Stop the presses! There have been voter irregularities involving second and third placing Hugo award finalists at Chengdu! The stakes have never been higher!

I don’t have any great respect for the Hugo Awards. What little respect I had for them was fully torpedoed after the incident where a Washington DC Worldcon, at which a lot of people got COVID, was sponsored by Raytheon. For anybody in my readership who isn’t familiar, the Hugo Awards are a fan-administered award for science fiction and fantasy genre material voted for by the voting membership of Worldcon – an annually cycling science fiction convention that is put together by the unincorporated literary society the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). Anybody who can put together $50 and has sufficient interest can buy a voting membership, which allows them both the option to vote on site bids for future Worldcons and also to nominate and vote for Hugo Award winners.

While, historically, the Hugo Awards have been awarded to some excellent works of SF such as Neuromancer, Dune and The Dispossessed, the truth is that they generally go to whichever works of science fiction (and while fantasy is awarded these awards do skew toward science fiction) happens to be popular at that time which leads to embarrassing incidents such as the year that a Harry Potter book or Robert Sawyer’s forgettable Hominids novel won the award.

Due to the lack of any sort of jury and the low barrier to entry it’s not uncommon for people to attempt to game the Hugo system. An early example of this was in 1987 when the founder of the Scientology new-religious movement, L. Ron Hubbard, was placed posthumously onto the best novel shortlist via the concerted efforts of his religious adherents. Another would be the extended Sad Puppy fiasco. Part of the reason the Hugos should not be taken seriously is because they have no consistent aesthetic or political aim and generally just award whatever the most people feel passionate enough about to waste $50 over.

However, for the people who regularly vote in the Hugos, both those for whom Worldcon is a regular vacation destination and those who just pay their annual $50 dues, the Hugo Awards are assigned a grandiose purpose, referred to as being part of the triple-crown of Science Fiction awards along with the Nebula awards, voted upon by the members of the American professional association Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Philip K. Dick award, a juried award managed by the Philip K. Dick Trust and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. An astute reader might notice that these awards skew toward the specific taste of American Science Fiction readers. 60 of the 84 Worldcons were also hosted in the United States, with an additional five of the remainder next-door to the US in Canada. Worldcon has been hosted in Asia twice, once in Yokohama in 2007 and most recently in Chengdu in 2023. This has proven deeply controversial to the principal American audience. Worldcon has never been held in Africa, the Caribbean or in Latin America.

A seed of the grandiosity that affects the Hugo voters can be seen in a picture of the world that is mostly the United States with occasional visits to its closest (white) neighbor, to Europe and Australia and a vague nod toward the existence of Asia as a place where people live. While one person recently pointed out that, should a site selection be approved, Worldcon could be hosted on Alpha Centauri, this disregards that the majority of the usual voters of Worldcon come from the United States, the majority of the very small number of people who care about Worldcon (with winning bids requiring a few thousand votes at most) are in the United States. Worldcon is, effectively, an American event held mostly by and always for Americans.

Until 2023.

Science fiction is very popular in China. Chinese people read a lot of science fiction. There is a very large domestic market for domestically produced science fiction. A lot of Chinese TV plays with science fiction tropes and the Chinese movie market includes a lot of science fiction films. It’s a big deal. So it wasn’t unsurprising that, eventually, some people in China decided to bid on Worldcon. In this case the bid came from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan in Western China, a well-known tourist destination, well-known for its progressivism, welcoming of LGBT people and with excellent cuisine, Chengdu made perfect sense as a Chinese Worldcon site. Now, please keep in mind, that when we talk about tourism in China the Chinese market is a principal market. China will take in tourists from other countries but tourism, in China, is, perhaps even to a greater extent than in the United States, built around getting people from one part of the country to visit another part of the country.

So, in a way, it’s easy enough to understand why many Americans felt like Worldcon was being “stolen” – after all, this American event, generally set up to serve American tourists, was being transported to a city where English was not even the second-most frequently spoken language, in a country they see as a rival power, and which had a tourist market that was unconcerned with catering to American interests or tastes as foreign tourism is a secondary draw to domestic tourism.

There were efforts to prevent this from happening with the rival Winnipeg organizing committee trying to get online ballots from China thrown out due to absent address lines which they claimed were evidence of ballot box stuffing. This belies the first of several misunderstandings of China as many people live in narrow alleys that may not have a street address as precise as North Americans are accustomed to. The honest truth is that the address-line question is neither evidence for, nor against, ballot stuffing. But as Worldcon has been set up so that anybody with $50 to spend can buy a vote in these matters the people who were upset over this vagary had nobody to blame but themselves.

After Chengdu’s site selection was confirmed there were, of course, inevitable calls for boycotts. The Xinjiang conflict was cited. People made claims about lack of safety for LGBTQ+ attendees which disregard the reality that Chengdu is far friendlier to queer people than Miami. People claimed that their freedom of speech would be curtailed and that there’d be secret police combing the hotel to rendition dissident voices. It was, frankly, unhinged.

But, despite all the Sturm und Drang, the Chengdu Worldcon proceeded apace. Frankly there was no real mechanism to strip Chengdu of the winning bid due to the amateur design of the Worldcon constitution and the ephemeral character of the WSFS as a body. Calls for a boycott could be easily ignored if one considers that the foreign tourism market was a secondary concern. Chengdu would be happy to host a Worldcon to a principally Chinese audience.

Of course considering how well American SFF did on the final ballot I think a lot of Americans didn’t boycott anyway and dutifully doled out their $50. Best novel went to the American author T. Kingfisher, Best Novella to Seanan McGuire, a perennial Hugo favorite, best short story went to Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills, a didactic piece of Americana, very particular to the current American political moment, and precisely the sort of short story well liked by Hugo voters and few others. Best Semiprozine went to Uncanny. Again. And the Astounding Award went to Travis Baldree in his first year of eligibility, hot on the heels of his successful pivot of Legends & Lattes from self-pub to Tor. I find it safe to conclude that the majority of people voting for the Hugo Awards were Americans and, despite the ambiguity to follow, their will was reasonably reflected. These are precisely the people one would expect to see winning Hugo Awards in Winnipeg or Washington DC.

However the voting statistics for the Hugo Awards were delayed until the last minute they should be published per the Worldcon constitution and when they came out there were notable irregularities. Some of these appeared to be misunderstandings of handling the Hugo’s rather byzantine transferrable ballot process. But more alarming were a few exclusions of mid-ballot finalists. Xiran Jay Zhao was disqualified for the Astounding Award; Paul Weimer was disqualified from the fanwriter category; an episode of the Netflix TV show Sandman was disqualified from dramatic presentation, short form, and most glaringly, Babel by R. F. Kuang was disqualified from the best novel category.

For most of these reasonable explanations could conceivably exist, however the person from the concom to communicate out on these, Dave McCarty, has been loath to explain the reasoning for disqualifying them, instead, quite vaguely, and with some hostility, saying he followed the rules in these decisions. We could easily speculate that Zhao’s exclusion was due to misinterpretations of Astounding Award second-year eligibility criteria. As of writing they have two books published, a third on the way and one translated into Spanish. They should have been eligible for a second year as a “new author” but it’s reasonable to suggest that their exclusion was due to mistake rather than malice. The Sandman show had been disqualified from Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, on the basis that it was appropriately in the Short Form category and then disqualified from short form for unknown reasons. I’ve seen half of Sandman, including the disqualified episode, (I lost interest shortly thereafter as it is a very dull TV series) and there’s nothing in there that I expect would bother Chinese TV censors at all. With this in mind I think it’s likely this was a plain and simple fuck-up and that McCarty is loath to say to Neil Gaiman that he screwed the pooch on the eligibility criteria for the episode. It’s unlikely we’ll ever find out why.

In the case of Paul Weimer a few possibilities exist. He is a participant on the podcast Skiffy and Fanty which was nominated separately from him and qualified but didn’t make the cut for the final ballot. So they may have thought that excluded him from the Fanwriter category. It’s possible that the concom simply didn’t see the relevance. Most of his SF blogging is on Patreon and, if the concom didn’t look there they might have just seen his photography website.

Alternatively the concom might have seen Weimer’s writing about the Chengdu worldcon, where he once said, “it may already be ‘too late’ if there are, and its dollars to donuts that there are, fans of SF within the CCP. The CCP may not be content with just the already horrible prospect of monitoring the 2023 Worldcon closely. What if they decide to, say, sponsor the Hugo Awards a la Raytheon and Google? Or some other aspect of the con? Chengdu is not going to be able to say no. It is literally an offer they can’t refuse. I feel bad for my fellow fans in Chengu. I do not envy their position in trying to put on a Worldcon in such a country, such an environment, with such a looming shadow.”

Frankly, if somebody said that about an event I was hosting in my home town you can damn well bet he wouldn’t be getting any special honours at that event. This patronizing and, in my opinion, unhinged fantasy is, sadly the shallow end of the yellow-peril handwringing that went on surrounding Chengdu.

The strangest, most inexplicable, and most suspicious exclusion was that of Babel by R. F. Kuang. Kuang’s previous work touched on contemporary Chinese history quite a lot, using a fantasy setting to relate the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War but, far from being a censored topic, this historical event is a favourite of mainland fiction writers and TV producers. Kuang’s books centered the fantasy stand-in of mainland Chinese protagonists as heroes and allies of other colonized people. Babel continues with her theme of exploration of empire and colonization with a specific look at the role of the British academia in colonization. Far from being topics that would be excluded from a Chinese discourse on science fiction, Kuang’s books are almost precisely the sort of fiction I would expect mainland China to celebrate. The exclusion of Kuang from consideration did not get a Chinese author onto the ballot for best novel, which ultimately contained four Americans, one New Zealander and a Canadian.

Kuang’s book was placed third in the nominations, behind Legends & Lattes and eventual winner Nettle & Bone but not so distantly (810 nominations compared to 831 and 815 respectively for the other two) that we could discount it might have won the Hugo, unlike most of the others on this list. There’s no explicable why either the Chinese state or even the concom as an organization would want to put their fingers so obviously on the scale here. Furthermore the end result, possibly clearing the path for T. Kingfisher to win or slipping Silvia Moreno Garcia onto the ballot also simply don’t make sense as motives. Babel was obviously an eligible work – first year of publication, definitely a novel, definitely SFF. It makes no sense.

Some people have dreamed up conspiracist scenarios that Kuang was being blackballed by China because her grandfather served under Chiang Kai-Shek but this disregards the modern condition of the KMT.

There are now two Kuomintang parties. The first, the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang holds 65 of the CPPCC seats and is the largest of the “minor parties” in Chinese national politics. The second is presently the opposition party of Taiwan and is marked by its position that Taiwan should reunify with Mainland China in a manner that retains its unique cultural and democratic character. Both of these parties are political allies of the CCP. Kuang’s family history here is simply not something that would matter in the slightest to the Chinese government.

But this whole issue also belies how badly westerners understand the political structure of nominatively socialist countries. Now first off we could have a whole digression regarding conceptions of mass democracy via Cuban localist political action or through the Maoist conception of the mass line. However that would be something of a rhetorical cul-de-sac as neither Cuban localism nor mass line politics are really practiced by the Chinese government today. However there is a general principle to Socialist organizing that is very much in play in China which is that power tends to devolve to be closer to the people.

In practical terms this means that municipal governments often have quite a lot more influence than their counterparts in North America. Provincial governments then direct municipalities regarding national planning with the national government being largely hands-off unless something goes terribly wrong. The real hard truth is that, contrary to the view of a totalizing and ever-present party with its fingers in the lives of every citizen, the CCP and the government of China, was, probably not even aware of Worldcon. The government of Sichuan may have rubber-stamped approvals for Chengdu but it’s hardly likely they had any interest in the itinerary of the event. Sichuan is a province with a population of 83 million people. A book convention in Chongqing attended by a few thousand people barely rises to the level of administrative notice. Proportionally it’d be like asking Justin Trudeau for his opinion on Toronto FanExpo except that Sichuan has a population nearly twice that of Canada. And Chinese cities have far more autonomy than Toronto does.

At the municipal level we know that Wang Fengchao was quite aware of the event. He arranged busses to assist the tourists there in doing additional sight-seeing. He showed up for a grip-and-grin. So I suppose one could ask the question of why the mayor of Chengdu might have decided to exclude one innocuous fantasy author whose past works portrayed China in a favorable light and whose current work was critical of England, a country with which China has a particularly fraught history from an award ceremony hosted at a Chengdu hotel. But I suspect it’s unlikely he had anything to do with it. My personal opinion, based on my knowledge of Kuang’s public persona, of the nature of Worldcon and the nature of Chinese politics is that whatever led to Kuang’s exclusion on the ballot was a decision made entirely by one or more members of the concom.

Now Dave McCarthy quite flatly said, regarding the exclusion of the excluded works in general (not of Kuang’s work in specific), “Nobody has ordered me to do anything. Nobody is changing decisions I have made… There was no communication between the Hugo administration and the Chinese government in any manner… I’ve done this job four times now and assisted a few more times. The rules I followed this time are the same as the rules I followed the others….and the same as every Hugo administrator ever has followed.”

Regarding the Sandman episode McCarthy was even more specific that he was a decision-making authority saying “it was a judgment call on my part whether to list both the same way or note that per the WSFS constitution, only one could be considered. I thought it more appropriate to do it the way it appears.”

Plenty of people are speculating that McCarthy was bribed, blackmailed, that he’s protecting somebody else on the Worldcon team who may be vulnerable or all kinds of other reasons for his standoffish, oblique and stubborn responses. I don’t see that. My personal opinion is that he looks like a petty asshole protecting his fiefdom. He tells us he’s done it a lot. He tells us that he is an expert. He tells us explicitly he made decisions regarding Sandman. The Hugo Awards weren’t built for consistency or accountability. Who knows? Maybe McCarthy is as ignorant of Chinese politics as he is of social graces. Maybe McCarthy believed that Kuang’s work would upset Chinese censors and he decided on his own to remove it. It’s more likely than a shadowy government conspiracy predicated on no discernable political or aesthetic aim. Let us recall Occam’s Razor: Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.

We have an entity who says, “I did this along with the concom because I thought it was the correct choice.” We don’t need to drag Wang Fengchao, Huang Qiang (the governor of Sichuan) or Xi Jinping into this mess. We don’t need to imagine CCP agents lurking in shadowy corners since the issue of Kuang’s exclusion from the ballot is fully explicable by a guy named Dave, who believes himself an expert in Hugo awards, deciding she was ineligible with the full knowledge that literally nobody can do anything about it. It might be nice to know why but it’s not necessary to know a motive to put forward this as the most likely root cause of this problem.

Now, with all this said, and looking beyond the yellow-peril racism of American fans bitter at becoming the marginal audience to their own party for one year, there is the kernel of an interesting thing happening here. And because the stakes are so remarkably low it’s almost a useful case study for assessing how people think about these things. Because the Hugo Awards have become a discursive territory for discussing the nature of democracy.

Cheryl Morgan addresses these points pretty clearly in her blog post titled “How did we get here?“, in which she says, “Democracy only works if we are constantly vigilant and prevent it being subverted.

But then there are people who say that it can never work because the wrong people will always get elected. That’s much more of a Libertarian viewpoint: all government is bad, because anyone who gets to be in government is bad.”

Now, again, I want to stress that we’re talking about an award for science fiction books with an electorate counted in a handful of thousands of people at the most. In some categories, such as fanwriter, a person can reach the final ballot with fewer than one hundred nominations. This is hardly mass-democracy.

And I might note that it’s somewhat pernicious to call anything democracy when it requires you to spend $50 to vote. Poll taxes are rather un-democratic on their face. However I think there’s also a mistake in associating democracy so directly with governmentality. Because, of course, there is another viewpoint that is critical of government beyond the right-libertarian one. And that’s the Anarchist perspective that says the problem is not that people make decisions together but that they should need to be governed to do so. In this manner Anarchists and Marxists share some common ground, power should rest closest to the masses. People should have as close as possible to direct control of their own lives. The truth is that this is a key political perspective of both Anarchists and of Marxist states. The question then becomes in defining what “as close as possible” means. Anarchists would argue that people should have a direct grasp of the power that affects their lives while the Marxist state believes it’s necessary there be some form of authority and the question becomes how to use that authority to give voice to the authentic will of the masses. The disconnect between liberal representative democracy and the Marxist state is that the Marxist states operate from the perspective that liberal democracies serve only very specific classes of people (the bourgeoisie) and fail to ever become truly democratic in the first place. But, of course, the anarchist response is that this is true also of the Marxist states even if the people they purport to serve may not be precisely the same class as the liberal democracies.

Now here is where I make my pitch for what is called destituent communism. This form of socialist organizing, conceived by Marcello Tari, drawing from Marxism and Anarchism in near equal measures, argues that the problem with power isn’t its movement or concentration into any given set of hands but rather its tendency to form into institutions. Power as potential is concentrated in order to achieve an aim, this is all well and good. The problem is that, after that aim has been achieved, the concentrated power perpetuates itself and holds onto power. As such the most critical mass power in order to empower revolutionary change is the power to take down extant structures regardless of their replacements.

For Tari, the perfect exemplar of destituent power was Subcommante Marcos of the Zapatistas. This anonymous spokesperson of the movement and, in fact the movement for which he spoke, have constantly shifted and changed so that the people they represent can be served, not governed. When Marcos was not needed Marcos, as an authority, was voided and the commander disappeared into anonymity. The Zapatistas are well represented by the statement, “Here the people command and the government obeys.”

So what would this look for in the context of the Hugos?

Well first, despite the silly Libertarian history underlying the resistance of the WSFS to incorporation it’s probably for the best they never did. Because the best thing to do would probably be just to get rid of the Hugos.

The Hugo awards, as an institution of authority regarding the zeitgeist of science fiction, have long outlived their usefulness. Worldcon, as a body, has only ever represented an American distortion of the world, one where most of the world is America, Asia is a distant other and the global south is best ignored altogether. The little personal fiefdoms of guys named Dave and the various hangers on of the Worldcon scene have no power or significance in the world.

In fact this is the principal source of my skepticism that the CCP had their thumb on the Hugo scales. The Hugo awards simply don’t matter. They’re irrelevant. There is nearly no power invested in the Hugo awards but it’s clear that power has only been wielded to perpetuate itself for a very long time now so best to do away with it. Allow other people with other methods to hold the third gem of the “triple crown.” I’ve heard good things about the Ignyte Awards. Is it good what happened in Chengdu? No. It sucks. But it sucks for the same petty, grandiose, self-important, self-satisfied reasons that the Hugo awards have sucked for a very long time now.

A lot of people have been saying that now the Hugo awards have lost their credibility. But the Hugo awards lost credibility when their red carpet was sponsored by a bomb maker. They lost credibility when a bitter conservative author brigaded the nominations using a slate because he thought it was his turn for the participation trophy. They lost credibility when they said Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the best SFF novel of 2001 rather than A Storm of Swords or Midnight Robber. They lost credibility when they included the second volume of L Ron Hubbard’s manifesto in the form of a 10-volume posthumous SF series on the short-list. As of the time of writing the Hugo Award for best novel has been awarded to only two non-white authors: N. K. Jemisin and Liu Cixin (as translated by Ken Liu) in a brief run from 2015-2018 – this is not the actions of a credible award. The Hugo awards have never been credible.

Let’s just end them here.