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.

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 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.

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.