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ladybusinessWow, those Sad Puppy years look different from our perspective in 2024, huh?
If you follow SFF awards at all, you've heard about the release of much delayed longlist statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards. These statistics are coveted because it gives an idea of what just missed the ballot. It's not a Hugo Award, but it's still nice to look and see work you loved honored by your fellow fans. It's also nice to see yourself there! As someone who was gobsmacked the first time one of my projects showed up on the long list, I know that feeling well. It's also to see what media was just shy of the long list and see what directions the field may be going as well as up and coming writers. I've moved plenty of stuff up my TBR once I saw it was on the long list. In the early days of following the long list, I would discover media new to me completely, but that's harder to do these days.
Many people who write faster have weighed in; I don't have much to add except worries.
I'm afraid this will hurt the effort of fans currently building Glasgow 2024. In local Democratic politics, we often do a ton of work on a project. Then a national leader steps on a rake, denies stepping on the rake or that the rake existed, and gets testy with everyone asking about the rake. After being a jerk, they finally admit that the whole rake-stepping happened but it's not a big deal! In fact, it's XYZ that's the problem for even mentioning the rake to begin with. Our work, under the same general banner, is overshadowed by their flub and their denials. Their treatment of people adjacent or distanced enough from our work only see us as extensions of the flub owner and go, "Yeah, I don't want any part of their mess." I have lived through this many times. It is exhausting.
I'm worried every non-American Worldcon bid will struggle under increased suspicion, especially if bid leadership isn't white. When one group hurts an institution, anyone who comes after has to take on that mistrust. Sometimes it's fair and sometimes it's not, and any visible marginalization only compounds the unfairness. But many of us have been pushing for more international Worldcons for decades. To have this happen in the midst of all the other shenanigans with this con around toxic guests of honor, communication standards, accessibility, etc. means that the core constituency of the WSFS (which changes year to year since anyone can buy a membership) may decide to go, "Okay, let's bring it back to the US for a decade or two." It's even more of an insult, then, that the person making this worse for everyone is a white man who has never been told "no" or "STFU" in his life.
I'm worried that members of the Hugo Admin team will be able to administer this award again as part of a future bid. This includes Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow, Ann Marie Rudolph, Diane Lacey, Shi Chen, Joe Yao, Tina Wang, Dongsheng Guo, Bo Pang. To be clear, I don't know how much any of them were involved; why they made these choices, why they didn't resign when asked to make unethical decisions, and why they're allowing Dave "Old Man Yells at Sky" McCarty to be their team representative without speaking up for themselves or their involvement. There could be safety concerns. We simply don't know; the lack of transparency is another big issue. But especially for the white folks on the Hugo Admin, allowing this to happen to the award, finalists, long list members, and voters, I don't believe any future bid should let them anywhere near the Hugo Award administration going forward. If there can be no other accountability due to lack of mechanisms to create it, this would be the bare minimum.
I'm sad for all the finalists and winners this year who will inevitably feel bad about these revelations. Yeah….yeah.
There are a lot of potential fixes out there (I link to some below). My issue with fixes is that I participate in the Hugo Award as a fan without the financial ability to go to two Business Meetings in a row and support proposals, even when the convention is in the United States. It's difficult financially and sometimes unfeasible. That seems to be a trend; the people most interested in making positive, inclusive, transparent changes don't have the resources to be involved when it matters the most. I don't know how to solve this problem. An unrelated thing I wish would change along with whatever changes come out of this: keeping the award infrastructure at the same place online year to year. Instead, change who admins/accesses that site, whether it be a team from each Worldcon or another body that the future WSFS society members decide to implement. There is simply no reason anymore for it to go from site to site to site when it can just be parked somewhere, and people plugged into its home. Related to this: keep anonymized voting records that can be audited by anyone of all data on that server.
Less importantly to everything else, I'm sad for myself. When you invest a lot of your personal time for free, it hurts to be shown it was probably wasted. This is pretty on brand for me, though. Find a broken system and go, "this could be good!" Only to discover it probably could be, but it won't, because too many people with power believe it shouldn't change. Until the Business Meetings include Supporting WSFS members and give them a way to participate virtually, we'll likely just shift from crisis to crisis, never fixing the underlying issues. SHRUG EMOJI
Other people better at math/data than me have done great work talking about this issue. Here's a collection of what I've been reading/watching/ mostly in the order I found it. This is not comprehensive, simply what I've come across in my doom scrolling over this topic as I question my life choices/dedication in free labor to this award. I may update it here and there going forward as this is an active discussion.
eta: more of my recent reading
eta redux 1/25: more reading, and now I'm seeing it break containment and I mostly want to crawl into a hole
If you follow SFF awards at all, you've heard about the release of much delayed longlist statistics for the 2023 Hugo Awards. These statistics are coveted because it gives an idea of what just missed the ballot. It's not a Hugo Award, but it's still nice to look and see work you loved honored by your fellow fans. It's also nice to see yourself there! As someone who was gobsmacked the first time one of my projects showed up on the long list, I know that feeling well. It's also to see what media was just shy of the long list and see what directions the field may be going as well as up and coming writers. I've moved plenty of stuff up my TBR once I saw it was on the long list. In the early days of following the long list, I would discover media new to me completely, but that's harder to do these days.
Many people who write faster have weighed in; I don't have much to add except worries.
I'm afraid this will hurt the effort of fans currently building Glasgow 2024. In local Democratic politics, we often do a ton of work on a project. Then a national leader steps on a rake, denies stepping on the rake or that the rake existed, and gets testy with everyone asking about the rake. After being a jerk, they finally admit that the whole rake-stepping happened but it's not a big deal! In fact, it's XYZ that's the problem for even mentioning the rake to begin with. Our work, under the same general banner, is overshadowed by their flub and their denials. Their treatment of people adjacent or distanced enough from our work only see us as extensions of the flub owner and go, "Yeah, I don't want any part of their mess." I have lived through this many times. It is exhausting.
I'm worried every non-American Worldcon bid will struggle under increased suspicion, especially if bid leadership isn't white. When one group hurts an institution, anyone who comes after has to take on that mistrust. Sometimes it's fair and sometimes it's not, and any visible marginalization only compounds the unfairness. But many of us have been pushing for more international Worldcons for decades. To have this happen in the midst of all the other shenanigans with this con around toxic guests of honor, communication standards, accessibility, etc. means that the core constituency of the WSFS (which changes year to year since anyone can buy a membership) may decide to go, "Okay, let's bring it back to the US for a decade or two." It's even more of an insult, then, that the person making this worse for everyone is a white man who has never been told "no" or "STFU" in his life.
I'm worried that members of the Hugo Admin team will be able to administer this award again as part of a future bid. This includes Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow, Ann Marie Rudolph, Diane Lacey, Shi Chen, Joe Yao, Tina Wang, Dongsheng Guo, Bo Pang. To be clear, I don't know how much any of them were involved; why they made these choices, why they didn't resign when asked to make unethical decisions, and why they're allowing Dave "Old Man Yells at Sky" McCarty to be their team representative without speaking up for themselves or their involvement. There could be safety concerns. We simply don't know; the lack of transparency is another big issue. But especially for the white folks on the Hugo Admin, allowing this to happen to the award, finalists, long list members, and voters, I don't believe any future bid should let them anywhere near the Hugo Award administration going forward. If there can be no other accountability due to lack of mechanisms to create it, this would be the bare minimum.
I'm sad for all the finalists and winners this year who will inevitably feel bad about these revelations. Yeah….yeah.
There are a lot of potential fixes out there (I link to some below). My issue with fixes is that I participate in the Hugo Award as a fan without the financial ability to go to two Business Meetings in a row and support proposals, even when the convention is in the United States. It's difficult financially and sometimes unfeasible. That seems to be a trend; the people most interested in making positive, inclusive, transparent changes don't have the resources to be involved when it matters the most. I don't know how to solve this problem. An unrelated thing I wish would change along with whatever changes come out of this: keeping the award infrastructure at the same place online year to year. Instead, change who admins/accesses that site, whether it be a team from each Worldcon or another body that the future WSFS society members decide to implement. There is simply no reason anymore for it to go from site to site to site when it can just be parked somewhere, and people plugged into its home. Related to this: keep anonymized voting records that can be audited by anyone of all data on that server.
Less importantly to everything else, I'm sad for myself. When you invest a lot of your personal time for free, it hurts to be shown it was probably wasted. This is pretty on brand for me, though. Find a broken system and go, "this could be good!" Only to discover it probably could be, but it won't, because too many people with power believe it shouldn't change. Until the Business Meetings include Supporting WSFS members and give them a way to participate virtually, we'll likely just shift from crisis to crisis, never fixing the underlying issues. SHRUG EMOJI
Other people better at math/data than me have done great work talking about this issue. Here's a collection of what I've been reading/watching/ mostly in the order I found it. This is not comprehensive, simply what I've come across in my doom scrolling over this topic as I question my life choices/dedication in free labor to this award. I may update it here and there going forward as this is an active discussion.
- BlueSky thread from Jason Sanford
- Hugo Award final Data--and my Ineligiblity(?!?!)
- Didi's short recap on TikTok
- My priority questions about the Hugo Stats
- Outrage Season
- Elections Have Consequences
- Stitch & Bitch livestream
- The 2023 Hugo nomination statistics have finally been released – and we have questions
- This legal thread about trademarks (which I only partly understood and have no clue about, but I did read the whole thing, so...)
- This BlueSky thread by Abigail Nussbaum on award admin integrity
- Genre Grapevine on the Hugo Awards’ “not eligible” problem
- A Comparison of Hugo Nomination Distribution Statistics
- Hugo 2023 Noms: Mind the Gap
- Decoupling the Hugos
- What’s Up With Babel and the Hugos?
- Twitter thread from Arthur Liu
- Well, I sure don’t like this (I’m talking about the Hugo stats) (this is from someone I really trust re: Business Meeting politics)
- The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk
- BlueSky thread from Nibedita Sen about Dave McCarty
- this entire trashfire where McCarty has Neil Gaiman is his comments asking for clarification. If Gaiman spoke to me like this on the public internet I would simply turn to crystal and shatter into a billion pieces.
- R.F. Kuang's statement
- Hugo Nominating Stats Rascality and a Brief History of Where it All Started
- Numbers thread from the guy who helped create/pass the voting system the Hugos use
- The Hugo Awards Are Facing Yet Another Controversy
- Instagram post from Xiran Jay Zhao, which has 50K likes. I guess it's fine for white dudes to treat the Hugo trademark like a particularly hated soccer ball? Good luck if you're a marginalized AO3 writer joking about being a Hugo winner, though.
eta: more of my recent reading
- Burning Down the Hugo Awards: A Look at the Irregularities in the 2023 Nominating Statistics, What We Know, and What It Means
- I’m coming around to the Unified Stuff-Up theory
- China--to be avoided? (Whereupon I engage with Dave McCarty)
- Thoughts from Yudhanjaya Wijeratne on the Hugo Awards; this is a Twitter post with images that don't have alt text, so I dug up the original text on reddit.
- Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors
- Worldcon does it again: this is a Metafilter commentary thread, so a bunch of different folks with opinions.
eta redux 1/25: more reading, and now I'm seeing it break containment and I mostly want to crawl into a hole
- This thread goes into reaction from Chinese fans with some screencaps, and a volunteer steps up to provide a translation of at least part of them because otherwise it was being done by machine translation, which is...a problem. The main takeaway from the one human-translated post seems to be: Chinese SFF fans are also (rightly) angry.
- Controversy over 'inexplicable' exclusion of R F Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao from Hugo Awards 2023
- Nothing About the Hugo Awards’ Inexplicable Exclusion of R. F. Kuang’s ‘Babel’ Makes Sense
- Statement on Irregularities and Disqualifications within the 2023 Hugo Awards
- What is Going On With the 2023 Hugo Awards?
- Hugo Awards under fire over censorship accusations, and SFF writers want answers
no subject
Date: 2024-01-23 08:51 pm (UTC)So, I know my opinion doesn't count for much, but this is another good take on it all.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-23 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-23 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 07:49 pm (UTC)I mean, I guess there's so many unknowns, and, perhaps to whatever extent pressure was brought to bear, it may be unsafe for people in a dangerous situation if we ever knew the details of what happened.
But I guess... if there was no pressure, then individual moral weakness is at stake. I just didn't know that was an interpretation of events that had much traction.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 10:52 am (UTC)As a non-USian, I will say that I only go to non-USA world cons, and that if the broader membership were to decide to 'bring it back' to the USA for a significant period I would walk away from WorldCon and the Hugos. I appreciate the work that people have done to encourage the voting membership to vote for the wider range of options.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-24 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-27 02:14 pm (UTC)The lack of response is quite alarming now that so much detail about how messed up the vote numbers are plus the disqualifications.