Before I get into this–Chinese science fiction is so much more than the chauvinist, authoritarian “Three-Body Problem” series. A great place to start is the short story collection Invisible Planets, and its eponymous story which you can read for free here. I’m also enjoying the Sinopticon collection right now. If you’d like to support the victims of this farce, you should check these out!
There are a handful of awards in the sci-fi & fantasy world that are considered the Big Ones. There’s the Nebula, where the guild (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) votes. Most of the rest are decided by fans–the Locus and BSFA, for instance. The most famous of these is the Hugo, voted on by attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention. The Hugos have been roiled by controversy in the past, most notably by a gamergate-adjacent group called the Sad Puppies attempting to elevate an anti-diversity slate. This led to “No Award” winning several categories, and ultimately, the introduction of some changes to their ranked-choice system to disempower slate voting (discussion in the comments).
One fun thing about ranked-choice voting is that it’s tamper-evident. Which brings us to 2023, where the voting was extremely, extremely tampered with.
2023 Worldcon was held in Chengdu, China. When this was announced, fans of human rights expressed concerns that this might endanger both participants and the awards themselves, in addition to maybe just not being an appropriate venue for a genre that has traditionally opposed oppressive governments. It felt, perhaps, like a cash grab on behalf of the industry; certainly reputation-washing on the part of China. This is far from an unheard-of arrangement; similar things have happened with golf and chess in the Middle East, for example. But it was surprising to see something with such an anti-authoritarian reputation go for this. (Some future hosting bids have come in from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uganda; a Tel Aviv bid is also controversial. These are now expected to go down in flames.)
So, were we right? Did this seriously damage the Hugo awards? Oh goodness yes. It even seems to have damaged civil rights in China.
The entire process was suspect from the get-go, and it’s only gotten worse as more has been revealed. People noticed three weird things about it right away:
- The nominees were announced ninety-one days after the start of the convention, which was the maximum allowed delay. This has never happened before; they’re usually released almost immediately. Figuring it out is a simple process–you count nominations. So why the delay? No clear explanation was given.
- A lot of works that probably would have won were declared ineligible, most notably those by R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, two North American writers who are not always friendly to the Chinese government. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman TV series was also declared ineligible–once because it was eligible for two awards and you’re only supposed to be eligible for one; and a second time for unstated reasons. Gaiman is an outspoken critic of China’s tendency to imprison dissident writers.
- The ranked-choice results don’t look right at all.
Hypothesis #3: The math is bogus. That is, the reported nomination statistics include large numbers of nominations attributed to the “top group” that do not arise from an actual nomination process. […] There really aren’t any conclusions other than the ones that were immediately apparent from the raw data. The 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics are implausible and anomalous and as a result we don’t actually know who should be on the Hugo Long List. (And–based on factors that I haven’t discussed here–we don’t entirely know who should have been on the Hugo Short List.)
The whole thing stank to high heaven. Most assumed this was a case of state-encouraged self-censorship, though there was considerable pushback from the left against the idea that China would ever do such a thing. Well, guess what–some emails leaked, and we were right.
In an emailed dated June 7, 2023 at 6:18 PM and sent to the Western Hugo administrators, Dave McCarty said “Tomorrow I have a 4 hour meeting with my chinese counterpart to look at ballot detail and determine if any ballots are to be voided (which happens with frequency so that it’s not *really* that controversial if we determine we need to do it) as well as what things we need to move categories.” The identity of this Chinese counterpart remains unknown at this time.
McCarty then added “The chairs and the administrators will review the items we’ve highlighted in research Friday evening if we have enough time after the ballot review…otherwise we’ll be looking at it on Saturday (China time, of course, so we’re about 13 hours ahead of you).”
This statement, along with McCarty’s earlier email saying the administrators will “determine if it is safe” to put finalists on the ballot or “if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it,” shows that the research the Western administrators did on Hugo Award finalists was used by the Chengdu convention chairs and administrators to determine who would be on the final ballot.
Lacey confirmed in an interview that this is what happened. “We were supposed to identify any issues and pass them on,” she said. “The decisions were above our heads.”
As Lacey explained in more detail in her apology letter, “We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so. Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”
Were the unnamed interlocutors representatives of the Chinese government, or just citizens concerned about getting in trouble with the Chinese government? Does it matter? This is how state censorship works. The CCP can’t control everybody’s thoughts, but they can take enough high-profile enforcement actions that people end up controlling their own thoughts. Such control doesn’t only weigh on citizens; whether the Hugo administrators were worried for the safety of their Chinese counterparts, or willing to do whatever it took to hold the event in China, or any other hypothesis, the fact remains that they chose to do this. It’s a complete disgrace. I feel so sorry for the winners.
I also feel very sorry for the Chinese organizers, who were almost certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place, and are hopefully not in any danger. The government is clearly embarrassed; Chinese commentary on this farce has been disappearing from the Internet, and the organizers are unwilling to speak up:
An explanation for what might be happening came from Pablo Vazquez, a traveling genre fan and former chair of the 12th North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Vazquez is also well known for his connections with genre fans around the world.
When Vazquez was asked if he could help connect the authors with any fans in China who might comment for this report, he said “I’m sorry. They do not want to speak to the media even anonymously.”
As Vasquez stated in a follow-up comment, “I have a lot of love for Chinese fandom and my friendships and connections there run deep. That’s a real and vibrant fandom there that is, like us, wanting very little to do with their government being involved in their fandom. They definitely don’t think it’s their government and instead think it’s corporate interests or, even worse, a fan/pro organization. Honestly, they seem more scared by that than anything else which saddens me to see and despite multiple attempts to get them to share their story they seem really hesitant.”
He elaborated further: “They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. 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.“
And there you have it. The game was rigged from the start–heads the CCP wins a PR coup, tails free speech in China loses.
I don’t really know what we’re supposed to do about all this. Holding Worldcon only in ‘free’ countries will restrict the ability of people in repressive regimes to participate. But holding it in repressive countries will endanger the citizens, and the attendees, too. Inclusiveness is very important, but so is the message you’re sending to the world.
gwangung
What pisses me off is the clear racism of the Hugo committee, deciding to toss diaspora Chinese just…because.
It’s the modern way to say, “well, they’re all too inscrutable to figure out”…
Liberals can be racist just as much as conservatives.
Major Major Major Major
@gwangung: to be, very very slightly, fair, the CCP is very critical of diaspora voices…
Yutsano
So trying not to have the Hugos crash and burn is resulting in the Hugos…crashing and burning. You cannot have a celebration of free expression in a country that doesn’t allow free expression. I’m obviously not involved in the organisation of the convention but there was a solution to include mainland China fans while avoiding the actual mainland: hold it in a Southeast Asian country like Thailand. Hell even Indonesia would have been better. Fans from the PRC could still attend and none of this would have happened I bet.
Major Major Major Major
@Yutsano: worldcon Tokyo would have kicked ass too
Timill
@Major Major Major Major: 2007 was in Yokohama. Close enough? No Hugo problems that year.
Major Major Major Major
@Timill: that’s so funny, I almost wrote Yokohama because it seemed like a great venue.
Doug Clark
As I said in on Scalzi’s Whatever, there is being open minded and inclusive and there is being soft headed.
Holding a LITERARY convention in an authoritarian country is very much the latter.
Baud
Thanks for the summary for someone like me that doesn’t follow this stuff. Insane.
cain
Having gone to many SciFI conventions in my youths – I know that it is filled with people who are on the spectrum gender, and as well as neural divergent in all forms. They are literally a collection of minorities as a very large major community.
You can’t hold conventions in repressive regimes – it’s just not going to work. Especially in areas where it is anti-LGBTQ+. I have never seen a more wonderful, weird bunch of folks. :-) I know I’m one of them.
geg6
I don’t get it. Why hold it in China? Chinese people can travel and I would think it would be fairly easy for those fans to get to other Asian/Pacific countries. Why would a group that often includes writers who highlight repressive practices want to hold their convention in one of the world’s most repressive places? It makes no sense to me at all.
Myself, I know nothing about the Hugo awards or 99.9% of any of the works that would be honored in any year, let alone this one. But I do know enough about the genre to question who made such a decision.
Baud
Who actually chose China, and I wonder if money changed hands?
ColoradoGuy
This was entirely predictable. Communist nations have elections and voting, sure enough, but counting the votes is quite another matter … that’s a matter of State Security.
I’m not sure any Communist nation counts votes objectively (using math). The Hugo committee didn’t bother to do much historical research … on the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, or the CCP/CPC. It’s all there in the historical record.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Follow the money…
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: it’s voted on by members, though of course somebody has to count those https://www.worldcon.org/worldcon-bids/about-bidding/
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks. I see the next two years are Glasgow and Seattle.
ETA: not any information on the voting process at those links.
Feathers
@Baud: People who were members at a previous convention vote. I don’t remember the time lag, a few years previous. However, memberships are relatively inexpensive. I remember concerns that there were a lot of memberships purchased from people in China that voted in the election that awarded the convention to China. Suspicious interference or excited Chinese fans? Hard to tell apart, especially from a distance. Becomes obvious in hindsight.
NotMax
Sidebar:
New York CD 03, the district just won by Suozzi, is nearly one-quarter Asian American, primarily Chinese.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: interesting, I wonder how they voted (Chinese-Americans in NYC shifted hard to the right in 2020)
gwangung
@Major Major Major Major: And we diasporic voices chafe at being treated like the black sheep of the family, sometimes, even when we’re not critical…(the gatekeeping can be humorous at times…)
But these are aspects that are too gross to be even nuances, and the committee just didn’t want to deal with a single one of them.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
Everyone involved should have seen this shite coming a light year away. Admirable as it is to want fans who live under authoritarian regimes to be able participate, it should have been recognised how dangerous this could be for them. If part of the reason for having the Hugos in China, was to shine a light on Chinese science fiction, they seem to have screwed that up too. Yet another shite show they brought on themselves. I don’t know how many more of these the Hugos can survive. On a personal note, the shenanigans surrounding Neil Gaiman and The Sandman is particularly infuriating because it’s a work I personally love and I thought the series was one of the best fantasy series we were ever going to get. After the way corporations have managed to destroy, *checks notes* Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, Shadow and Bone, Farscape,, just about every fantasy or science fiction series they touch, The Sandman was a breath of fresh air. For it to be banished from the Hugos on the say so of a repressive regime is just the icing on the crap cake. What a fiasco.
Major Major Major Major
@gwangung: yeah, Kuang’s book Babel wasn’t particularly critical of China even? It’s about the opium wars, and while I haven’t read it I understand it’s mostly critical of the British.
pacem appellant
@Baud: Worldcon voters in a previous year. Buying a voting ticket to Worldcon isn’t that expensive. I suspect that Chinese fandom saw an opportunity to participate in anti-authoritarianism, and it blew up in their faces (not my theory, Charles Stross’s, I think).
Several folks in China and US have been banned for life from the organization over the 2023 shenanigans.
I’ve read that Glasgow is working overtime to make it the most transparent Worldcon ever.
Redshift
The Hugos have had ranked choice voting since 1968. The details of the voting method were tweaked after the Puppies debacle, but that’s not when ranked choice started. (It’s the main reason I knew what ranked choice voting was before it became a political cause.)
gwangung
@Major Major Major Major: I felt the committee bent over backwards to fellate the Chinese authorities; it’s not clear the Chinese folks even said a thing. They tried the “better safe than sorry” routine and was VERY sorry when they handled it with all the finesse of an elephant in a glass shop.
Marcopolo
@Major Major Major Major: dunno about that but the AAPI vote in the NY-03 special (mostly in Queens) was overwhelmingly D.
Also, the inexpensiveness of membership for Worldcom selection, combined w/ actual fairly small numbers makes it ripe for folks/groups to steer the results to the location they prefer.
Major Major Major Major
@Redshift: ah my mistake thanks
would it be accurate to say they introduced instant runoff voting? Wiki: “the new rules define a voting system in which nominees are eliminated one by one, with each vote for an eliminated work then spread out over the uneliminated works they nominated”
CaseyL
I very strongly urge eeryone interested in this story to go read “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion,” by Chris Barkley and Jason Stanford. They are investigative journalists, who had access to reams of information, including emails.
The most damning point in their investigation is that the Americans administering the Chengdu Hugo awards did not wait for any pressure from China to exclude certain writers and artists, but did it on their own recognizance.
They began compiling dossiers on the nominated writers and artistsI – some going back 10 years! – appeared to not know the difference between Tibet and Nepal, appeared to not have read the books they excluded, appear not to have actually consulted with anyone knowledgeable about what the Chinese governmetn would and would not permit but made their own decisions based on their own very limited knowledge, and also appeared to have screwed around with the finally-released data.
The SF world is in an uproar far beyond what it would be if the Chinese government were simply to blame, because the perpetrators were “our own”: longtime WorldCon and Hugo administrators, who should damned well have known better but succumbed to some kind of self-censoring, pre-emptive accommodationalist thinking for reasons that no one really knows but, Boy Howdy, is there a lot of speculating.
Two of the people involved have issued mewling apologies, but only did so after being outed. One of them, Kat Jones, was already working as Administrator of the Glasgow WorldCon – to the Glasgow’s committee’s great credit, she has since been removed. My guess is that none of the managers/administrators who did Chengdu will ever be allowed near another SciFi convention ever again.
It is a hellish mess. It is heartbreaking. And while it is indeed a signal lesson in the perils of putting a literary convention in an authoritarian dictatorship, it is also an object lesson in protecting one’s own integrity and being capable of calling out wrongness even when that wrongness is being done by one’s friends and colleagues (which none of them did, by the way – none of them even resigned in protest).
Timill
@Redshift: Sure about 1968? I’d got as far back as 1971, but I’d love to know more about the change. (I have the 1963/64 Constitution and the 1971, but nothing in between).
Major Major Major Major
@CaseyL: I quote from the file770 piece extensively here. It’s not clear to me that the government wasn’t involved; indeed it is very common for some minor functionary to be assigned as a liaison, which of course is not unique to China. All they’d have to do is mumble a few Concerns to get the ball rolling. And, you’ll also note the emails do say they consulted with the Chinese organizers on this, who may have had perfectly understandable concerns of their own, not to defend the government but to defend themselves.
but as I also say it doesn’t really matter, they bear full responsibility for their choices.
gwangung
@CaseyL:
Went with their own prejudices and brutally showed their own shortcomings and internal biases; i.e., didn’t guard against their own racial biases.
Subcommandante Yakbreath
deleted
Timill
@Major Major Major Major: It’s a weighted count system known as EPH – your nominations are weighted by the number of your nominations that haven’t been eliminated. Thus initially all my nominations count 0.2 of a vote, and when one goes, the rest count 0.25 and so on.
The nominees are the last 6 standing.
Major Major Major Major
@Timill: instant runoff but weird, got it! Updated with a link to your comment.
Redshift
As others have pointed out, Worldcon and the Hugos aren’t “something” that decided to do this. The location is voted on by members of the convention a couple of years beforehand, and they won the vote. There were plenty of people who were worried the Chinese government might be involved in buying the memberships, but without evidence, that could be considered a pretty racist assumption. There are a hell of a lot of people there, if people there got excited about it, they could easily win legitimately.
The bigger question is how. Since there isn’t an organization that can just decide not to hold it in those places, and Worldcon is unlikely to change the voting procedure to somehow exclude people from the “wrong” places, it would probably have to be restrictions in the bylaws on what places are allowed to bid. I don’t envy the rules lawyers who will be trying to figure that out at this year’s business meeting.
Anoniminous
Hugo has been ‘game-able’ right from the git-go. “They’d Rather Be Right” winner of the Hugo in 1955 for example.
Redshift
@Major Major Major Major: In the history, they call the system that started in 1968 Instant Runoff. I suspect the specifics of the post-Puppies changes are too arcane for there to be a simple term for the difference.
Major Major Major Major
@Redshift:
I was referring to science fiction in general. The locations are of course chosen by science fiction fans.
I also don’t buy the argument that it’s “racist” to think that an authoritarian communist government might behave like one.
I do think this was a selection without malice though.
CaseyL
@Major Major Major Major:
My impression is that the Hugo Administrators anticipated what would bother the Chinese government even before anyone, formal or informal or anonymous note passed in a coffee shop, approached them.
The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is, the Administrators desperately wanted the convention to go well, they were excited about bring WorldCon to a huge fan population that hadn’t had the opportunity to go to one before, and they decided, implicitly or explicitly, to remove any possible source of trouble and controversy before it could even start.
Sometimes people sell their integrity and souls for what seems to be a good cause.
MattF
Charlie Stross has some comments about this on his blog.
Major Major Major Major
@CaseyL: yeah it was almost certainly self censorship (which is the main vector for state censorship) but I also don’t think it emerged fully formed from the heads of the western organizers.
As others have noted elsewhere, Kuang’s book was published in China (though I can’t speak to the translation)! So this was obviously not some top down affair.
Redshift
@gwangung: Since Worldcon and fandom are all-volunteer, a lot of jobs, especially the most thankless, get filled by whoever is willing to do them. That’s often a good thing, but when it isn’t, it can be really really terrible.
pacem appellant
@Major Major Major Major:
I think sci-fi fans in China got excited about hosting a WorldCon and bought tickets.
Unfortunately, they won. And now many of them will never get to participate in fandom ever again, either because they’ve been banned or because the crackdown by the CPC will be severe.
Redshift
@Major Major Major Major:
That was really my point. I don’t think it’s racist to worry that the government might be buying the convention, but I think it would be to assume that must be what happened.
Jay
As all threads are open threads,………
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-lgbtq-warning-violence-1.7114801
CaseyL
@Major Major Major Major: I think it emerged fully formed from the head of Dave McCarty, possibly after some contact with someone in Chengdu. I think McCarty was (and is) compromised in ways the others are not, and for more quotidian reasons (ego, baksheesh).
Doug
Here’s a really good piece on censorship by Ada Palmer, herself a Hugo finalist and Astounding Award winner: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/
Pithiest bit, “The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.”
I doubt that Worldcon will change anything about the mechanics of bidding, but I do expect more competition, and I think that will be good for Worldcon. There had been a lot of unopposed bids in recent years, and that’s an invitation to cronyism and stagnation.
I do think that some of the deep structures behind Worldcon and the Hugos will change. Specifically, I expect that the unincorporated society that currently holds the trademarks for the Hugos will incorporate and will find better ways to bind individual conventions to how they run the Hugos. (Seriously, when some of this first came out and IP lawyers on bluesky started looking at Worldcon’s structure, they started bandying phrases like “trademark abandonment” and “naked license” and “unlimited personal liability.” I could hear legal jaws hitting floors from seven time zones away.)
I hope that Worldcon will find voting and counting software with audit trails; I know such things are available for, e.g., data from testing new medications, so they can handle both anonymization and full audits. I would not be surprised if some kind of standing administration committee evolves. That will solve the problem of malfeasance in one year that tells outsiders to pound sand but of course brings the issue of oversight and audit of the standing committee. One set of problems at a time, I suppose.
Jay
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/former-fbi-informant-charged-with-lying-about-the-bidens-role-in-ukraine-business-1.6770761
Princess
The very idea of holding a literary festival — a literary festival! — in a place where you’re going to have to censor who participates… Who ever thought that was acceptable? No love for any of them, including the Chinese organizers who are certainly, at least some of them, CCP people. They’re everywhere.
Redshift
@Doug:
Eh, maybe. There have been a lot of years that started with competition and ended up with unopposed bids because the others folded before it got to voting. Running a Worldcon is hard, and keeping a large group of volunteers together for several years is hard, and random external events can make it even harder. It’d be great if there were more bids, but I’m not so sure people will make the connection to bidding as a possible solution to this problem.
Sister Golden Bear
@Jay: Worth noting that in the UK, a day or two ago, a trans girl was stabbed 14 times by a woman at a party — only a day or after the anniversary of a trans girl being stabbed to death by her classmates (a girl and boy), who were later convicted in what was ruled an anti-trans hate crime.
Anti-trans hatred is metastasizing.
pacem appellant
Apropos, this just popped up on my Mastodon feed. I haven’t read it yet, but Scalzi will have WORDS I’m sure.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-and-where-we-go-from-here/
CaseyL
@Jay: I’m not sure what to make of this.
Weiss doesn’t strike me as someone who wants to clear Hunter Biden; he’s caved to GOP pressure a few too many times.
Is he hoping to leverage more damning information from Smirnov?
Marmot
Thanks for the essay on The Three Body Problem. It was fascinating, especially since I haven’t read it (the book[s]) — and now won’t!
It reminds me of Alan Dershowitz’s evoking of the “ticking time bomb” scenario to justify torture. The setting is carefully constructed to deliver the desired outcome.
Edited for clarity.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom: A lot of us did see it coming. We were called racist for thinking that there might be issues. It’s one of the things that led to me stepping back from online communities around that time.
However, the people involved in those leaked emails seem as confused about the Sandman mess as the rest of us.
Jay
@Sister Golden Bear:
Read about that case, ( the two).
It was horrifying that they just wanted to “experience the thrill of killing someone” and they picked at their victim, somebody they though nobody would care about.
Jay
@CaseyL:
I think that he’s just pissed that the dude lied his ass off with easily disprovable lies, and made a fool of him.
Scout211
@CaseyL: I don’t know what it means yet either, but it sounds like maybe Weiss is none too happy with his source???
More from CNN
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Major Major Major Major: McCarty was apparently wined and dined the entire time he was there. Did some businessman make a random comment about hoping that nothing drew the attention of the censors? It’s plausible.
Darkrose
@gwangung: That, and the fact that the western members of the concom seem to have largely made these decisions on their own. McCarty mentioned “my chinese counterpart” but it’s not clear if that was a Chinese concom member–in which case shouldn’t they have been part of the conversation throughout the process?–or one of the many people he talked about receiving gifts from. It sounds like McCarty led the charge to pre-emptively self-censor because he was being wined and dined and he wanted to keep those folks happy, while blaming it on “the Chinese (you know how they are).”
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
I’m gonna drop a Bluesky thread here about the GOH choice and the voting software:
https://bsky.app/profile/maryrobinette.bsky.social/post/3klgpwgkli52c
glc
@Darkrose: To emphasize your point: all the information we have now shows massive self-censorship from the American side, with no evidence to date of any pressure applied.
As always, John Scalzi is very good at laying out what has been learned in a digestible form.
As one might expect, most of the people commenting on this in various places do not seem to have read the report. (Personally, after reading the report, I did not click through to the actual emails.)
Doctor Cleveland
The idea I’ve seen floated is some administrative disconnection between WorldCon and the Hugos, so that the WorldCon attendees (which has long included “supporting members” who can basically just buy a vote) still vote on the Hugos, but the folks putting on the con don’t administer the election. Tricky, but maybe necessary.
kindness
Next year’s Hugo awards convention in Moscow is going to be lit!!! (/s)
Seriously though, what ‘leftists’ say China wouldn’t throw their weight around?
Dan B
@Jay: Saw that earlier. It’s gut wrenching that the right in Canada is pushing the notion that people who are sexually “normal” are being corrupted by the sexually “perverted”. There’s the concept that punishing these “perverts” will purify society and individuals. Now that abortion is not a cudgel in the US it’s time for the next marginalized groups. LGBTQ & 2S plus brown skinned immigrants are easier targets than birth control and/or porn. Unless this is stopped every group will have its time in the barrel.
gwangung
@kindness: See #61’s final paragraph.
Dan B
@kindness: Im looking forward to Pyongyang and Rangoon. They’re easy access for the Chinese.
Ian R
Most of the conversation around that that I’ve seen has been careful to talk about jurisdictions, rather than countries. Mostly because enough of Worldcon’s recurring membership is American that it would be extremely awkward to be unable to hold it in the US because of laws in certain states.
Major Major Major Major
@glc:
I just have a hard time believing this. I can say first-hand that everywhere I’ve lived, from San Francisco to New York to a town of 7,500, has put pressure on event organizers in one form or another, to toe some line. I don’t see why Chengdu should be exceptional in this regard.
Also, like, the people who did this have come pretty damn close to saying it out loud.
Don’t really understand the part about why they had to wait though.
If you’re feeling charitable, you could read this as “we were told by Dave, who decided entirely by himself to rig this contest in a way that aligns with CCP politics”, but c’mon. I’m not saying that they kidnapped his family, but this is exactly how state censorship works.
brantl
@gwangung: Truth be told, I think that’s a contradiction in terms, like “Colder than Absolute Zero”?
Jay
@Dan B:
unpopular reich wing Parties in Canada are stoking the “Rufio” agenda in Canada, in Alberta, Sask, Ontario and New Brunswick in an attempt at relevance.
It is, more and more clear to the voters, that they are a wholly owned subsidiary of the US GroPers party.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Major Major Major Major:
Because despite being a SMOF, Dave doesn’t understand fandom. He thought that by waiting, people would have lost interest in the details and there would be very little uproar.
Plus, he needed the time to massage the numbers. I don’t think he realized how easy it would be to detect the fakery.
Hob
@Dan B:
That’s not even the “next” marginalized groups— it’s just a subset of the already-previously-marginalized ones. Current “trans people are a cult/ideology/conspiracy trying to recruit our kids” rhetoric is copied virtually verbatim from the anti-gay campaigns of 40-50 years ago, which at the time was understood to include trans people under the general umbrella of “people not conforming to mainstream gender roles.” There’s a partial shift in emphasis because cisgender same-gender relationships are now relatively more mainstream, and because trans & NB people have a level of visibility & activism (particularly in terms of younger activists) that would’ve been unimaginable back then. But only a partial shift, because a large percentage of anti-trans assholes continue to also be anti-gay in the same style as always— the “groomer” stuff is 100% old-school homophobia.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: I have read the Three-Body Problem series, and while there’s a lot that is imaginative in it (often to a downright goofy degree–when he reviewed the first book, James Nicoll commented that the super-science reminded him a bit of the 1930s pulp of Edmond Hamilton), the unrelenting grimness of it did put me off ultimately. As the essay says, while the series isn’t overtly pro-authoritarian, it’s filled with this overwhelming sense that the universe is a dark and dangerous place and in such a world, humane behavior is a luxury we can’t afford. And all the horrifying struggle in it turns out to be pointless anyway.
The essay correctly notes that this is not some uniquely Chinese attitude–in fact, Liu Cixin is clearly a fan of 20th century Western science fiction (he drops specific names) and you see it frequently there.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: It’s not super duper fascist apologia or anything, as you and the essay note, but the necessity of authoritarian in the face of such grimness is definitely a theme. And it is sexist as hell. Like a quarter of book two is just making fun of effeminate men, and the rhythm of the entire story is “emotional woman ruins everything, stoic man tries to fix it, emotional woman ruins everything again…”
Mm, sort of like postwar Western science fiction, come to think of it.
Hob
@Major Major Major Major: The “weird” part is designed to lessen the impact of slate voting: the tl/dr is, if a lot of other people nominated the same things you nominated, those things will still get bumped up but those votes will be somewhat diluted, making it more likely that the shortlist will end up including some less-numerically-popular stuff as well.
But to be clear, that’s all just about tallying the nominations. Once there’s a shortlist of nominees, the final voting is done with standard instant-runoff/RCV.
Hob
@Major Major Major Major: As others have noted elsewhere, Kuang’s book was published in China (though I can’t speak to the translation)! So this was obviously not some top down affair.
Those two things aren’t really mutually exclusive— it’s always possible for censors to change their minds if they become more aware of something about the author, or for one person in the government to supersede another. And the content of book itself is less likely to have been the focus of their displeasure than the author’s opinions expressed elsewhere, which they could have become aware of more recently.
Of course based on all the leaked correspondence, this does seem to have been more about anticipatory self-censorship (using absurdly broad criteria like “this book mentions China” which went beyond even what McCarty had originally told his team) than any official directives. But really we will never know. Such directives if any wouldn’t have needed to be in writing, and wouldn’t have needed to be fully consistent with any previous policy. And I don’t think the distinction really matters.
Major Major Major Major
@Hob: True, and there are presumably thousands+ of state censors, many of whom are in a crab bucket situation.
Hob
@Hob: I forgot to add: McCarty is on record as thinking the current nomination system is weird and confusing and unnecessary. If he were principled and competent, he could’ve still implemented it correctly since it’s really not that hard to do; the algorithm is well known. But as he seems to be both unprincipled and clumsy, I wouldn’t be surprised if his irritation at the whole idea made him both more likely to make actual mistakes sometimes, and more likely to deliberately fudge the data at other times with the rationalization that “this system doesn’t produce the results I think it should, so I’ll change the inputs to make the results ‘right’.” So, as with the censorship question, we will never know— people have done deep dives into the data, but ultimately those can only show that things were f’d up in many different ways.
Marmot
@Major Major Major Major:
Dang! I was just going to say that. Reading golden-age sci-fi in the 80s had a weird anthropological feel to it, like I was looking in on a stereotypically primitive culture trying to imagine my world, but without changing much of what made them primitive.
Major Major Major Major
@Marmot: and then you pick up something like The Stars My Destination and wonder why the hell nobody else was able to write like that.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, though there are also a lot of attitudes in Bester that haven’t aged very well. But his prose and imagery were just extraordinary.
Marmot
@Major Major Major Major: I know of that book, but never read it. I should.
Another thing that essay reminds me of: the Right’s obsession with “manliness” makes no sense in the same way that gendered nouns make no sense.
I’m too lazy to look it up, but in some study of gendered nouns, French speakers say of course a bridge is feminine—the graceful, curving lines! German speakers say of course it’s masculine—the sturdy supports and reinforcements!
None of that shit authoritarians worry about actually has to do with gender, only its representation in their respective cultures. Same goes for The Three-Body Problem author. He’s just a parrot on that score.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: it’s the other way around, but yeah https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/395742/german-bridges-are-girls-spanish-bridges-are-boys
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/04/06/102518565/shakespeare-had-roses-all-wrong
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: I think Stars holds up pretty well on that front still other than one scene.
Another author in this bucket is Jack Vance.
YY_Sima Qian
@Yutsano: Holding Worldcon in Bangkok or Singapore would have been far more preferable, especially since PRC passport holders now have visa free access to both places.
Holding any kind of awards or conventions related to the creative industries in the PRC (including Hong Kong these days) will crash & burn. Even if the CPC regime does not actively censor & repress a specific event, there is now enough of an atmosphere of fear (on the parts of the organizers & local governments) that they will go to great lengths to self-censor, which is the intent of the censorship & example making. This also creates an environment for one group or another of fans to attack rival artists & their fan support, w/ innuendos about lack of patriotism or some other unsupported but nevertheless damaging aspersions.
Marmot
@Matt McIrvin: Oh nice! Thanks.
Ya know, with all their insistence on denigrating other groups and treating outsiders primarily as a threat, the Right misses something important.
Apes stronger together!
Marmot
@Major Major Major Major: I am wracking my brain to think of a golden age author who wasn’t a sexist creep. I’m sure I’ve read one. “Asimov wasn’t as bad” doesn’t quite cut it, right?
Major Major Major Major
@Marmot: Asimov was extremely handsy at conventions. Actually Bester liked to goose him, which eventually taught him that it doesn’t feel so good.
Marmot
@Major Major Major Major: Hahahahaha! Good for Bester. I’ve heard that about Asimov.
Weird cultural flotsam the groping is—near work, there are all these ‘80s posters from high school movies, with dudes openly groping the gals like it’s all in fun. Teachers, students. It’s strange to see now. I can’t see how things were better before.
Hob
@Marmot: Kind of depends on where you draw the line chronologically, but looking at male authors who were active before the late 40s, I’m not aware of any particular creepitude by Fredric Brown, Henry Kuttner, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak, or Theodore Sturgeon, for instance. All of those were prolific and significant, but didn’t have the kind of star status outside of SF fandom as Asimov had; if there’s a correlation, it could be either way (creep types being more likely to get ahead, vs. fame encouraging creepiness).
There were also some fairly successful women writing SF in that period such as Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, Margaret St. Clair.
YY_Sima Qian
@Matt McIrvin:
@Major Major Major Major:
I think that is a misreading of Liu. Reading the end, it becomes clear that all of the scheming, efforts & tribulations by the human race or Trisolarans & any of the alien civilizations, no matter how far they are willing to go in their amoral pursuit for survival, will in the end be for naught. Singer’s civilization, for example, was willing to exterminate any civilization capable of interstellar communication to nip potential threats in the bud, & was willing to flatten themselves into 2D to survive. However, there will always be civilizations more powerful, & no one can escape from the end of the universe.
In the end, it takes compassion & collaboration among all of the civilizations that had secluded themselves into pocket universes, a selfishly rational course in response to the Dark Forest, to return all of their matter into the real universe to enable the latter’s rebirth into the primordial Eden w/ 10 dimensions & where speed of light is nearly infinite, the same Eden our universe started w/ but was destroyed by billions of years of Dark Forest warfare in the ROEP. Should the “pragmatic” authoritarian mentality of Thomas Wade (or the Trisolarans or Singer) prevailed, such rebirth is impossible.
Of course, it is clear that Liu had internalized certain paternalistic, chauvinistic & misogynistic views that do show through in his writing. The criticism of feminized/androgynous humans of the later Crisis Era was a common place reaction among traditionalists across E/SE Asia in the 00s, to the rise of the androgynous aesthetic of J-Pop & K-Pop at the time. In time, the J/K-Pop aesthetic won, & largely took over C-Pop as well.
Major Major Major Major
@YY_Sima Qian: I’ve read the interpretation that he was trying to do this, yeah, but IMO the books are a complete failure if that’s what he was going for. They make up at the end, yes, but it hardly excuses the hundreds of pages of misogyny and homophobia that come before. ETA I think I misread your comment. You’re right that this is the conclusion on a cosmic scale. I was thinking about how I’d read he was trying to do like a “yin and yang” thing with men/women but it sure doesn’t read that way to me.
This could just be because he’s not a great writer.
Had you seen this, from my link up top? Lol
Okay, it’s a dumb thought experiment, but why would you eat the only viable womb?
Ken J.
How Worldcon goes places: the process starts with a local group of science fiction fans who organize a “bid” and campaign to win a vote. That vote is held at the Worldcon two years in advance of the proposed bid year.
So, Chinese fans campaigned to host the Worldcon in Chengdu, and won a (disputed) election. (The dispute is more detail than I want to get into for this point.)
So if Worldcon were to go to Singapore or Thailand, these locations would need a substantial group of volunteers who could mount a “bid”, and a campaign to convince voters that they could produce a good convention. (The volunteers might not have to live at the host city, but they would represent it.)
The biggest threat to Worldcon is that the core group of people who organize it are mostly baby boomers who are aging out with no replacements in sight. This entire thing has been created and run by volunteers.
glc
@Major Major Major Major:
The point is, that there is no evidence of outside pressure. That’s simply a fact at this point. You’ve accidentally stated in your reply that you don’t believe that, but I take it as clear that you meant to say you don’t believe there was no outside pressure.
My comment was intended (a) to clarify where the border between known facts and speculation lies at the moment and (b) to indicate one good source of information. Incidentally, the comments on Scalzi’s post contain all sorts of theories about what did happen and what should happen, with occasional calm interventions by the host to separate some of the wheat from the chaff.
Scalzi has a background in journalism, and at times like this, it shows.
Matt McIrvin
@Major Major Major Major: I hadn’t heard Asimov ever learned.
Manyakitty
@Marmot: Bradbury
Manyakitty
@Major Major Major Major: our cat Asimov is also quite handsy. Of course, that behavior is adorable in cats, less so in humans.
Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Thank you for the clarification. I am late to this particular party. Clearly, racism was leveraged to make “problems” , ie too many sensible questions go away. I also agree with Princess, who’s nym I can’t get to embed, that at least some of the Chinese organisers were CCP plants. Had to be. Worldcon is too famous for the CCP to ignore. Unfortunately for true Chinese science fiction & fantasy fans who just wanted to taste the rainbow, just once in their lives, as someone above pointed out, they are now probably completely screwed. If they haven’t been banned, or even if they have, the CCP will be watching, & the little precious freedom they eked out for themselves, is kaput. That’s beyond sad. That’s tragic.
Major Major Major Major
@Matt McIrvin: he spoke about it at Bester’s memorial
Major Major Major Major
@Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom:
I mean, there are a hundred million party members, so I don’t think you need to plant anybody anywhere.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom:
I’m not as sure about there being CCP plants in the concomm. Or, rather, that they were primarily there as CCP. (I’m not clear on how much overlap there is between industry figures and party membership.) But the local publishing industry definitely got its fingers into the convention, building a new venue for it and changing the planned dates; the college students in the fandom couldn’t attend.
Doug
@Redshift:
We’ll see! Montreal seems now to be bidding for 2027, for example.
YY_Sima Qian
@Major Major Major Major: I did read Zhang Chenchen’s article when she 1st published it. I follow her on Twitter, & I find her commentary some of the most refreshing on the platform. She is unapologetic in her liberalism, humanism & leftism, but also w/ the highest integrity & consistency, & is unsparing w/ her criticism of hypocrisy & BS whichever quarter they are from (see her comments on the behavior of Western governments toward Israeli conduct in Gaza, as well as Western establishment toward voices critical of Israel).
However, there is a reason why different flavors of authoritarianism have held such appeal to human polities throughout history & in every cultural context. There is also a reason why even liberal democratic governments are granted near authoritarian powers during war time or national emergencies. Liu also explicitly states the pitfalls of the mentalities Zhang referenced in the 2nd novel the Dark Forest, where the Earth’s governments during the early Deterrence Era caused social, economic, political & ecological collapse in their all out attempt (sacrificing everything else) to build defenses against the eventual Trisolaran invasion. It was a calamity called the Great Ravine, during which the human population dropped by half. The feminized/androgenized culture of the later Deterrence Era evolved in reaction to the trauma of the Great Ravine. Of course, in the books the Great Racine happened “off screen”, & are referred to by characters as historical lessons, so the impact is not visceral to the reader.
I do not think you or Zhang are necessarily wrong to have this reaction, I had the the same reaction when I read the ROEP the 1st time, & had to fight through some of the cringe to read on. Superficially, Liu does lean rather hard into trope of “bad times create hard men, hard men create good times, good times create soft men, soft men create hard times”. However, I think Liu’s main point, clear upon reflection & rereading, is that human being’s tendency toward navel gazing is unjustified & indeed fatal in the grand scheme of things. The humans are but bugs to the Trisolarans, Trisolarans but bugs to Singer, & even Singer’s civilization is but a grain of sand in the cosmos.
Major Major Major Major
@YY_Sima Qian:
I totally agree, so I think it’s interesting we have such divergent takeaways otherwise. To my eye he explicitly identifies navel-gazing with femininity and (minorly) queerness throughout all three books.
ETA and the heroes react with visceral disgust. One could argue they’re a product of their time, but they are also time travelers more or less who still manage to be right about everything else. If he’s aiming for nuance in his gender politics he’s not very good at it. And I say this as somebody who can be pretty bad at noticing some of the more subtle strains of sexism in stories.
YY_Sima Qian
@Major Major Major Major: My take is that Liu includes all of the human race’s foibles as part of that self-centered navel gazing, including Thomas Wade’s ruthless & brutalist pragmatism. What would it have achieved in the end? Wade could have just as easily precipitated a ruinous civil war before light speed propulsion could be matured. Or the telltale signatures of a light speed drive would have drawn attention from more advanced civilizations? Once the Trisolarans chose to attack, what would Cheng Xin sending the broadcast have accomplished, except mutual destruction? (In any case, Gravity sent out the broadcast that sent the Trisolaran fleets away & gave the Earth Humans a few more decades of peace during the Bunker Era.) What would someone like Thomas Wade (instead of Cheng Xin) being Swordholder have accomplished in the end? Unless humans & Trisolarans were willing to live in a black domain around the Solar System w/ dramatically reduced speed of light (& all of the quality of life ramifications)?
If anything , Liu’s ideal might be the Galactic Humans descending from the crews of Blue Space & Gravity. It is notable that, while the remnant ships trying to escape the imminent Trisolaran invasion faced their own Dark Forest in miniature, the one ship that survived the Battle of Darkness & its aftermath was the ship that chose not to fire 1st, but prepared themselves to survive the attack launched by the other ships, & only retaliated when fired upon. The Galactic Human culture that Guan Yifan described to Cheng Xin also did not feature quite the kind of brutalist ruthlessness exemplified by Thomas Wade, though 1 colony chose to consign themselves into a black domain when they thought their position was compromised. A “happy” medium perhaps.
The ROEP series is polarizing, I think how much one likes the work depends how much one values the mind bending scientific/sociological/cosmological concepts versus the uneven pacing/mostly flat characters/somewhat cringy commentary on social values. I think the human race is the main subject of the series, & I found its struggles for survival bittersweetly poignant. Hey, out of all the untold trillions of civilizations that ever existed, humanity was among the millions that actually made it to the end of the universe.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: I’m half way thru book 2. Is a bit of a slog, IMO.
Paul in KY
I’m just going to not give a shit about any future Hugo ‘winner’ (until they totally revamp their voting/vetting procedures) and just consider the Nebulas as the only SF book award.
YY_Sima Qian
@Paul in KY: If you made it that far, then do try to push through to the end. The search for the perfect GF was a cringe inducing slog for me, too.
It gets pretty mental in the last 3rd of the Dark Forest, in a most satisfying way that also fills one w/ intense cosmic terror. Well, at least to me & the series’ many fans. However, not everyone will respond the same way. If you don’t enjoy the last 3rd of the Dark Forest, then definitely don’t both w/ the Death’s End.
Absolutely atrocious English translation of the title of the 3rd book, BTW. 死神永生, the Chinese title for the 3rd book, literally means “God of Death is Eternal”, or “Death Eternal”, essentially the opposite of the English translated titled.
YY_Sima Qian
Apologies to all who is currently reading the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, perhaps in anticipation of the new Netflix TV series. Ignore my comments in this post, they contain spoilers! Should have put up spoiler warnings.
Paul in KY
@YY_Sima Qian: Will do so!
Major Major Major Major
@YY_Sima Qian:
Heh, I guess I didn’t find it all that mind bending either. Not much I hadn’t seen before and as you note it’s in a pretty rough package. I wouldn’t go so far as to compare him as a writer to Ayn Rand but there’s some parallelism. Some really interesting set pieces but just not worth the slog and the cringe and the sexism.