, you of course went and looked at.
@Kirk: I completely agree.
Hi kaempi,
Sorry, but you can’t actually believe anything written at Vile 770. I used to red what was there with at least some interest. But that was 9 years or more ago.
As I pointed out above, Kevin Standlee got fired as Chair of the “Trademark Committee” for repeatedly saying “look, it doesn’t matter what our rules are, we still have to follow local laws.” Which to someone sane, looks like an attempt to cover up that they did it under orders and threats, not of their own stupidity.
And Dave McCarty’s statement says there was no “official” pressure.
Which says there was unofficial pressure. Probably through local communists who were on the ConCom.
If you want to point to a specific post, I’ll read it, and comment on what the person wrote. But I don’t go swimming in sewage for fun, and I’m not going to dig up posts to comment on, only to have you babble “oh, not THAT one.”
“How many Academy Awards are there that are looked upon as badly awarded, anyway? Most? I can think of a dozen classic movies and actors in them that got Jack and sh*t for recognition.”
This applies equally to film directors.
E.g., the feature films of Alfred Hitchcock received forty-six Academy Award nominations, including six wins. He never won a Best Director award even though he was nominated five times.
“And Dave McCarty’s statement says there was no “official” pressure.”
From the few news/blog items I’ve read so far, my understanding is that the whistleblower(s) were not in the inner circle and thus did not have direct knowledge of whether the committee was acting in obedience to Chinese government pressure or was simply doing what it thought the government would want them to do. And thus there was a certain amount of speculation. Sorry that I did not take notes or save links. Others may be able to provide detail.
pst314,
Do you seriously doubt that the CCP would have made life difficult for the CCP Worldcon if they HAD allowed people known for criticizing the CCP to get nominations?
Greg,
My comment was entirely to the documented facts of this case, not to what we all know about the effing CCP and what we might reasonably speculate thereby. Are you trying to imply something about my views or the meaning of what I wrote?
pst314,
Does your comment have meaning, value, and worth?
Is there some reason why you made it?
Because if the reason is NOT “generate pushback to the claim that this happened because of the CCP”, there does not seem to be any actual purpose to your comment.
The storm arose because the ConCom was forced to publish the Hugo nominations stats within 90 days of the award, so after an entirely unprecedented delay (I followed the Hugos for well over a decade, and the nomination stats were always released within a day of the awards, if not the night the awards were announced), they finally published them.
Whereupon people looked, and noted that the Hugo Awards Committee violated the published rules, and deprived people the CCP didn’t like of their Hugo nominations.
“Whistleblowers” are people inside an organization releasing non-public information that they believe shows the organization doing something wrong.
In this case the people complaining were outside the organization, discussing publicly available information that showed that the organization did something wrong.
So far as I know, the Hugo Awards Committee and the ConCom have all refused to explain what happened, at all. (Dave saying they did it because they were following the rules, then insulting people for asking “exactly what rule were you following”, does NOT qualify as “providing an explanation”). Do you have some actually provided explanation?
If so, please do provide it.
If not, please do explain what you thought the purpose of your comments were
So there are actual whistleblowers, who released the emails discussing what to censor. Posted here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_QqmsxQkACoYcxSx2LVqbxD39-DJI_gS/view
They read exactly like what I would expect “douchebag lefties talking abotu what to censor in order to suck up to the CCP” would write.
Which means that if someone releases the actual emails, and it turns out these were fakes, I would not be that surprised. Since these read like they were written by a great Bablyon Bee writer on a good day.
But since I can’t find anyone who’s claiming the emails are fakes, and it’s been over a week since they were released, I’m passing on the link
This letter is from the member of the Hugos Committee who released the emails:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d4scDfJAP5GX_y30BkzuM2GKGP72q623/view
I’d like to flag this bit of specialness:
Then things began being removed from the vetting lists. We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated, exactly as many have speculated*.
Now, i stopped follow the Hugos post Sad Puppies, but when I was heading out the door, they passed EPH (E Plurbis Hugo) to change the way votes were counted to block the power of slates.
So I’m rather curious about the whole “we decided they were a slate, and so removed them”, as opposed to “we did the counting the way the rules say, so these otheres lost out to the top winner of their slate.”
I suppose I could dig around to find out what’s going on, but I just don’t care enough about the Hugos any more to bother. Anyone know the answer? :-)
More fun and games:
https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
I am LMAO. Yes, it’s Vile 770. No, I’m not going to read the comments. I’d be tempted to read, mock, point, and laugh, but I know the Mike just deletes anything sane, so i’m not going to bother.
They finally got around to what I thought was a very interesting point:
“Strangely, neither the emails nor other supporting files shared with the authors explain why the episode “The Sound of Her Wings” from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman TV series was ruled ineligible. When asked about this, Diane Lacey said she wasn’t sure who reviewed finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation but it wasn’t her, Kat Jones or any other associate administrators.”
Diane Lacey just had the “white people emails”, which is to say the ones between Dave and the American and Canadian Hugo Administrators.
She didn’t have the emails between Dave and the Chineese members of the Committee. So I guess we know who ordered Gaiman’s nomination pulled, don’t we?
I can quit any time I want to. :-)
This is for you pst314 and kaempi. It’s more from the report linked above
While the emails from the Hugo administrators don’t reference overall Hugo Awards committee decisions or any specific orders from the Chinese government, a post reported to be from a Sichuan government website discusses work done to censor works related to last year’s Worldcon.
In the post, the Propaganda Department of the Sichuan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China stated that “Three special groups reviewed the content of 1,512 works in five categories, including cultural and creative, literary, and artistic, that were shortlisted in the preliminary examination of the Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, conducting strict checks on works suspected of being related to politics and ethnicity and religion, and putting forward proposals for the disposal of 12 controversial works related to LGBT issues.”
The post was later deleted.
Because the post was deleted, it is difficult to prove its authenticity. However, the post does tie in with language from the Chengdu Worldcon’s second progress report that was shared by ErsatzCulture on X-Twitter on January 20 and by Nibedita Sen on Bluesky on January 23. That language stated “Eligible members vote according to the ‘one person, one vote’ rule to select Hugo Award works and individuals that comply with local laws and regulations.” [emphasis added]
pst314,
Does your comment have meaning, value, and worth?
Is there some reason why you made it?
Good grief, can’t I offer factual details to aid clarity of understanding?
Note that I wrote “from what I’ve read so far” and “Sorry that I did not take notes or save links. Others may be able to provide detail.” What more could I have done to say that my knowledge is limited and that I welcome further data from others?
pst314,
Good grief, can’t I offer factual details to aid clarity of understanding?
You could. But in that case you didn’t. you didn’t add anything new, and you didn’t add any meaningful analysis.
So I pointed that out.
What more could I have done to say that my knowledge is limited and that I welcome further data from others
Well, since you actually had nothing to add, you could have said nothing.
So, i provided more data and analysis, with links. Including a post from a CCP government office bragging about their censorship efforts WRT Worldcon. Comments?
Greg: I added one small detail: That, as far as I knew, we did not yet have direct affirmative documentation of CCP action to influence the Worldcon committee. Emphasis on not YET: Who knows what we might learn later. I made no effort to add analysis because, as I first wrote, I had not read extensively and in fact I had nothing new to offer.
You replied with snark, ignoring the actual small point I was making. And making in all humility.
Only later did you offer further data. And then more snark.
But thank you for reminding me why I no longer waste my time with face-to-face interactions with science fiction fans. There are some good ones, but not enough. Life is too short to waste it on a subculture which has so many socially defective people