This is what we'd call an own goal

The 2023 Hugos and self-censorship

Yesterday I read Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley’s long report on the recent revelation of notable disqualifications from the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon Hugo and Astounding Award ballots. When the nominations came out, it had seemed odd to many that R.F. Kuang’s 2023 novel Babel didn’t appear on the shortlist for Best Novel (even though she was nominated for and won the Nebula for it), nor did Xiran Jay Zhao appear on the shortlist for the Astounding Award. In previous years, the data about nominations is released in the days after the awards are held—sometimes soon enough for guests at the Losers’ Party to read them on their phones. Instead, voting data for the awards themselves wasn’t released until December 3, forty-six days after the convention. On January 20, they released the information about the longlist and nominations, and the data made clear that both Kuang and Zhao each had enough nominations to make the longlist, and had been deemed ineligible.

Initially, this was widely considered to be the result of censorship on the part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP.) Both authors are outspoken on social media, with Zhao in particular making headlines recently for their comments regarding cease-and-desists from their publisher. But other works that might have conceivably drawn CCP ire made the shortlist, including Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, which features a sapphic romance. Kuang noted on instagram when this information was revealed that “no reason for Babel’s ineligibility was given to me or my my team... until one is provided that explains why the book was eligible for the Nebula and Locus awards, which it won, and not the Hugos, I assume this was a matter of indesirability rather than ineligibility. Excluding ‘undesirable’ work is not only embarrassing for all involved parties, but renders the entire process and organization illegitimate.”

Now it turns out that it wasn’t the CCP that interfered, or even the Chengdu team that asked for the works to be excluded—it was the western con advisors who were helping the Chengdu delegation run the Hugos. In email exchanges excerpted in the report and included in full, these advisors expressed confusion about Chinese law surrounding sensitive topics, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and COVID. (Presumably they didn’t care about the ongoing human rights violations happening in Xinjiang, which have taken a back seat in world attention given what’s happening in Ukraine and Gaza. But I digress.) These organizers, particularly Dave McCarty, seem to have been the ones to deem these works ineligible.

So, to sum up: the organizers were so worried about Chinese censorship that they went ahead and censored themselves. Quoting an academic article about censorship and social media in China, the report says there is a “red line” around certain forbidden topics in the country. Because people don’t know exactly what the red line is, and because the punishment for crossing the line can be so severe, “self-censorship is the only way to protect themselves and lower the risk.”

Which is an understandable stance to take—for someone in China, who lives under the authority of the CCP’s regime. All these organizers did is to call into question the winners of the awards from 2023—who now will have to wonder if they would have won, had every possible option been included on the ballot.

I don’t have a lot of huge points to make here beyond the obvious: censorship is bad, and the self-censorship practiced here is worse. Something like this will likely happen again if the World Science Fiction Society doesn’t separate management of the Hugo awards from individual con bids. There are long-expressed complaints in the SFF community about the lack of consistency from WorldCon to WorldCon—one year you have a smoothly running machine, the next year you have a disaster. (It must be noted that the Chengdu WorldCon itself was extremely well-run, according to Chris M. Blakely, one of the coauthors of the report and a 2023 nominee for Best Fan Writer.)

McCarty, somewhat unsurprisingly, expressed in an interview with File 770 that he doesn’t want the awards separated from the individual cons:

“Even though I am certain that every administration decision I made was correct, I don't think that anybody would ever give me this job again,” McCarty said in the interview. “The answers that I've got for the administration decisions, all I can say is again, after reviewing this Constitution and all the other rules we must follow, the administration team ruled that these works were ineligible, which absolutely, categorically is our right to do, you know, that's right there in the WSFS Constitution.”

According to Mary Robinette Kowal on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), McCarty also owns the proprietary software that counted the votes for the 2023 awards—and won’t share that software or code with anyone. I wonder why!

At any event: what a shitshow. The worst thing about this whole mess is the chilling effect it seems to have had on the Chinese fandom involved—Sanford and Barkley note that posts discussing the controversy have begun to disappear from Chinese forums, and others involved didn’t want to speak with the authors for fear of backlash. The report quotes Pablo Vazquez, an SFF fan and academic from Puerto Rico, who said that “If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.”

If I can attend Glasgow WorldCon in August, I know I’ll be attending the general meeting—and I bet a lot of other people will, too.

p.s. I’m trying to be more consistent about putting alt text in these photos!

WHAT I’M READING

My nonfiction streak continues, only now I’m juggling several things at once. (Thank you, Libby holds and your impeccable timing!) I’m still working through Tracers In the Dark, and now I’ve added a book on creativity by Tina Seelig called Inside Out, and An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler. I’ve been carrying around the first book in the Emily Wilde series, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies, for days since my sister gave it to me. The second one just came out and she blazed through it, insisting I read the first one. When I’m ready for fiction again, I know what I’ll turn to.

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!

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