So, last week I made a post about how shitty it was that award worthy authors and works were shafted in the 2023 Hugo Awards for no apparent reason. You can read it by clicking here.

Not long after I made that post, a bombshell in the story dropped. Emails were leaked which show that yes, we were right, the weird disqualifications were a form of political censorship. The Canadian and American members of the committee were picking out and disqualifying any works that they thought could be seen as critical of China. There is a possibility that the Sichuan government had some involvement too, but for the most part it seems that the Western committee members happily and willingly partook in self-censoring the Hugos to appease an authoritarian government at the expense of the careers of dozens of writers.

Also posted since my report was an excellent report on the whole issue. The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford is an excellent summery of everything that happened and goes over what we can learn from these new leaks. They also provide plenty of sources for their conclusions, and I’d recommend this report to anyone looking to know just what happened and why it has been so damaging to the SFF fandom.

There are two things in particular about this event that really get to me. The first, is that we are seeing people from Western countries that are supposed to champion free speech willingly go to great lengths to censor works that might upset a totalitarian government. A homophobic, genocidal totalitarian government that imprisons its citizens and discriminates against ethnic minorities. I understand that the safety of the Chinese committee members, event organizers, and fans would have played a large part in this decision and I admire that the Western committee members didn’t go in with some sort of rose-tinted privilege glasses thinking that the Chinese Communist Party would just let books and authors it doesn’t like be celebrated and everything would be all cool. However the correct course of action would have been to cancel the awards once it became a problem, not to capitulate to the sensibilities of a totalitarian regime. Making the CCP’s job easier by voluntarily self-censoring the ballots is just weak.

We must remember that free speech and freedom of expression are not natural parts of Western society. Neither are our extensive human rights and anti-discrimination policies. These are all things that we have won through protest, and revolution, and a constant struggle against those who would prefer we all shut up and act like good little serfs. By slipping into self-censoring habits, we start losing this fight. I cannot help but think of Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance (that a tolerant society that accepts intolerance will soon become an intolerant society, and therefore a truly tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance.) By going along with the CCP’s bullshit, we make the world a less tolerant place. Not only that, but by aiding the totalitarian government, we make it harder for people living under the regime to fight back.

Which brings me to the second thing that really gets to me. In the report, Barkley and Sanford mention that there were a lot of posts by Chinese fans upset about the censorship, but they have started to go quiet and now no-one wants to speak up. As the report explains, the Chinese science fiction and fantasy fandom was one of the few avenues of free speech in the country, and now that the controversy has embarrassed the CCP, people are worried that that freedom will be ruined by more government or business attention. The Chengdu Worldcon was meant to bring together fan communities in China and the rest of the world, but instead it may have shattered Chinese fan communities.

I don’t know what needs to be done to fix this. Firing Dave McCarthy was a good start. The idea of decoupling the Hugo Awards from Worldcon has also been floated around both in Barkley and Sanford’s report and elsewhere, which would be a huge step, but I think it may be necessary to save the Hugos. If the Hugo Awards can be guttered in order to fit into the ideology of whatever country is hosting Worldcon, then they’ll cease to be seen as a valid reflection of what is actually award-worthy. Still, people are talking about what happened, and some people have been fired, so it’s a start. Hopefully the 2024 Worldcon/Hugo Awards learns from this, and new rules are introduced going forward.

Hopefully, this is the last I talk about this for a while. Peace out everyone.

~ Jayde

EDIT: I wrote this article the night before I posted it, and in that time Samantha Mills, author of the Short Story Rabbit Test released a statement about how she considers Rabbit Test to no longer be a valid winner of the short story award due to the fact that dozens of Chinese language short stories were deleted from the ballot due to ‘slate voting’. Which is another bullshit excuse for excluding works, since slate voting is not illegal. When the whole Sad Puppies slate voting thing happened in 2015 no-one even considered disqualifying the nominees. In fact, after that new voting policies such as run-off voting and having more finalists than there are nominee spaces for voters, purely to lessen the affect of this potentially dodgy but still perfectly allowed practice.

You can read Mills’s blog post by clicking this sentence. This cannot have been an easy decision for her to make, but I am really glad she had the integrity to make that call. I cannot imagine how hard it must be to think you’ve won a Hugo and then have that tainted.