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Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China

ilaksh
81 replies
15h58m

“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,” said Lacey, who did not respond to a request for comment.

“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.”

Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.

That's pretty bad. But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?

idlewords
25 replies
15h34m

You can't solve the world's problems at a sci-fi conference, but an easy first step is not to pre-emptively censor on behalf of anyone.

bdw5204
24 replies
15h22m

An easy first step would be to not hold a sci-fi conference in a totalitarian dictatorship. Why couldn't they have just held it in Japan or South Korea or Taiwan instead?

lukev
12 replies
15h16m

Because the site of Worldcon is selected by members (i.e, sci-fi fans) of which China has _many_.

In fact, this whole debacle has hurt them the most since it seems many/most Chinese authors were excluded by default since the amateur self-appointed censors couldn't actually be bothered to figure out what disqualification criteria would be, just that it could be "sensitive to China."

domador
6 replies
14h48m

Maybe the site of Worldcon is what should be "censored" (vetted and altered) by the organizers.

TheCoelacanth
5 replies
14h14m

There's not really any organizers who could make that decision.

The organizers are just whoever won the vote to run the conference that year. There's no actual organization that persists from year to year.

persnickety
3 replies
13h35m

That selection criterion means there is some continuity and persistent organization.

Otherwise I could announce a Worldcon unilaterally and no one would have the grounds to stop me.

TheCoelacanth
2 replies
13h0m

The only standing committee is the Mark Protection Committee which has the power to enforce trademarks and nothing else. They couldn't do anything to change the location.

toyg
1 replies
8h7m

Surely they could refuse to endorse the event, retracting any right to the "Hugo Awards" brand. The event would have to use another name, which would highlight the schism. Obviously a dangerous game, as the committee would attract more scrutiny on its composition and role as ultimate owner of the brand, but probably worth considering as a nuclear option in case, say, "fans" vote for Saudi Arabia next year (yes, "fans" - I'm sure any semi-competent state actor can easily stuff ballots in polls like these...).

TheCoelacanth
0 replies
3h44m

That's the equivalent of the "Mike Pence can make Donald Trump president" theory. They administer the trademark according to the rules laid out in the WSFS constitution; they don't decide who is allowed to use the trademark.

The Chengdu bid won the vote legitimately. They would have been massively overstepping their authority to try to prevent it. It's unlikely they could have even won a court case if they tried to prevent it.

michaelmrose
0 replies
13h56m

Maybe there shouldn't be one one next year then. I know I plan to ignore them thereafter no matter what they do and I hardly think I'm the only one.

whatshisface
1 replies
14h1m

the amateur self-appointed censors couldn't actually be bothered to figure out what disqualification criteria would be

...as opposed to professional government-appointed censors?

pototo666
0 replies
11h44m

Good point. Besides, there is no detailed guidebook on censorship in China. Every organization (media, social media) has to guess what the gov wants to censor. As a result, every organization tends to overdo it. Because 1). you never know if you miss one target that should be censored and 2). What is OK today might not be OK tomorrow. Censorship in China is an art (or joke).

wrs
0 replies
15h4m

My impression is that’s how it works. There’s never a clear definition from the government, so whoever’s doing the self-censoring has to guess (and err on the safe side).

squarefoot
0 replies
7h0m

Because the site of Worldcon is selected by members (i.e, sci-fi fans) of which China has _many_.

One could argue that when parties involved have so different population numbers, probably using the percentage of votes relative to a country population, instead of just number of votes would be a better solution.

baq
0 replies
6h12m

China also has many CCP members, some of them are told to vote for China everywhere possible. It ends exactly like this every time. Remember the NBA scandal?

techsupporter
9 replies
15h15m

At each WorldCon, host committees of science fiction groups from cities put up bids to host the WorldCon to be held two years hence. In 2021, Chengdu and Manitoba had committees on the roster. WorldCon voters chose Chengdu.

The problem is one of effective power: do you tell people who live in these regimes, "sorry, you cannot participate in this culture because your government is bad." How much pull do they have to change things, especially this sort of thing? Or do you say "you can participate, but only at a lower tier." Either way is going to put some people into an out-group. Maybe that's the right thing to do--paradox of tolerance, for instance--for the rest of the people in the group or culture. Maybe it isn't.

I know it would hurt pretty badly to be a science fiction enthusiast in China, perhaps even someone who really does not like what their government does, and not be able to participate. On the other hand, it hurts to be potentially on the list for your work's most prestigious honor, only to be "disqualified" because you "might" have written about something that isn't permitted in the host country you couldn't have predicted.

ipaddr
3 replies
14h29m

What if Gaza was selected or the Ukraine? Most orgs would have a policy. Excluding hosts that can't meet standards is what the Olympics does when selecting a host city.

tialaramex
2 replies
7h45m

Why mention the Olympics? I don't think anybody's concern was that the Worldcon isn't corrupt enough, or that it's not doing enough to leverage its prestige to entrench corporate greed?

The Olympic Committee aren't quite as awful as FIFA, I don't sense plans to hold a winter games in Qatar for a fat bribe for example, but they're pretty bad.

denton-scratch
0 replies
5h57m

The Olympic Committee aren't quite as awful as FIFA

I'm not sure how you can tell. They're both completely rotten, as far as I can see: not an honest person among them.

baq
0 replies
6h3m

Sochi wasn’t Qatar… but only just

Wowfunhappy
2 replies
14h31m

Do you tell people who live in these regimes, "sorry, you cannot participate in this culture because your government is bad?"

Yes. Sorry, that's how it goes.

If I'm running a dance competition, I should not hold the award ceremony in a country which outlaws certain types of dance, lest they arrest some of my attendees.

Similarly, if I'm running a literature competition, I shouldn't hold it in a country that outlaws certain types of literature.

This isn't about trying to change anything per se, it's just practical.

maxglute
1 replies
14h17m

You can buy the books in PRC. They're not outlawed. The issue is when authors politics are obvious source of controversy relative to local politics. Hugo is not stranger to such drama. Except fallout from ideological drama is extra bad for business in PRC. 8B RMB / 1B USD of deals was made at Chengdu convention, everyone tends to self censor / avoid blowback when that kind of money is involved.

Wowfunhappy
0 replies
4h47m

Books are not banned, but certain books are.

nkrisc
0 replies
14h37m

“Sorry, your government won’t let you participate. Take it up with them.”

Only the Chinese people can change China.

michaelmrose
0 replies
13h41m

People in China are neither wholly responsible for the actions of their state nor are they wholly separate and apart from it. The state and its people in any society that isn't tearing itself apart reflect one another and share many values. If you don't want your association to be infected by the spirit of self censorship and propriety shared by a 1.4 billion people you can't simultaneously allow them to vote on where to hold the conference or how. You need to settle on a set of rules that isn't up for vote like not holding it in dictatorships or countries without meaningful freedom of speech and press.

bloqs
0 replies
15h13m

This seems to be the only sensible response to this... what do people expect

Dalewyn
16 replies
15h51m

But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?

Cordon off that part of the world and leave them to their devices.

The old saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

ilaksh
13 replies
15h41m

That's not currently possible because all of the best devices come out of the border between that part and the rest (Taiwan).

So we can't leave the devices. We need them.

I think this ties into the $7 trillion Altman quest a bit.

Maybe if you build enough reactors and chip fabs then the world becomes safer?

yieldcrv
12 replies
15h34m

We take those $50bn aid packages requests, and invest it into a state side semiconductor supply chain instead and then we can ignore the idea of China invading China forever. Literally 180+ countries operating with that specific level of empathy right this moment, let’s meet parity with them.

Given the clamoring for semiconductors right now, a more expensive state side will sell like hotcakes.

I guarantee you this won’t be seen as controversial in the world that exists after we did that. We’re going to look back at this time and think “lol what”

ProjectArcturis
4 replies
15h24m

Swear off defending Taiwan, let millions of people die when China sees weakness and invades, but it's cool because we got chips bro.

yieldcrv
2 replies
15h17m

Meet parity with 180+ countries level of empathy until our internal infrastructure meets parity with other developed nation’s 21st century level of advances.

PaulHoule
1 replies
15h0m

Calling any US airport a "third-world" airport is an insult to the third world.

yieldcrv
0 replies
14h12m

Uniquely, we have the resources for that not to be the case. We could have the best infrastructure of any nation, across the entire continent and far flung extremities

Just held up by a lack of leadership, lack of consensus, and paranoia

Zpalmtree
0 replies
9h58m

this but unironically

light_hue_1
3 replies
15h22m

Yup. Because having no allies, no one to back us up in the international stage, no access to resources, no trading partners, just a world united against us is totally a logical way to live. That won't have any negative consequences for a country that depends on both imports and exports.

When did the Trump possy arrive at HN?

yieldcrv
0 replies
15h14m

interesting conclusion that this is a Trump supposition, when you’re entire worldview is that “they’re against us” unless we pay for our friends

the defense industry isn't partisan and you’re totally subscribed to their faulty logic for your money

swells34
0 replies
15h16m

You can find idiots and assholes in every sector; they've always been there, just are more vocal now.

Dalewyn
0 replies
15h9m

I suppose you are correct that China commands far more geopolitical power than anyone else including the US today. China knows how to play this game far better than anyone; the Hugos being held in China was just one example of many of that.

This state of matters won't change whether it's the Republicans or Democrats in the State Department, though.

zopa
2 replies
6h10m

Good news: we’re spending more than five times that on domestic semiconductor manufacturing, already, starting two years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

yieldcrv
1 replies
2h42m

I remember that act, thanks

zopa
0 replies
50m

Then I’m not sure why you’re arguing that $50 billion would make the problem go away. Care to explain the good faith reason if you have one?

justinclift
0 replies
11h29m

Cordon off that part of the world and leave them to their devices.

Who would cordon them off?

The US probably couldn't due to their extreme manufacturing dependency on China.

China's friends and allies clearly wouldn't cordon them off, and some of them share land borders with China.

China also has a substantial coastline, which adds even more complication.

cookie_monsta
0 replies
15h19m

Cordon off that part of the world and leave them to their devices.

Lol. If the US couldn't even boycott little old Cuba into regime change, what chance do they have with China?

__MatrixMan__
11 replies
14h55m

I think a good start would be to develop useful technology that doesn't have any choke points for the authoritarians to capitalize on. If the internet were gossipped device-to-device at stoplights and in elevators and wherever people congregate, it would be very hard to control the flow of information.

The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.

gtirloni
6 replies
14h27m

The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants?

__MatrixMan__
2 replies
13h31m

I was responding to:

But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?

We're hackers, we solve things with hacks.

But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event.

But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes.

The message would be:

we can make aggregate decisions without your interference

Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.

justinclift
0 replies
11h35m

But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests ...

That seems like a hole in the concept.

For the situation where the authorities are turning up to arrest people, it's most likely they're not being arrested for winning.

It's more likely they're being arrested for other things that happened before.

So, the award situation is more being used as a useful honeypot to get them physically there.

Those people would be arrested anyway, regardless of whether they win.

gtirloni
0 replies
6h33m

I like acts of civil disobedience against an authoritarian regime but this will accomplish nothing other than put the lives of these people at risk.

If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.

CoastalCoder
2 replies
14h0m

The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants?

I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a SF story!

gtirloni
0 replies
6h43m

I see what you did there and I approve ;)

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
13h18m

That's good to hear. I am writing that SF story.

safety1st
3 replies
14h11m

This take seems disconnected from the facts of the matter at hand - it wasn't a technology problem, it was a human problem. The Hugo organizers voluntarily chose to censor the awards because a Chinese city had been selected by the venue. Technology was not at issue, nor was capitalism. They chose to support authoritarianism and diminished the integrity of the awards in the process.

__MatrixMan__
2 replies
13h10m

Yes but we are makers of technology, not organizers of awards, and the question was: (paraphrasing) what can we do about it?

Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do).

I believe Tor was created due to similar logic.

safety1st
1 replies
8h54m

Actually a great point and I'd much rather be building something that solves the problem than just complaining about it. But what information technology could possibly solve the problem here? The nature of the awards ceremony is that it's public and the issue was with it needing to physically take place in China...

__MatrixMan__
0 replies
2h46m

Setting the transport layer aside (which would be tricky, since you have to avoid relying on anything thar can be used to interfere), you'd want all the same things you'd need to pull off an illegal election, or contribute remotely to organizing a protest: A web of trust, a userbase that's practiced in maintaining it, and the ability to vote and agree on some outcome without revealing which real identities correspond with the voters, but while still providing proof that this was indeed an outcome chosen by a majority (or you know, customizable logic here), among people you've explicitly trusted, pseudonymously or otherwise.

It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before.

It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc.

People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check.

----

I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset.

I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code.

Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.

themacguffinman
10 replies
15h44m

Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.

They were scared into doing the censorship. Saying they overdid the censorship implies there is an acceptable level of censorship that they could have done.

And why does anyone have to have a plan for rectifying China's authoritarianism? It's up to China to do that. In the meantime, we can incentivize China by refusing to whitewash their behavior with prestigioius cultural awards. You don't get to have cultural prestige while you destroy culture with authoritarianism.

hyperman1
3 replies
8h26m

I see some discussions on Disqus or Reddit where people don't mention Corona because the posts might be removed and the accounts flagged. I see people put stars in swe*rwords. I see people commit all kinds of contortions to not mention any kinds of possibly sexual content.

No censor has been able to check everything. The point has always been to get people to self-censor, and even stop thinking about it as censorship.

So here we see the west reacting on Chinese censors. As an European, I've wondered about how the supposed land of the free managed to build a culture of deep puritan self-censorship. Undoubtly, I have my own built in Europe-based self censoring and can't even notice it.

I was in fact wondering if I could post this here, without risk of downvoting, flagging or account removal. I decided to take that risk and post, because a) to hell with virtual internet points b) HN is still reasonably free. But this post would not have much chance on Disqus/Reddit, and I did think about it so censorship works.

Mountain_Skies
2 replies
7h3m

Most of the western world gave authoritarianism a huge vote of confidence with the pandemic response and still are unable to come to terms with what this means or their responsibility for it. How can the west stop its increasing addiction to authoritarianism when most of it can't even admit that it is a problem?

hyperman1
1 replies
6h27m

This started a lot earlyer than the pandemic, however. I've seen a huge increase when the WTC has been attacked.

Older example: American culture had huge puritan censorship on comics in th 1960's. The stories are heavily infantilized, and even the word for them became 'comics'. A new word, 'graphical novels' was needed to make the same things acceptable to a somewhat older public. Culture in Belgium is completely different: there is a much more natural progression, from children stories to young adult and adult ages. Adult also does not automatically imply sex. They're just books, with pictures.

I do think politicians became aware of the internet between 2010 and 2020, and covid gave them the excuse needed to start thought control and censirship on the new media.

hnfong
0 replies
4h9m

Arguably the US censors were late to the party. Years ago Facebook execs proudly boasted to have been part of popular uprisings that toppled regimes around the world (eg. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS1650658071/ ) .

It was only in recent years they realized it could happen locally too. It coincided roughly with COVID, but I guess before that they didn't realize how much social media shaped the political landscape (of every country that allowed them). Personally it feels like the social media censors started getting serious at that point.

persnickety
2 replies
13h38m

I don't know, maybe some people are not fine sitting around waiting for the bully to reform while the bully keeps bullying.

themacguffinman
1 replies
13h15m

I'm not fine with that either, I think it's essential to rectify the bullying by protecting countries & organizations like the one behind the Hugo Awards from being bullied.

But that is different from rectifying the bully, which I'm sure you already know is extremely costly and difficult.

persnickety
0 replies
12h4m

While that is the issue discussed here, authoritarianism hurts those trapped as part of the system the most. It's diffcult to protect the system without directly affecting the system.

AceJohnny2
2 replies
12h51m

This is really a case study demonstrating how authoritarian regimes enforce their power.

Have trigger-happy and excessive punishments to violations will scare the rest of the population into self-enforcing the rules.

mrguinea
1 replies
12h38m

As someone that has been monitored electronically assaulted experimented on etc in the west and grew up in an authoritarian society in a non Western country it’s always interesting to read about what people’s conception of authoritarian is very 1984 esque

Jensson
0 replies
6h1m

monitored electronically assaulted experimented on etc

You mean web analytics, ads and A/B testing when you visit a site? I don't think that is comparable to being put in prison etc.

maxglute
8 replies
14h9m

Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.

More than 1 billion with a B, US dollars worth of deals was signed at Chengdu convention. Why incentivize with fear when that much money is on the line. Western media/businesses selling out to PRC is not new.

justinclift
3 replies
11h39m

More than 1 billion with a B, US dollars worth of deals was signed at Chengdu convention.

Where are you getting that figure from?

maxglute
2 replies
9h1m

Investment deals valued at approximately 8 billion yuan ($1.09 billion) were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.

https://www.china.org.cn/arts/2023-10/23/content_116768150.h... 10%2F23%2Fcontent_116768150.htm

There's reporting from other write ups behind the scenes from apparent Chinese organizers talking about how the event got rapidly captured by commercial interests.

justinclift
0 replies
7h59m

Interesting, thanks. :)

---

Weirdly, that link is showing an invalid https cert. The non-https version of the page seems to load ok though.

denton-scratch
0 replies
5h53m

What are these investment deals? Why are they being signed at a scifi convention?

marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China.

Since when did scifi need investment for development?

mulmen
1 replies
14h5m

Whats the marginal benefit of hosting in Chengdu? Presumably deals would have been signed at other locations too.

maxglute
0 replies
13h44m

More graft/kick back opporunities. Also a billion dollars? Seems unlikely considering scale of typical Hugo (as far as I'm aware).

eviks
1 replies
11h57m

That's easy - because there is not enough money in the world for that, there are also more people with a B, and western media not selling out is also not new

maxglute
0 replies
8h56m

Let's be real, incentives from being around a billion dollars is almost always enough money. Most sell out for much less. US gov has to resort to export controls to prevent folks from caving to that kind of financial incentive.

_heimdall
2 replies
14h22m

Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.

What does that mean exactly? What's the line for simply doing, or underdoing, the censorship?

jerkstate
0 replies
13h49m

“I know it when I see it” -Potter Stewart

eviks
0 replies
12h0m

The line is other people's reaction

safety1st
0 replies
13h54m

"Rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world" was not the committee's job. Their job was something much simpler: to conduct the awards with integrity.

If some external actor (say the Chinese government) makes that impossible then you cancel the awards. This comes down to McCarty and the people under him not upholding the values of the WSFS and appropriately they have now all been censured or sacked.

This could have been handled much much better and while it probably looked very scary and hard to an amateur, you would think the people at this level of authority in the organization would not be amateurs. The best way for things to go down probably would have been for the committee to engage early and aggressively with Chinese authorities, state their commitment to free speech assertively, make it clear that they were going to give awards to Chinese political dissidents, and then when the Chinese responded with "you're not going to get a permit for that" or whatever other signal emerged that respecting the Hugo's principles was a no-go in China, you make that information public and you cancel the awards. If it happens early enough you move the venue, if it happens too late in the game maybe you have to do them online or something. All better options than compromising the awards. Yeah the members who chose Chengdu are not going to be happy but that's better than EVERYONE losing respect for you and that's also why you engage with Chinese authorities in good faith until they admit that this thing is gonna be a no-go... let China defend its own policies don't do it for them.

nine_k
0 replies
11h40m

I would say that crashing and burning might be better overall, both for not dilutiong the reputation of Hugo by the allegations of caving to pressure (because pressure there was), and demonstrating the problems with China's censorship, to the Chinese themselves (who had voted for Chengdu) among others.

h0l0cube
0 replies
15h12m

But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?

Rather than solve this intractable problem, simply don't host literary awards in a country that outright censors criticism of the government (or anything really)

themacguffinman
41 replies
16h15m

This time it didn't seem to work out well for the organizers. The organization behind the Hugo Awards "Worldcon Intellectual Property" announced resignations and censures in response to this:

Dave McCarty has resigned as a Director of W.I.P.

Kevin Standlee has resigned as Chair of the W.I.P. Board of Directors (BoD).

Dave McCarty – censured for his public comments that have led to harm of the goodwill and value of our marks and for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.

Chen Shi – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.

Kevin Standlee – reprimanded for public comments that mistakenly led people to believe that we are not servicing our marks.

Ben Yalow – censured for actions of the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon that he presided over.

From https://www.wsfs.org/2024/01/31/announcements-from-worldcon-...

hn_throwaway_99
38 replies
13h20m

Glad to see this, but then I have to wonder why the organization decided to have the event in China in the first place?

kevin_thibedeau
28 replies
13h6m

Three Body Problem isn't good enough to legitimately win a Hugo. There's clearly money lining pockets to promote their culture and political cant.

QuesnayJr
7 replies
11h50m

This is ultimately subjective, but I thought the Three Body Problem trilogy was the best sci-fi novels in 20 years.

Larrikin
5 replies
11h37m

3 Body problem is the novel that made me go from reading one sci Fi novel every couple years to ferociously reading multiple per year for a while trying to recapture the feeling I had reading it. Have read some good ones after but nothing so far that captured me in the same way.

ethbr1
4 replies
10h37m

The 3 Body Problem love reminded me of someone who's never read Lovecraft, reading Lovecraft for the first time.

I.e.: mind blown, best book ever.

Instead of: interesting in some ways, weak in a lot of others, and ultimately on par with similar other books.

I'd put any of the Culture series up against 3BP any day.

QuesnayJr
3 replies
8h20m

Again this is subjective. I think 3BP is better than the Culture novels, and I like the Culture novels and have read 6 of them.

arnavpraneet
2 replies
8h5m

same, and I have read far more Culture novels than I have read Cixin Liu. 3BP was refreshing in a way very few books are.

baq
1 replies
6h16m

Refreshing is perhaps the best word to describe the book. Excellent out of not, it’s barely good, but quite different from western sf, which earns it extra credit.

ethbr1
0 replies
2h39m

which earns it extra credit

Does it?

Maybe this is what bifurcates opinions on it!

I'd agree it's different: I just don't think it's different and good. And difference alone doesn't bump it past similar but better-written books, imho.

7734128
0 replies
7h31m

The protein unfolding technobabbel in the end just killed any interest in reading the sequel for me.

e12e
4 replies
12h33m

While not my favorite book, I think it's certainly Hugo quality. What would you pick for 2015? Besides, winning would seem fair, nominations possibly not?

The list was:

https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2015-hugo-awards/

The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books)

The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)

Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK)

Skin Game, Jim Butcher (Orbit UK/Roc Books)

The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books)

ciberado
1 replies
9h22m

I read "The Three Body Problem" due to all the promotion it received at the time. In fact, I proposed it as the first book for our small reading club. We all agreed that I should have simply bought some beers and read whatever book another member had proposed. While the book presented two very good ideas (the nature of the history loop and the "computer architecture"), it was marred by excessive repetition, flat characters, and poor writing (at least, in the Spanish version). Some characters' reactions to certain events were utterly ridiculous, and the deus ex machina resolution was disappointing. The structure was so repetitious that it seemed as if half of the book was the same chapter repeated over and over. I found it quite boring.

I would appreciate any suggestions for works by other Chinese science fiction authors, as I understand that it's not fair to judge such a vast culture based on a single data point.

int_19h
0 replies
8h12m

I concur on all your points. The writing was so bad - basically middle of the line fanfic level - that at first I thought that it was a low-quality English translation; but I was assured that it was faithful to the original. When it was announced as Hugo winner, I was speechless.

I should also add that as reasonably hard sci-fi goes, the very notion of "sophons" (and their mechanics) as presented are not even wrong. In general, when it comes to most sci-fi elements of the book aside from the titular concept, it felt like someone just clipped whatever sounded cool from a popular science magazine and then tried to write a segment of the story around it - i.e. some things, like nanowires/sheets, are introduced not because they make sense in context, but solely for the cool factor.

vertoc
0 replies
12h19m

Personally, I enjoyed Goblin Emperor much more

the_why_of_y
0 replies
8h23m

2015 was the first year of the Rabid Puppies, as can be seen from "No Award" actually winning the Best Novella and Best Short Story categories, among others.

We'll never know who would have won in the absence of all that ballot stuffing.

A_D_E_P_T
3 replies
8h57m

N.K. Jemisin won three years in a row, which is far worse. (Three Body Problem was actually okay, though it seemed to me that books 2 & 3 were far better than the first.)

At this point, I'd say just about anything is legitimately good enough to win a Hugo.

watwut
1 replies
7h7m

Broken Earth is absolutely awesome. I don't like everything Jemisin wrote, but her hugo win was 100% deserved.

baq
0 replies
6h19m

It was ok, but not earth shattering.

int_19h
0 replies
8h10m

Jemisin gets a lot of flak for her politics and the way she weaves it into narratives, but as far as quality of writing itself goes, I'd say she's vastly better. Characters behave like, well, people, not like cardboard cutouts that are there to say the line that author needs to be said.

MattPalmer1086
2 replies
6h56m

I personally enjoyed it a lot, although the later books were better.

The writing style wasn't brilliant, but it was a translation. I don't necessarily expect great literature from sci fi. The ideas were cool though and that's my main thing.

kevin_thibedeau
1 replies
3h40m

The translation had zero impact on one character who is a sociopathic murderess and faces zero consequences after confessing to the authorities.

MattPalmer1086
0 replies
1h8m

It didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Each to their own.

stubish
1 replies
11h55m

Your opinion on the novel aside, the Hugo's are awarded by popular vote and winners do not have to be 'good'.

justinclift
0 replies
11h47m

the Hugo's are awarded by popular vote

Except this time around, of course. :(

dcminter
1 replies
10h45m

Three Body Problem isn't good enough

Look, I personally hate it, but it comes up here as a top recommendation constantly.

notahacker
0 replies
6h7m

Yeah. I didn't exactly find it memorable[1], but I was recommended it by relatives whose literary tastes don't usually include scifi

[1]pretty much the only bit I really remember is how the oppressive Cultural Revolution era backdrop made the idea of alien overlords seem worth considering, so I'm particularly struggling to see it as a promotion of Chinese values...

NotSammyHagar
1 replies
12h22m

I disagree. I thought it was great, had creative ideas and concepts, enjoyed it reading the English translation.

pitaj
0 replies
11h47m

Yeah I really enjoyed the whole trilogy.

bawolff
0 replies
10h34m

I personally didn't super like it, but lots of people do. It definitely has the fan base to win a hugo, and a lot worse books have won in the past.

arathis
0 replies
11h3m

Nonsense.

zhdc1
2 replies
13h5m

There was a good discussion on Reddit about it. I don’t have the link but it should be easy to find.

Annual meetings are apparently organized by local groups who lobby/compete with one another. China has a very large SciFi readership and the group from Chengdu was very active when it came to lobbying and gathering votes. It wasn’t until later that people started to realize this may not have been the best decision, e.g. with visa applications and so on.

As far as the actual scandal, there’s also discussion about whether there was any actual government intervention or if this was mainly the result of self-sensorship.

themacguffinman
1 replies
13h0m

The risk of government intervention (read: penalties for everyone involved) is what drives self-censorship. There's no meaningful distinction between the two.

dkjaudyeqooe
0 replies
12h10m

read: penalties for everyone involved

Read: being denied an exit visa, arbitrary detention, torture, being disappeared, being executed.

These are all things that the Chinese government does as a matter of course.

For instance, this Australian woman spent 3 years in detention and was tortured for releasing a government report a few minutes early:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/like-...

svl
2 replies
8h31m

As others have said, between competing bids for who'd host Worldcon in 2023, China got the most votes (from registered fans at an earlier Worldcon).

However, there was also controversy about this, as a very large number of those votes lacked an address (a minimal safety feature to give some indication that votes belong to distinct people). The responsible committee decided not to count them, but was overruled. If it wasn't for that, Chengdu wouldn't have won the bid.

saiya-jin
1 replies
7h19m

That's an obvious scam that any trained eye spots in 5 seconds, and very typical for more primitive undemocratic societies like Russia and China. I am curious why nobody reacted since at least few must have realized this.

Once you clarify you deal with scam no voting can overrule anything, you can easily go public and expose people if they would keep pushing for it. This is 2024, we have (at least some) tools to deal with such things in such situations.

pavel_lishin
0 replies
4h11m

According to Charles Stross's explanation of how Worldcons work, you don't really need to fake votes - you can just buy them at $50/pop:

My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"

They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldco...

No scam involved at all, to be honest - just regular voting-with-money.

euroderf
0 replies
9h19m

Considering that China is the most populous country on the planet, and that some of its sci-fi has recently attracted worldwide attention, it makes sense that China gets a shot at hosting.

And then... they screwed it up.

TheCoelacanth
0 replies
12h51m

There is no actual organization that makes decisions. It's a fan convention with no governance structure other than that whoever shows up at the convention gets to vote on things.

At each convention, fan groups that want to host the convention after the next one submit proposals and then attendees vote to choose one. Whichever wins the vote gets to run the convention.

DinoCoder99
0 replies
12h40m

Why not?

svl
1 replies
8h43m

Please note that Kevin Standlee is a good egg here, and was not involved with this iteration of the Hugo awards and everything which went wrong with it.

His only fault was saying something impolitic at the wrong time, which people feared would be misunderstood due to his position as Chair. (You can see the difference in censured/reprimanded and in the reasoning behind it, but it's easy to skip over that and just retain the list of names. Kevin does not deserve to be lumped in with the others!)

geoelectric
0 replies
7h50m

Thanks for this. Kevin has been a part of the Bay Area SF fandom community for a very long time, and I’ve never known him to be anything other than a good, honorable person. I was saddened to see his name on the list of people associated with this, and would have a hard time believing he’d ever act intentionally to undermine Worldcon or the Hugos.

mensetmanusman
13 replies
14h49m

The fear China uses to control its population is leaking out of their country.

max47
10 replies
12h56m

The fear people have on NH about China is >10x worse than what real chinese people living in China feel about their own government. After living there for a while, the things I hear on US social media sounds like it came strait out of a South Park parody. Many of the supposedly high crimes that may get you jailed or killed (according to Americans) are the equivalent of jaywalking in New York City.

aurareturn
8 replies
12h45m

Exactly this. I felt extremely safe in Shenzen. More safe than I've ever been in any American city.

Maximum propaganda about China in the west has done people in. But people in the west still swears that they actually have press freedom. Yet, no mainstream press will ever write anything remotely positive about China or simply daily life in China.

throwaway2990
2 replies
8h7m

lol plenty of mainstream media write positivity about China. But equally they write about how terrible the CCP is because, it’s the truth.

aurareturn
1 replies
7h0m

Source?

Also, define “equally” in your context.

throwaway2990
0 replies
1h4m

Source? Mainstream media. There’s no conspiracy saying “only post negative stuff”

sharlos201068
1 replies
9h48m

Of course you felt safe, you weren't publically opposing the regime.

arp242
0 replies
1h46m

And had a US passport, which gives some protection, which also means they can just leave.

It takes staggering levels of privilege to claim visiting China as a US national is the same as living there as a Chinese national.

People don't understand how these authoritarian regimes work because it's so far outside of their experience. During the Nazi rule and occupation most people just continued their lives as before, especially during the first few years. What else could you do, right? And mostly, it was kind of okay. But it wasn't "safe" by any means, even for non-Jews. But people also weren't shaking with fear 24/7.

snowpid
0 replies
9h18m

I know one German mainstream news paper which did it. How many news papers from the West do you read? H

pvaldes
0 replies
6h25m

no mainstream press will ever write anything remotely positive daily life in China.

The number of videos that westerners are receiving with positive messages about daily life in China, (or S. Korea, or Japan) on tablets, laptops or TV channels has never been so high in fact.

phist_mcgee
0 replies
10h25m

Who says that feeling safe and authoritarian police states are mutually exclusive?

In fact they go hand in hand, the state offers security and protection and the citizen offers up political agency and free-speech.

pvaldes
0 replies
6h33m

the things I hear on US social media sounds like it came strait out of a South Park parody.

The problem is that this history in particular is indistinguishable from a South Park parody

Other things said may be or not be true, but as we are talking about this history, it seems backed by solid and credible evidences.

imiric
0 replies
10h19m

This is not new. China has always ran strong external influence campaigns. This has only ramped up in recent years under Xi.

China has police presence around the world[1]. And remember how they controlled the narrative around COVID, the dubious WHO report in 2020, and this interview[2]?

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-overseas-police-service-cente...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

anon-sre-srm
0 replies
13h31m

Greed and feeble cowardice enable it while denying creativity and freedom.

hunglee2
13 replies
16h11m

"Some books, like Kuang’s “Babel” — which won the 2023 British Book Award for Fiction — appear to have been excluded simply for taking place in China"

In Western media, anti-China prejudice can be turned into more anti-China prejudice by simple reframing.

AbrahamParangi
12 replies
16h5m

Something amusing about “anti-China prejudice” is that generally speaking most countries don’t especially care if you badmouth them. Can you imagine Americans up in arms that someone in China doesn’t like or respect America? And don’t scour the internet to find outlier examples, any reasonable person well acquainted with American culture knows the answer.

aurareturn
10 replies
11h52m

  Can you imagine Americans up in arms that someone in China doesn’t like or respect America?
Yes. Absolutely.

But in general, Americans have hate China at a personal level. The Chinese do not hate Americans at a personal level. They see the conflict as just political - not personal. The level of anti-China propaganda in the US far exceeds the level of anti-American propaganda in China in my opinion.

AbrahamParangi
4 replies
4h42m

See, this is the thing. It’s just wrong in spirit. Americans just don’t care about China. Americans don’t particularly think about any other countries, period, and they definitely don’t care what those countries think of them.

aurareturn
3 replies
4h8m

That seems wrong. Every mainstream American news publication is doing anti China propaganda. Major politicians are using China as something scary they can protect you from to win elections. Even on HN, you get one or two anti china posts everyday.

AbrahamParangi
2 replies
3h44m

Are there any news articles from mainstream journalism you could point to that were harsh but fair regarding China, or is any negative or unflattering statement about China “anti China propaganda”?

aurareturn
1 replies
3h34m

Let me ask you this, when was the last time you read something that portrayed China in even a semi positive light in mainstream?

Off the top of your head. Don’t Google.

It’s not what the news publication publishes. It’s what they choose not to publish.

AbrahamParangi
0 replies
1h6m

I read about economic growth and modernization and brilliant public transport projects in China all the time. I read about how Shenzhen is a Mecca for technology product development. I read about the great success of Chinese software companies — essentially the only country in the world to have a real software industry other than the US.

Your view is distorted, it is worth considering if that distortion is motivated. Is it emotionally important to you to believe this? Would you be unhappy if you entertained the alternative?

throwaway2990
2 replies
8h1m

There is far more anti America propaganda than anti China.

aurareturn
1 replies
6h54m

Now that’s just wrong. The level of anti china propaganda in the US is magnitudes higher than anti American propaganda in China.

Anyone who disagrees has never stepped inside China. Maybe not even in US.

throwaway2990
0 replies
52m

Meanwhile in reality China spreads anti America propaganda at school while in America, China runs positive China propaganda classes and programs.

toyg
1 replies
5h58m

The same line was said by Soviets during the Cold War, or Americans during the Iraq Invasion...

In reality, in any relationship both sides must share some of the guilt for the failure in getting along.

aurareturn
0 replies
4h7m

I dont think so. America is clearly the big bully in the school yard.

NikkiA
0 replies
15h27m

Can you imagine Americans up in arms that someone in China doesn’t like or respect America?

Easily, yes.

karaterobot
9 replies
15h7m

My opinion of China has not changed because my mental model already included it insisting on self-censorship from anyone who wants to do business there.

I already don't buy books because they win or fail to win Hugo awards. I bet some people do, so this is marginally worse for them, because they're trusting someone else to curate books for them and now they might miss out. I guess the lesson is not to depend on which works of art (or of entertainment) get recognized for awards.

For the authors who may have missed out on a Hugo award and whatever money a Hugo nomination or award brings (probably non-zero bump in sales) I guess I'm sorry. But they'll be fine, and this kerfuffle might even bring more attention to than a nomination would have: "would this book have won a Hugo?"

theragra
8 replies
14h38m

But how do you choose books if they are not curated somehow? Read all of them? This sentence does not make sense to me. You always choose based on some curation: reviews, word of mounth, cover blurbs etc etc

EGG_CREAM
5 replies
14h12m

I have the same question. Goodreads has the same politics problem, plus the rotten tomatoes issue where authors seem to get punished for taking risks or not sticking rigidly to genre. I don’t know where to go for recommendations.

NegativeLatency
2 replies
11h40m

Been using storygraph with my friends and it much better for finding new stuff to read in my opinion

skywal_l
0 replies
8h30m

Just tried Storygraph and their survey feature has one of the worst UX I've ever seen. To the point that it's just unusable.

EGG_CREAM
0 replies
3h59m

Thank you! I will take a look! I’ve never heard of storygraph!

corimaith
1 replies
13h15m

Try /lit/. As with most places in 4chan, don't take things too seriously but the people in those hobby boards do genuinely care about their respective hobby.

EGG_CREAM
0 replies
4h0m

Thanks so much, I’ll give it a look!

corimaith
0 replies
13h19m

Once you have your preferences settled, the number of new and upcoming works that falls into the right categories is actually quite small that could individually read the blurb and pick what's interesting. Other than that you could also just go through your local gallery and pick the interesting stuff.

The only "curation" is between the author and reader's own preference.

Beyond that I guess you can pick from authors with good reputations, specific genre enthusiast communities and friends. But awards show aren't good because the need to appeal to entire community means that what gets picked usually will appeal to the lowest common denominator.

beezlebroxxxxxx
0 replies
9h22m

Sometimes you just have to risk it. This is the old way people picked out books. Look at the cover, read the back, flip through the pages or a sample if available, then tell themselves "huh, this looks good." Then you hope it's good. Usually you don't get stung with real stinkers but it can happen. Once you read enough you'll get a 6th sense for books you might enjoy. I can usually with a quick scan of the prose style and the back of the book blurb tell if something seems interesting or not

pyuser583
8 replies
13h5m

I’m a practicing Roman Catholic.

Its impossible for me to travel to China without failing the Sunday obligations for Mass.

I’ve had to turn down jobs, conventions, study abroad opportunities, and networking events because my religion requires me to go to Mass.

When I explain this to people, I get this weird look like, “Hey that’s your choice, but you must not take your career that seriously.”

I have very little sympathy for anyone involved in this.

transcriptase
3 replies
12h48m

Surely you must be aware that being unable to attend mass is not the same as intentionally not attending it, according to the church itself.

It’s widely accepted among even the most religious Catholics that travel and work obligations (among other situations) are acceptable reasons for not attending Sunday mass.

It’s not impossible for you to do those things as a practicing Roman Catholic in the slightest.

pyuser583
2 replies
12h35m

If there’s no Mass to go to, then you’re not obligated to go.

If there’s a Mass next door, but there’s a 50% chance the attendees will be arrested and spend 10 years in jail, you take your chances and trust God.

All it takes is fellow Catholic letting me know when/where Mass is and I have an obligation to risk my freedom and life.

Kind of cowardly of me to say, “hey the locals can risk their butts to praise God, I’ll just sit it out.”

toyg
1 replies
6h12m

But not travelling at all is equally righteous? Sounds like a cop-out to me...

Then again I'm not a theologian, and growing up in Italy taught me not to expect any actual consistency from any multi-millennial institution.

pyuser583
0 replies
3h39m

I love traveling. Just not to places where going to Mass is illegal.

defrost
2 replies
12h47m

What's the problem with the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Chengdu ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception_Cathedra...

pyuser583
0 replies
12h32m

For most of my career, there was both an above ground and outlaw Catholic Church. But it was hard for a foreigner to tell which is which.

More recently the situation has changed, but I’m not sure how. I don’t keep up to date.

lmz
0 replies
12h31m

I'm not a Catholic but the relationship between the Vatican and China hasn't been great - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Patriotic_Association

surfingdino
0 replies
9h34m

How does your faith have anything to do with the Hugo Awards?

kevingadd
8 replies
16h10m

Most indications are that the people doing the censoring didn't put much effort into investigating what the actual laws and regulations were over in China, either. If you look at the emails there's a lot of 'I'm not sure whether this will be a problem'-style language, and aggressively filtering out anyone who might cause an issue based on what they imagined the law to be. It's possible they could have let all the candidates sail through and the government there wouldn't have protested, though I wouldn't be surprised if some of the candidates would indeed end up blocked.

Vecr
1 replies
16h8m

That's how all censorship regimes work. If other people didn't do most of the job for you, you'd get hopelessly backed up. Preferably the author does it themselves.

raphlinus
0 replies
15h59m

Indeed, and there's a most excellent essay that goes into considerably more detail on this: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/ , written partly in response to the Chengdu debacle, but also covering lots of Western examples, including Galileo vs the church, the comics code, and more.

maxglute
0 replies
15h47m

TBF they did a "decent" job filtering, Zhao has youtube videos with 100,000s of views where she labels Xinjiang "genocide", Kuang graduated from Georgetown School of Foreign Policy, aka her credentials make her potential US propaganda mouthpiece. If local committee eventually got involved in censorship, they would have removed those two from nomination list. PRC nationalist (which I imagine have high overlap with scifi) love trolling PRC diasphora, especially female (especially reporters/media), who carries water for US narratives. These two are basically PRC version of sad/rabid puppies, I feel like they would have been made ineligbile at some point in the filtering process. There was no way anyone involved who did basic due diligence would have allowed either on the slate.

imiric
0 replies
15h49m

The organizers were likely given loose instructions about topics that should be avoided, and decided to play it safe. Otherwise they would've been liable themselves.

est
0 replies
14h28m

put much effort into investigating what the actual laws and regulations were over in China

Sorry but in authoritarian state, things don't work under "laws and regulations". Everyone is subject to 规矩, which roughly translate to "unspoken rules" or "how thing supposed to work without irritate powerful people".

You are not safe by laws and regulations alone, other people can fuck you up in many ways.

ddxv
0 replies
15h28m

Panopticon style self-censorship is what makes censorship in China so effective.

Ray20
0 replies
7h53m

investigating what the actual laws and regulations were over in China This is always impossible in totalitarian countries. Where there are clear rules, there are possibilities to use them against those who wrote them - and this is exactly what totalitarian country will never ever allow (otherwise it would be not totalitarian country). This is the whole point of censorship: to ban not what is written in some rules, but what must be banned and when it must.
2OEH8eoCRo0
0 replies
15h59m

Are the laws vague on purpose?

bluedays
8 replies
15h4m

Hugo Awards have been weirdly political since the whole Sad Puppies thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies

concordDance
3 replies
6h33m

The near complete absence of male winners (none in any main category from 2017 to 2022) since then is admittedly pretty suspicious.

tobias3
2 replies
6h5m

I wouldn't care if this wouldn't impact winner quality. Presumably there are a lot of authors which need discovering (or perhaps not, idk).

But a book like "The Calculating Stars" is just so bad, I'll never trust the Hugo award again.

pavel_lishin
0 replies
3h52m

I loved The Calculating Stars.

Books do exist that are objectively bad, but consider that maybe this time - and other times - this is just a matter of taste. (And it's entirely possible that the folks who pick out Hugo winners don't match yours, and that's fine.)

edanm
0 replies
5h20m

I really enjoyed "The Calculating Stars". As did apparently many other people.

It's totally normal to dislike some winners, I certainly don't like them all. But that doesn't mean quality is down - it's a matter of taste, after all.

IronWolve
3 replies
14h38m

Wikipedia is documenting one view of sad puppies. Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76xQ_49V500 for another view with more details.

This and gamergate made the public aware of politics in reviews and awards, which did help push people to look for a more group review about books. There are now tons of subreddits with each genre you can see what popular books are out.

I stopped reading the hugo collections when they started to mix sci-fi and fantasy, because fantasy has more diversity, so mixing genres pushed the diversity goal. Now lots of diversity in sci-fi books, so its not really an issue of mixing genres to accomplish a goal.

Kinda sucks that clashing of politics is included in everything, when all you want to do is a read a book. But the wikipedia article really isn't the entire truth from people watching from the outside knew what was going on. Thus they had to change the rules from block voting to stop the plebs from voting.

lebean
1 replies
13h32m

I'm not in the scene, but as an outsider, this sounded like someone is complaining about DEI for Orcs, Dwarves, and Elves.

pavel_lishin
0 replies
3h53m

Maybe, but I get it - the genres are different, and the tropes & conventions for them are different as well.

I like some fantasy, but I strongly prefer science fiction. It's not a value judgement, one isn't better than the other - I just like reading scifi more than I like reading fantasy, and I wouldn't particularly want a collection that combines the two semi-indiscriminately. (There are stories & novels that mix the two, and those can be very interesting, though.)

(Weirdly enough, I play D&D and other fantasy RPGs - but most games set in a sci-fi or modern setting don't interest me as much. Maybe it's harder to suspend my disbelief in Shadowrun when I'm vaguely aware of how hacking works, whereas magic is magic and I don't have to think about how a fireball works unless I want to.)

TheCoelacanth
0 replies
12h43m

The Hugos have always included fantasy.

epivosism
7 replies
15h29m

Came here to post Charles Stross's article about this and found it in a 2nd level comment, but it needs to be 1st level: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldco...

It's not as simple as it seems, as normal

epivosism
6 replies
15h19m

Funny that this is being done partly in the name of RF Kuang, whose book "Babel" promotes a pretty violent strand of anti-white anti-colonial theory. That particular protagonist, a young Chinese boy rescued from poverty due to his innate magical talents, was walking one night when some awful racist louts threaten him and also accuse him of being willing to betray the nation of his benefactors; completely randomly (or so the story would have it) when a page later he runs into an ethnic Chinese who is obviously a criminal, the boy immediately "naturally" feels a kinship with him and decides to join his gang, which uses terrorism against innocent victims etc. It's pretty disgusting to write a validation of basically racist, anti-enlightenment feelings that "being of the same race as someone" is a strong positive reason to feel kinship/allyship with someone, even when that person is obviously breaking the law, and to also betray people who, although harsh and screwed up, clearly saved you from extremely serious immediate death. The author retcons some of this attempting to make the boy's rescuers evil enough to validate his utter betrayal of them... but again, being "mean" and not taking responsibility for a child is somehow considered more significant in this world than saving someone from literally dying within a few hours of the plague and giving him 10+ years of the worlds best education and inventing technology, which in our world's correlate, has led to billions of people escaping poverty. No, the fact that his dad is a meanie/jerk/sexist fully justifies firebombing him and his ilk. okay...

And in the author's world-building, although magical resources are widely distributed, the only group which seems to be figuring out how to actually exploit them to increase wealth is England. But to the characters in the book, figuring out how to use those things at all, i.e. natural resource exploitation/study/efficiency improvement/industrialization is viewed as nothing more than stealing from indigenous people, rather than being a positive sum contribution to humanity. The fact that the original possessors of the silver, and other magical goods weren't doing anything with it is not mentioned. (at least in the 20% of the book I read before this scene, which basically suggests that non-white people should naturally coordinate to attack their white oppressors, led me to deleting it.)

It's also funny that in this book, she's putting out pretty basic CCP anti-western rhetoric, like many other bloodthirsty communists I've met; yet here, she is being defended by normally pro-american, anti-censorship voices, while the CCP is being cast as "oppressing" her. Kuang, an illiberal person, whose education consisted of private school (Greenhill school, today's tuition 32k->39k/year) => Georgetown => Oxford => Yale

Vecr
1 replies
15h12m

I'm probably not going to read the book but that's not a reason to censor it.

epivosism
0 replies
15h10m

Yes, I'm not in favor of censorship. Reasonable readers will just toss it.

MeImCounting
1 replies
13h53m

Now I havent read the book so maybe I shouldnt be talking but its odd how your interpretation seems to be totally at odds with others here and elsewhere. In fact youve made me want to read this book alot more to see if any of this analysis is true or if this response is just your run of the mill "anti-wokeness"

epivosism
0 replies
12h14m

Yeah, go for it. I liked the environment she was setting up, but it just kept shocking me how easily and naturally the main character flipped. It's as if the 10+ years of study he went through didn't matter. I understand it could be a natural curiosity from him at that age, and he may recover later.

But the pairing of the intentionally racist stereotype of a loutish brit (not a type I'd defend, but it really is a silly stereotype, especially here where it was totally out of nowhere) followed by a scene which, against her own case, validates that idiot's attacks, just made me lose it.

Like, if you're trying to be anti-racist, don't have your main characters immediately confirm the worst racial stereotypes that the "intended-to-be-hated" racist majority just accused them of (i.e. of disloyalty and ungratefulness to their host country, radical attempts to overthrow the governments which accepted them). It's way beyond multiculturalism - instead, it's basically saying that multiculturalism can't work because even the best newly arrived groups will naturally flip into opposition as radical terrorists. How can we build a multi-cultural society when people we're meant to sympathize with, act like that?

Anyway, good luck with the read. I may have overreacted, or it may redeem itself later. I didn't do extensive further research on her work beyond listening to a few interviews to check if I was just totally misreading.

isr
0 replies
14h29m

Hmm, I'm confused now.

"The Chinese censors don't like her (we're assumming), so she must be defended and China must be punished".

Ok, got it.

"No, actually, she is anti-colonialist in her basic world view, and she shows (through her main protagonist) insufficient gratitude to the white westerners who 'saved' her".

So we must burn her at the stake, lest others be influenced by this evil agenda.

Err, ok ...

I guess all that remains is for y'all to ask her "but, do you condemn the khhammas?"

Zpalmtree
0 replies
9h51m

white people are the only ones who will defend people who want to kill them. crazy

paulryanrogers
6 replies
16h19m

Why not just hold it elsewhere?

ishanmahapatra
4 replies
16h15m

The location is voted on by fans at the WorldCon held two years earlier.

duxup
1 replies
15h54m

Probably time to limit the list to "more free" countries.

shagie
0 replies
14h27m

Sibling comment to yours linked http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141533 - 144 points by cstross 21 days ago | 56 comments ) ... which has in it:

The fallout from Chengdu has probably sunk several other future worldcon bids—and it's not as if there are a lot of teams competing for the privilege of working themselves to death: Glasgow and Seattle (2024 and 2025) both won their bidding by default because they had experienced, existing worldcon teams and nobody else could be bothered turning up. So the Ugandan worldcon bid has collapsed (and good riddance, many fans would vote NO WORLDCON in preference to a worldcon in a nation that recently passed a law making homosexuality a capital offense). The Saudi Arabian bid also withered on the vine, but took longer to finally die. They shifted their venue to Cairo in a desperate attempt to overcome Prince Bone-saw's negative PR optics, but it hit the buffers when the Egyptian authorities refused to give them the necessary permits. Then there's the Tel Aviv bid. Tel Aviv fans are lovely people, but I can't see an Israeli worldcon being possible in the foreseeable future (too many genocide cooties right now). Don't ask about Kiev (before February 2022 they were considering bidding for the Eurocon). And in the USA, the prognosis for successful Texas and Florida worldcon bids are poor (book banning does not go down well with SF fans).

Beyond Seattle in 2025, the sole bid standing for 2026 (now the Saudi bid has died) is Los Angeles. Tel Aviv is still bidding for 2027, but fat chance: Uganda is/was targeting 2028, and there was some talk of a Texas bid in 2029 (all these are speculative bids and highly unlikely to happen in my opinion). I am also aware of a bid for a second Dublin worldcon (they've got a shiny new conference centre), targeting 2029 or 2030. There may be another Glasgow or London bid in the mid-30s, too. But other than that? I'm too out of touch with current worldcon politics to say, other than, watch this space (but don't buy the popcorn from the concession stand, it's burned and bitter).
starkparker
0 replies
15h42m

Context from Charlie Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon...

SF fandom is a growing community thing in China. And even a small regional SF convention in China is quite gigantic by most western (trivially, US/UK) standards.

My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"

They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.

...

It needs a WSFS constitutional amendment at least (so pay attention to the motions and voting in Glasgow, and then next year, in Seattle) just to stop it happening again. And nobody has ever tried to retroactively invalidate the Hugo awards. While there's a mechanism for running Hugo voting and handing out awards for a year in which there was no worldcon (the Retrospective Hugo awards—for example, the 1945 Hugo Awards were voted on in 2020—nobody considered the need to re-run the Hugos for a year in which the vote was rigged. So there's no mechanism.
egypturnash
0 replies
15h43m

And by anyone who buys a “supporting membership”. Which also gives you the rights to vote on the Hugos in the year your membership is for.

If you have a pile of money and the desire to do so it is thus trivial to fix the Hugos for any given year and put a future worldcon anywhere you want.

a_gnostic
0 replies
16h16m

To not offend China.

TedDoesntTalk
6 replies
15h34m

Now I want to read the books that were excluded especially “Kuang’s ‘Babel’ — which won the 2023 British Book Award for Fiction”

rawrawrawrr
2 replies
15h31m

Babel is a decent sci-fi book, it's actually quite anti-capitalist. I'm not making a political statement.

r00fus
0 replies
15h26m

Two reasons to read it now

AlotOfReading
0 replies
15h24m

It's more anti-colonial than anti-capitalist, like the rest of Kuang's work. However, her works also aren't particularly friendly to the the PRC either. Babel deals with british colonialism and the century of humiliation while her previous series The Poppy War talks a lot about China's relationship with indigenous Taiwanese.

ycy2m
0 replies
12h49m

What a mess. They removed the book Babel, but Babel has already been published in China :facepalm:

thaumasiotes
0 replies
13h55m

Now I want to read the books that were excluded

You wouldn't learn anything. The whole point of this article is that the people making the exclusion decisions had no idea what might or might not be sensitive, so they just excluded everything with any conceivable connection to China, such as mentioning it.

paulgerhardt
0 replies
15h4m

It was a strange read for me and the first time I’ve felt out of touch with the new generation of writers. The research quality is inconsistent—impressively thorough in some aspects yet glaringly lacking in others. The critique of 19th-century British imperialism is justified and compelling. However, the narrative abruptly shifts to a surprisingly uncritical support of Qing and Mughal Khan regimes, both of which had pretty shocking and unsound policies. Kind of flattening the politics into “British Empire bad, opponents of Britain good.”

As an enthusiast of etymology, particularly when examining the concept of “revolution,” I found the book’s treatment disappointing. It overlooks the nuanced and historical origins of the term, especially relevant to 17th-century England during the Glorious Revolution’s swift rotations in power between Catholic and Protestant monarchs. Instead, it opts for a simplified, pop culture interpretation that equates revolution with the notion of ‘burn everything down.’

The pro-Luddite sections also felt like a mischaracterization of those nuanced movements without a clear working of the economic factors at play there which don’t lend them to be natural allies of the protagonists. Additionally, there’s a poor grasp of the military tactics associated with barricade warfare, comparable to what one might infer from a single viewing of Les Misérables. That whole section was a bit cringe.

Which is to say the huge sections of the book had my face in my palms but I’m happy to be challenged and glad I read it to re-question my priors on a fascinating period with a fun, nerdy take on a magic system.

excitednumber
5 replies
16h10m

Maybe more countries and groups can act like Australia.

Hucklederry
4 replies
16h7m

?

Sabinus
2 replies
16h2m

Australian right-leaning government called for an independent investigation of the origins of Covid. Chinese government responded by sanctioning Australian imports for years.

est
1 replies
14h31m

I've seen this narrative going arond the Interwebz for years, but in my memory China took retaliation measures before covid happened, during of Trump's trade war.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN287099/

Australia's ties with top trade partner China soured in 2018 when it became the first country to publicly ban China's Huawei from its 5G
justinclift
0 replies
11h14m

Isn't it more that relations with China already weren't fantastic when Covid started, and the above mentioned request for an investigation just made things worse?

Vecr
0 replies
16h6m

Probably relating at least to the coal situation a couple years back.

enjeyw
4 replies
10h57m

I dislike the use of the world “offending” in the context of nation-stakes; it conjures this air of innocence around the state is if their primary failing is one of being overly sensitive.

A better albeit wordy phrasing would be “for fear of invoking retribution from China as a consequence of not conforming to their authoritarian desires”.

freemanon
3 replies
10h50m

I dare you to run a communist, pro-china or confuscian learning event in the US. The US have closed down most Confucius Institutes in the country citing "national security" with no concrete proof.

Freedom of expression has to work both ways.

snowpid
0 replies
9h20m

Confucian does not mean pro Communist and not pro CCP as some Commies have to learn it. I read in an anti China Magazin a reasoning for human right based on Confucian philosophy made on by Taiwanese philosophy phd student in Germany.

I guess these discussion won't happen in your mentioned Confucian learning events.

sinuhe69
0 replies
10h10m

The communist party is still operating in the USA and at least nobody disturbed their national convention in 2019.

Also, the Chinese Culture Center, arguably a pro-China activity, is still operating normally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Culture_Center

enjeyw
0 replies
10h45m

I have no personal insight into Confucius Institute censorship, but the reason I wrote “nation states” rather than China was because I agree, this applies in all directions.

aaomidi
4 replies
15h27m

I think self-censorship is skyrocketing currently.

There are a lot of folks who are scared of speaking out against Israel because according to a lot of authorities, that's now considered anti-semitic.

silenced_trope
3 replies
15h6m

Yup, there's also a lot scared of speaking out against Islam because to a lot of authorities it makes you an Islamophobe to point out that many Muslim migrants bring values completely anathema with the US, Britain, Canada, etc.

ta_9390
1 replies
14h14m

Islam is a religion, Israel is a state

Vecr
0 replies
14h2m

I'm critical of both. Nowhere near as much as I dislike Hamas, though.

toyg
0 replies
6h3m

It's almost like reality is complicated and ideological simplification is the root of most evils - who knew!

jcranmer
3 replies
12h19m

Something that didn't make it into this article is that apparently, on top of all of this insanity, they still ended up throwing out all of the Chinese works that would have made the finalists list for unknown reasons (which seem to smell a lot like "can't let non-English texts win") [1].

At least one of the winners of the Hugo Awards has already rescinded her acceptance of the award as a result of all of these shenanigans: https://samtasticbooks.com/2024/02/17/rabbit-test-unwins-the...

[1] See, e.g., https://bsky.app/profile/tkingfisher.bsky.social/post/3kln57...

maxglute
2 replies
12h9m

This is the biggest part of the drama that of course western reporting/conversation will ignore - people think the organizers biased the selection to be pro PRC, when they are massively rigged against PRC titles that would have won via PRC community slate voting, which as far as Hugos (and past Hugo dramas) go, is a legitimate tactic. Excluding these western authors likely wouldn't even have mattered since PRC scifi community already voted for Chinese titles to win. PRC fans getting great intro to democracy / (dis)enfranchisement. But I guess they're used to that.

aardvark179
0 replies
6h2m

Oh it won’t be ignored. The EPH voting system is designed to make slates hard to get through, but if your slate is really popular it should still succeed, and the fact you need at least some form membership of the convention usually prevents a reasonable barrier to nomination stuffing.

If the two Chinese publisher slates should have made it through then they should have made it through, and everybody could have picked through the data later and worked out if there was something else that needs to be done to stop groups nominating slates. If the votes weren’t valid then that should have been made clear and called out. There was a lot of surprise that Chinese works weren’t better represented on the ballot when the nominations were announced. As it is Dave has probably destroyed any chance we had of having a proper debate on how well the voting system works in the face of heavily voted for slates because he just made the votes disappear.

15457345234
0 replies
10h8m

Giving both sides a bone to chew on

The Chinese side can say 'ahhhh Sinophobia, they dropped all the Chinese books because they're afraid of China'

The Western side can say 'ahhhh censorship, they dropped all the Chinese books because they're afraid of China'

How marvellous!

ipaddr
3 replies
14h28m

Why does China forbid science fiction and where do super hero movies fit?

humanlity
0 replies
13h20m

Frankly, PRC forbids ideological dissent and political satire

TheCoelacanth
0 replies
12h40m

They don't. SF authors in general weren't excluded; it was some specific authors that China has a beef with.

DiogenesKynikos
0 replies
14h6m

SciFi is not forbidden in China, and is, in fact, extremely popular there.

perihelions
2 replies
15h35m

This is like Finlandization, but more farcical than tragic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization#Censorship

idlewords
1 replies
15h33m

There was nothing tragic about Finlandization! Finland did a superb job navigating a tricky situation in the Cold War.

aaomidi
0 replies
15h28m

The tragic part is the censorship (and the fact that it was necessary).

Saying nothing was tragic is just reductive.

zoklet-enjoyer
1 replies
15h13m

Insane. If they were so concerned about what the CCP would think, why even have the awards in China?

moate
0 replies
13h49m

So everyone posing this question just gets "The mob voted China, so China it must be" and that's all well and good. Here's a better question: Why take on the challenge of organizing the awards/con in China if you oppose censorship? All these people resigned from posts, but it feels like a lack of forsight IMO (though, of course, hindsight is 50/50).

If I was tasked with trying to balance a LITERARY award going off as intended with massive concerns about the host nation's reaction, at a certain point I might just say "I could go do anything else with my life instead" and let someone who's more pro-censorship take over. IDK, I have no aspirations to do great/important things, only things I can defend to myself, so maybe others have a harder time walking away from event organizing than I do.

tjpnz
1 replies
15h22m

As a science fiction reader with a healthy dislike of censorship and authoritarian regimes what's my best course of action? Has Hugo taken steps to ensure that there will not be a repeat of this? Are there freedom respecting alternatives more deserving of our support?

ianburrell
0 replies
14h19m

Nothing will happen until this year’s Worldcon in Glasgow when the business meeting is held. I assume there will be amendments. One problem is that it takes two Worldcon for changes to be enacted. It is very much model from before internet.

I hope they move administration of the Hugos under the WSFS and not each Worldcon. But the new revelations that lots of WSFS people were involved is disheartening. Voting should be done online in central place.

The problem with Worldcon is that have super democratic model that is open to manipulation and hard to change. Nobody fixed things after puppies. Or changed when internet made online voting and central org possible.

pseudolus
1 replies
16h1m
Sniffnoy
0 replies
10h6m
ii41
1 replies
6h58m

The whole thing is just stupid.

I am reading Kuang's Babel right now, the Chinese version, published in China, by a publisher that would be called "state-owned" when it appears in a Western report.

I have read Neil Gaiman's work that was published the same way before.

And still, the Hugo people be like: let's censor them because they mention China.

But's let's still spotlight Robert Sawyer even though he wrote a whole trilogy that can't be more anti-PRC [1].

Meanwhile, a bunch of other people be like: Chengdu is China, Xinjiang is China, China doesn't do things to muslims in Xinjiang that the US and Israel do to muslims in the Middle East, so let's protest Sci-fi events in Chengdu!

And now we have a purge on the Hugo organizers.

Disclaimer: I'm a Chinese mainlander Sci-fi reader and I have a view on China that most of HN will likely disagree with.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWW_Trilogy

denton-scratch
0 replies
5h2m

so let's protest Sci-fi events in Chengdu!

That's silly; the issue isn't about Xinjiang, or Taiwan, or Tibet. It's about the organizers of a scifi award manipulating the nomination lists in the hope of pleasing the host-country, and doing it with ignorance and incompetence.

BTW: I also have opinions about China. I'm not about to share them either; but not because people would disagree with me. I'm not sharing them because they're off-topic.

gkanai
1 replies
14h46m

They should never have agreed to holding the Hugos in China.

TheCoelacanth
0 replies
14h8m

There is no "they" who agreed to it. The location is decided by a vote at the convention two years earlier. Anyone attending can vote. It turns out that there are a lot of Chinese SF fans who decided to vote in 2021.

dang
1 replies
14h8m

Recent and related:

Hugo Awards – A Report on Censorship and Exclusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39382323 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)

The 2023 Hugo nomination statistics have been released and we have questions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132185 - Jan 2024 (74 comments)

Hugo Nomination Report Has Unexplained Ineligibility Rulings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083571 - Jan 2024 (3 comments)

2023 Hugo Awards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012127 - Oct 2023 (67 comments)

Freak_NL
0 replies
11h1m

Also for the investigative journalism behind this recent bunch of reports in the news (linked from the article on CBS as well):

https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...

I can recommend that report to anyone interested in digging a little deeper, and reading about the possible solutions entertained to prevent this in the future.

And a view from one well-known sci-fi author:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-a...

andrewstuart
1 replies
13h50m

Principles and Integrity.

In short supply.

anon-sre-srm
0 replies
13h26m

And leadership to pick somewhere reasonable rather than submit to the tyranny of the mob or stuffed ballot boxes.

alexnewman
1 replies
14h33m

I say we double lean into censorship until it becomes so painfully hilarious as to backfire. It’s not like the people of China are stupid or naive .

anon-sre-srm
0 replies
13h25m

Get your Fahrenheit 451 flamethrowers warmed up.

Aeolun
1 replies
15h50m

Don’t ** hold it in China if you don’t want to censor people.

drooopy
0 replies
9h24m

Seriously. What the hell is the point of holding an event that ultimately celebrates freedom of expression in a country that is now known for celebrating freedom of expression in any way shape or form?

wslh
0 replies
15h55m

This is pure science fiction.

throwiogh
0 replies
13h36m

Many people are on Chinese payroll. I came across many news (including big outlets) articles giving a free pass to CCP or parroting them. The same people expect support from us when they need help to fight CCP

svl
0 replies
8h8m

If you care to read deeper, including comments by many of the principal parties involved, there's no better place than https://file770.com/ (also linked to from this news article). It's hard to follow if you come in fresh, as it's a very active blog, with many pages of insightful comments on each post, but worthwhile.

Here's the list of all posts from the last month which are primarily about this. (There are also daily roundup posts, and lots of small and relevant tidbits in there, too.)

  https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-releases-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics/
  https://file770.com/2023-hugo-nomination-report-has-unexplained-ineligibility-rulings-also-reveals-who-declined/
  https://file770.com/chengdu-hugo-administrator-dave-mccarty-fields-questions-on-facebook/
  https://file770.com/hugo-controversy-hits-mainstream-news-a-chengdu-vice-chair-comments-in-social-media/
  https://file770.com/zimozi-natsuco-guest-post-the-hugo-awards-evil-fall-is-a-watered-down-affair-and-certain-issues-to-watch-out-for/
  https://file770.com/dave-mccarty-makes-statement-about-his-facebook-responses/
  https://file770.com/worldcon-intellectual-property-announces-censure-of-mccarty-chen-shi-and-yalow-mccarty-resigns-eastlake-is-new-chair/
  https://file770.com/decoding-the-tianwen-project/
  https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ (the big one)
  https://file770.com/2023-hugo-awards-related-statement-by-kat-jones/
  https://file770.com/diane-laceys-letter-about-the-2023-hugos/
  https://file770.com/glasgow-2024-announces-kat-jones-resignation-as-hugo-administrator/
  https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-wont-account-for-sponsorships/
  https://file770.com/cheryl-morgan-dave-mccarty-resign-from-wsfs-hugo-award-marketing-committee/
The original nomination statistics dropped on January 20th (already bizarre; usually these are released as soon as the Hugo awards are awarded). In the month since then, fans have been puzzling together just what happened. Chances are that more will come to light in the coming weeks.

romusha
0 replies
13h37m

Another event that will just fade away in the years ahead

readthenotes1
0 replies
15h16m

Hugo's are as relevant as the Oscars...

mrguinea
0 replies
12h40m

——

methou
0 replies
9h14m

Zhao’s novel “Iron Widow” was flagged as being a “reimagining of the rise of the Chinese Empress Wu Zetian.”

This is funny, Wu Zetian lives long before the PR China even existed, why should they even what image it paints.

mac-attack
0 replies
16h19m

Woof. Flashes of the climate summit week in Saudi.

karaterobot
0 replies
14h52m

“Censoring people based on what you think that a government might not like is completely against what the whole science fiction project is,” he said.

I wish there had been a little more examination of this statement. I don't see SF as fundamentally anti-censorship or anti-authoritarian (or the opposite). It's unrelated. If that weren't the case, there would not be SF in China at all, and there is.

isodev
0 replies
16h7m

Just looked up Hugo Gernsbacher, the person after whom the awards are named. He was born in Luxembourg and later moved to the US. Given his life, collective works in science fiction and technology (he owns 80 patents), I’d say the Hugo Awards are supposed to be orthogonal to notions of censorship and “what makes China happy”.

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback

humanlity
0 replies
13h8m

As a Chinese, sometimes I don't know how censorship works. commonly literature related to the Cultural Revolution is heavily censored, but sci-fi books like Three Body, with this history, are prevalent in China today.

gtirloni
0 replies
6h40m

I've been at conferences that were originally scheduled to happen in the US and were switched to Canada because of simple visa requirements that changed. It wasn't even impossible to get visas, it was just a bit more inconvenient than previously.

The organizers must be tone deaf if they thought China would be a good place to give awards to participants that did anything remotely bad from China's perspective. Tragedy of the commons (the voting) that they should have blocked.

Funny side note: many travel agencies in Brazil are advertising "Get your Chinese visa now! No need to for interview! Instant approval"

fouc
0 replies
16h7m

Interesting, Hugo awards were held in Chengdu for 2023 and various writers were excluded

writers including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer had been deemed ineligible as finalists despite earning enough votes

I'm glad the organizers for this year are tackling this issue.

In a statement on Thursday, the organizers of the 2024 Hugo Awards, which are being held in Glasgow, said they were taking steps “to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.”
feedforward
0 replies
15h28m

Luckily I live in the US - you'd never see things like the government demanding the heads of our most prominent universities be fired because they're not cracking down on anti-imperialist student groups hard enough.

emsign
0 replies
12h33m

Reminds me of the 1930s when people started to fear offending Nazis

causality0
0 replies
15h6m

and there was no one left to speak for me

The Hugos have long disqualified authors for being politically inconvenient. Their actions with regards to China are one hundred percent on-brand.

Kye
0 replies
5h16m

1930s: hugo boss gives cover for fascism

2020s: hugo boss gives cover for fascism