Last week I wrote about the disastrous decisions of a few (western) organizers/advisors to the Hugo awards to deem a number of works ineligible, despite the fact that they received nominations enough to make the ballot. What I didn’t realize, until it was pointed out by a number of folks on Bluesky, was that it didn’t even matter—if the actual number of nominations had been counted, maybe those works wouldn’t have been on the ballot at all. A huge number of nominations for works in Chinese were deemed ineligible because of supposed inclusion on a slate.
For those of you fortunate enough to have missed the Sad Puppy era of the Hugo awards, in which a number of racists got mad that N.K. Jemisin is more talented than them, a slate is a recommended group of nominees put forward to push a certain agenda. And notably, it’s not disallowed by the Hugo voting rules! But once again good ol’ Dave took it upon himself to decide he knew better, and he designated those works as being evidence of some kind of collusion.
This is such a huge bummer for those authors. The nominations in question had indeed been posted as a group, but as a kind of “Isn’t it cool? The Hugos are going to be here in China! These are some of the works in the categories that we enjoyed.” No collusion. Just enthusiasm.
Writer Abigail Nussbaum has a great post about the injustice of it all here. But one bit stood out to me in particular:
…The attitude over the last month has been that we let the riffraff in, and look what happened. Now that we know that we are the riffraff, our response should change accordingly. Whether it's the individual Worldcon, or an umbrella organization, or an outside firm, at the end of the day someone is always going to have to make judgment calls about who is eligible for a Hugo and who isn't, whose vote gets counted and whose doesn't. We have just gotten a good look at what rule by SMOF looks like, and I have to say that I don't care for it—and it might be worth remembering that the body most likely to have been expanded into a permanent Hugo administration, the Worldcon Intellectual Property nonprofit, numbered McCarty among its board members until just a few weeks ago.
SMOF means Secret Masters Of Fandom, and it’s the way the World Science Fiction Society has run itself for years. She’s right, and she should say it: something needs to change.
There are links circulating on BlueSky (which I’m quite enjoying as a Twitter alternative—you can find me here) of some of the Chinese works in translation, and I’ll include links next week.
WHAT I’M READING
I just finished the second of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde trilogy, Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands, and it was hugely fun. Arch Victoriana isn’t normally my thing, but the voice is so singular and her world building is so broad that I found myself absolutely sucked in. Slump over, baby! In the Libby app I’m reading Sarah Caudwell’s wonderfully charming mystery novel from the 80s, Thus Was Adonis Murdered. It is TREMENDOUSLY entertaining!
HOUSEKEEPING
My first novel, Marrying In, is available for purchase on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, and is coming soon to iBooks. If you’ve read it, consider leaving a review—that helps me and the book in the long run!
I’m available to hire for freelance editing services on Reedsy. You can find me on social media on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, the A Faster No Discord, and now TikTok. If you buy any of the books linked in this newsletter I receive a small commission at no cost to you.