hugo awards

This is just getting absurd: Hugo 2023 fallout

/ Simon / 1 Comment

Where do I even start?

A brief chronology:

  • On January 21 Ada Palmer published a blog post on the topic of self-censorship. This became relevant to subsequent discourse.
  • On February 7, File 770 and Jason Sandford’s blog co-published a report derived from Diane Lacey’s now-public comments regarding her role in censoring the Hugo Awards. The report surfaced two important details that had previously been left to speculation: first that the English speaking members of the concom, apparently without any feedback from the Chinese members of the concom had assembled dossiers on people who they suspected might be upsetting to the Chinese government. Some of these people (notably Paul Weimer, Xiran Jay Zhao and R. F. Kuang) were subsequently determined to be ineligible, again by the Western contingent of the concom on the basis of these dossiers. In many cases the texts declared ineligible were not read by the people assembling the dossiers. Second that this act of censorship was in concert with a decision, apparently made by Dave McCarty in specific, to exclude several works of Chinese fiction from consideration on the basis that he believed them to have been slated. Many of these works would have likely been finalists in their respective categories, making it highly questionable that the English language works that eventually won those categories would have even made the ballot if not for this intercession.
  • On February 19, Meg Frank stated that Dave McCarty had been “emotionally abusive, generally manipulative, and has sexually harassed myself and numerous others,” and that they’d previously made code of conduct complaints against him that had failed to gain traction due to his history of community service and concomitant popularity in the Worldcon set.
  • Also on February 19, Cheryl Morgan announced her resignation from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee and expressed fears that she, and others who had volunteered for the Hugo Awards may have become open to threat of lawsuit in the United States due to the handling of the trademark by the Chengdu concom.
  • Still on February 19, Xiran Jay Zhao stated they’d been contacted by a representative of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. This led to speculation among various Worldcon adjacent people that the United States might be considering punitive action against Worldcon on the basis that China Telecom, a sanctioned company in the United States, made financial contributions to Worldcon which subsequently may have donated money to the Mark Protection Committee or Worldcon Intellectual Property. According to these speculations, this might be interpreted as laundering money into a US organization from a sanctioned company – which is not an entirely dissimilar state of affairs to what led to the Meng Wanzhou diplomatic incident.

Needless to say, it has been an eventful month.

So let’s begin with self-censorship. Starting with largely around the time the February 7 report came out the discourse from within fandom was to say, “OK so maybe McCarty was principally involved in the exclusions but it was self-censorship because China is so censorious he felt he had to. This is largely in keeping with Palmer’s argument that a line cannot be drawn “between state censorship and private or civilian censorship.”

However this approach ignores an important question: if we assume that a censorious regime is imposing power such that the English speaking members of the concom self-censor, which censorious regime is it? The obvious answer is that they did it based on their beliefs of what might be problematic to the Chinese state. However this raises a second, very important question, where did the concom’s ideas of what would or would not upset the Chinese state come from?

This points back to my question surrounding the exclusion of Kuang’s book from my last Hugo piece. R.F. Kuang has a book deal in China. The book that was censored says nothing bad about China and instead principally addresses questions about English colonialism. Contending that the Chinese state is censorious the next question is why somebody would think, knowing what the Chinese state tends to censor, that this book would be likely to face censure. First we must consider who was doing the censoring. Based on the leaked emails reported on by Barkley and Sanford the vetting subcommittee was hand-picked by Dave McCarty and excluded all Chinese concom members. In a leaked email from June 6, regarding Babel, Kat Jones said Babel, “has a lot about China. I haven’t read it, and am not up on Chinese politics, so cannot say whether it would be viewed as ‘negatives of China.’”

Note that she had not read the book. It was excluded because Jones understood, somehow, that the book spoke at length about China. This must be contextualized together with Dave McCarty’s decision (seemingly alone) to invalidate votes for Chinese language work that appeared on recommended reading lists produced by the publisher Qidian and by the world’s largest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World.

The ultimate result of this censorship was the systematic exclusion of Chinese and Chinese diaspora authors from the Hugo ballot, ultimately favoring many of the same fandom-proximate figures who have become Hugo perennials. It ended up with a remarkably white set of Hugo awards. Can we really suggest that a person with first-hand knowledge of Chinese censorship practices would respond by removing all the Chinese people from the ballot? So if this constitutes self-censorship (which depends on a narrow read of self-censorship as any form of censorship undertaken by a private party at the assumed behest of a state) what was the state who was being appeased? Because it seems like this censorship does more to reify the general American misconceptions of China than anything from within China. If we call this self-censorship then it’s as valid to say the censorious regime was the US State Department as it is to say it was the CCP. After all, many of these fantasies about China come, ultimately from there.

This is categorically not something that China would want. In fact a quick perusal of Chinese media reveals that about all that was of concern within China regarding Worldcon was the presence of Chinese authors. The wrap-up article in the China Daily contained a single line regarding the (English language) winner of Best Novel before devoting a paragraph to Hai Ya and then shorter writeups for every other Chinese national who won their category. Zhao Enzhe gets a significant quotation, saying, “I always recommend the style of Chinese ancient paintings, graceful and full of vitality,” and “ancient Chinese culture provides the best style for sci-fi and with my efforts, I hope I can bring more sci-fi artworks with Chinese philosophical thinking to foreign audiences.” South China Morning Post also published a glowing feature on Hai Ya. This should tell western audiences the direction of Chinese propaganda surrounding this event. Excluding Chinese nationals from the ballot was something explicitly contrary to these aims. Notably there is nothing published in Chinese state affiliated media subsequent to the revelation of the irregularities. But considering how the profiles of Hai Ya and Zhao Enzhe contained superlative statements regarding the significance and prestige of the Hugo awards I’d suspect that nobody in the Chinese propaganda apparatus is too happy with the western members of the concom right now.

All this is to say that if self-censorship is to be brought forward as affecting the concom’s aims and if we should tie this directly to the power of the state, per Palmer’s argument, we must interrogate which state’s power was being projected by ensuring the international audience that, even at an award ceremony held in China, American literature remained dominant.

We should also consider the possibility that this is not the first Hugo award to have faced irregularities. Mary Robinette Kowal has said that Dave McCarty created proprietary software for Hugo vote tabulation this software gives him scrutiny over which people voted for which finalists but he will not show anybody the code underlying it. Considering the preponderance of sources suggesting that McCarty was the leader of the censorship effort at Chengdu it raises the question of how many other votes may have had his finger on the scales. From what I can see McCarty’s was modelling voting data as early as 2016; this could potentially call into question every Hugo finalist since the start of the EPH process. And considering the known irregularities that led to the adoption of EPH this could, in turn, suggest there hasn’t been a single Hugo Award since 2013 that is above suspicion of tampering either by the antics of the reactionary Sad Puppies or by the so-called SMOFs of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) putting their fingers on the scale.

Now this is where it’s relevant to bring up the accusations of harassment against Dave McCarty. These have been going around fandom for some time. As Meg Frank said, McCarty is not a missing stair. Rather he’s a man who was protected from the consequences of his actions. Complaints of groping and other abusive behaviour surfaced at 2011 SMOFCON and were largely brushed off. Meg Frank has reported that this is a pattern of behaviour demonstrated by McCarty and his enablers.

What is concerning is that treating these irregularities as solely the Dave McCarty screw-up is letting too many others off the hook. This one man didn’t amass such influence and immunity without a score of friends and helpers. If we can look at Chengdu and call it Dave McCarty’s fiefdom it’s only because of the many people who called him friend and helped him establish it. This man should have been asked to leave in 2011. Here we are, 13 years later, reaping the consequence of his enablement. And this is where we should pivot to a discussion of the byzantine finances of WSFS and its affiliated bodies.

If we look at Cheryl Morgan’s public statement following her resignation from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee we can note a rather anomalous point where she says, “Having seen legal advice on the subject, I am confident that the contracts I issued from Wizard’s Tower Press are structured in such a way that no one suing me, either individually or as an officer of WSFS, will be able to obtain the rights to any of the works published by Wizard’s Tower.” And at the time I thought this quite odd as I couldn’t think of any good reason why anyone would sue Morgan over her rather tangential involvement.

So I asked her. And she provided me with some answers which I took to a few other people. And from what I can put together Morgan had said on social media some time previous that it would be pointless to sue WSFS because WSFS barely exists as an organization and has no money. Whereupon a legal academic informed her that a litigant could always sue the membership in such a case as US law has stipulations for suits against non-incorporated entities like WSFS. And this apparently alarmed Morgan sufficient to make her want to distance herself from any element of WSFS quite vociferously to avoid ending up party to a lawsuit for something she had absolutely nothing to do with aside from managing a webpage.

Now neither Morgan nor myself are Americans and while I cannot speak for her I would never pretend to be a legal expert even within the bounds of Canadian law. I cannot adjudicate the level of actual risk Morgan faced.

It’s at this point we must turn to address Worldcon finances. During the debacle surrounding Discon III I actually tried to dig into Worldcon finances and what I found was a disorganized mess that took me down a few blind alleys and ultimately led nowhere. Frankly, from publicly available sources, it was impossible for me to figure out where Discon III money had gone. At the time I set it aside as largely irrelevant to my point surrounding the ethics of allowing an arms manufacturer as a sponsor of a literary event. Although this was not originally a particular focus of this piece it ultimately sent me down a remarkable rabbit hole due to the non-standardized and difficult to balance nature of Worldcon financial reporting year over year.

See WSFS is non-incorporated and consists of the voting membership of WSFS in any given year. That’s true. But there is a non-profit organization called Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP) which exists to, according to Kevin Standlee, “pursue registration of marks outside the United States.” According to information compiled by Jay Blanc, the Worldcon Marks Protection Committee (MPC) seems to have unilaterally determined that the MPC would take ownership of Worldcon related trademarks within the USA as they came up for renewal. It is worth noting that the initial board of the MPC in 2015, when these decisions were made included Dave McCarty, Kevin Standlee and Ben Yalow, among others. Blanc’s investigation points out both that this appears to have been structured specifically to keep both the MPC and WIP not legally responsible for WSFS but in such a manner that it would normally require that 33% of its annual income be taken from individual small donors. Blanc asserts that WIP’s income is taken in the form of a single grant from the yearly Worldcon. According to the most recently published financial statement for WIP, WIP earned $3,100 before September 11, 2023. $3,000 from Chicon 8 and $100 listed as “Deposit, Misc.” According to minutes published in December 3, 2023 for a special meeting of the Mark Protection Committee, “There are no dues outstanding since we just received nearly $3,000 from Chengdu” A footnote indicates, “The money from Chengdu is not part of the $18,800 noted as our bank balance, since it had just been received.” It is unclear whether this means the money had yet to be deposited into WIP accounts or whether it means the money had yet to be accounted for. There is no mention of a near-$3,000 expense item in the agenda of the Worldcon Business Meeting from Chengdu dated October 19-22. Which likely indicates the payment happened after October 22 and before December 3 however there’s no audit trail I can find for it at that time.

And I want to note that this is not a Chengdu-specific problem. However it’s worth noting that it’s not uncommon for there to be a remarkably low level of granularity in financial reports from Worldcons. For instance: the Discon III financial report from September 9 2023 includes an expense item of “Art Sales Reimbursements | $30,698.78” with no immediate context as to why these reimbursements occurred. There is no references to art sales reimbursements in the minutes of either the business meeting minutes for Discon III or Chicon 8. I would expect that a reimbursement of that size would at least warrant some discussion at a business meeting or at least some explication on the financial documentation.

However such vagaries are somewhat par for the course among Worldcons. Also a challenge is that most conventions (with the exception of Chengdu) report their finances in local currency and little detail goes into describing money conversion among pass-along funds. This makes an independent third-party balancing of Worldcon finances difficult year over year.

The difficulty of transferring money in and out of China only compounded this problem. The solution that was arrived at by the conrunners was to create a separate business entity – a 501c3 incorporated in Wyoming and headquartered at the residence of one of its board members – called the Development Center for Chengdu Worldcon (DCCW) whose responsibility it was to handle US finances for Worldcon. However, it should be noted, the articles of incorporation don’t mention that as the mission of the DCCW – instead saying that its mission is to “Facilitate the education and study of literary works internationally and in the United States.”

This caused several issues. First: the delays in allowing for registration in Chengdu Worldcon proved vexatious for some attendees. Allen Tipper went so far as to call for censure of the concom, though they were prohibited by meeting rules at Chicon8 from elaborating on the minuted records, telling me, “their skirting of the rules with regards to allowing memberships to be purchased was making me lose confidence in their ability to run a Worldcon. I would have specifically noted that I could buy a membership for Glasgow before I could buy one for Chengdu.”

Based on my research of the timeline surrounding the creation of DCCW, this was likely the root cause of this issue.

The administrators of DCCW seem to have been hard-pressed to keep up with the requirements of running the charitable organization. Wyoming state records indicate that the 501c3 became delinquent in its filings on August 2, 2023 and were administratively dissolved on October 9, 2023. This state of affairs was not rectified until February 2, 2024, when their annual report to the state was filed and their status was restored.

It seems somewhat alarming that this entity was in a legally tenuous position throughout the period of the convention itself, especially considering how finances were handled between the DCCW and the Chengdu Worldcon organization (which appears to have been the legal structure of the convention within China).

Now I will admit that what follows here is something of a guess. But the financial report for the Chengdu Worldcon contains a column for China funds and overseas funds before providing a total across both categories. The China funds are reported both in CNY and in USD while overseas funds are reported only in USD. It should note that this is actually somewhat better detail than most conventions financial reports provide.

As of August 31, the date on the financial report given at the October Worldcon, income in China funds totals to $279,704.43 while overseas income comes to $236,359.60. Expenses in China funds: $94,799.14 and in the overseas funds column it is $46,844.07. This leads to a reported net income of $184,905.29 in China funds and $189,515.53 in overseas funds. What’s interesting is when we look at the reported bank balances we see that the 2032 Chengdu Worldcon bank account is listed at $184,905.29 and the bank balance reported for the DCCW is listed at $189,515.53. This would seem to indicate, although I cannot be entirely sure, that the China funds column refers to income and expenses incurred by Chengdu Worldcon while the overseas fund column refers to income and expenses incurred by DCCW.

Now it is somewhat alarming that, at the time the report was produced the DCCW was delinquent in its filings with Wyoming and by the time the report was delivered to the membership of WSSF the DCCW had been dissolved. There is no mention of this dissolution within the agenda and I have been unable to find the minutes for the business meeting although they have apparently been published. However there are other challenges that arise from my interpretation of this report in this way.

For instance pass-along payments from CoNZealand and Discon3 are split between the two organizations. The split for CoNZealand was 75% / 25% – $37,500 went to Chengdu Worldcon while $12,500 went to DCCW. On the other hand the split for Discon 3 was 70% / 30% – of $28,528 passed along $19,928 went to Chengdu Worldcon and $8,600 went to DCCW. It’s unclear why these were handled differently.

Also unclear is the $57,428 Chicon 8 Pass-along waiver expense against Chengdu Worldcon that does not touch DCCW finances at all. I tried to find references to the pass-along waiver in the minutes of Chicon 8 and was unsuccessful. The pass-along waiver does appear as income on the Chicon 8 budget as of August 31, 2023. Again it’s unclear why this decision was made.

Another oddity is how small the amount of money was spent by either organization on international travel. DCCW paid $34,173.05 on international travel. Of that $26,522.45 was for an all-staff meeting in June. The remaining $7,650.60 was paid to convention guests. This is odd considering the number of accounts that have come out of convention panelists being comped flights and or accommodation. Tied to this oddity is the presence of only two corporate sponsors on the Chengdu financial document: Chengdu Technology Innovation New City Investment and Development Co., Ltd. – which appears to be a property development concern – and Chengdu Media Group – a media production company which also seems involved in the redevelopment efforts of the former company to some extent.

However reviewing the programming book for the Chengdu Worldcon reveals several other sponsors. Notably China Telecom, a company currently under US sanctions, was listed as a “2023 Chengdu Worldcon Starseeker” tier sponsor. Huawei, another telecommunications company under US sanctions, meanwhile does not appear as a sponsor but is an exhibitor, hosted an event attended by Worldcon panelists, and gave awards to participants (entirely distinct from the Hugos). This discrepancy is explained by statements made by Ben Yalow at Smofcon 40, previously reported by File 770, “None of that appears on our financial report because we didn’t get any money out of the deal. The convention never saw that money. What the convention saw was Hugo finalists who would show up and their plane ticket was taken care of and their hotel room was taken care of. It means that our financial report is completely accurate and totally misleading.” If I am parsing Yalow’s statement correctly this means that many of the line items that appeared remarkably low on the Chengdu budget were so because sponsors provided contributions in kind. While I will not profess to have any particular knowledge of US law regarding 501c3 reporting requirements I will say, as someone with prior experience in the not-for-profit sector, that it is not best-practice to exclude contributions in kind from financial records. You end up with “totally misleading” financial statements that way.

What makes this somewhat disconcerting is that there does not appear to be any sort of impermeability between DCCW and Chengdu Worldcon finances. Payments were divided between the two and it is unclear from the records I have access to why these payment decisions were handled in this way. If it were simply a matter of handling payments from the United States, why were pass-along payments split? If there is a good reason for this then why was the ratio of these splits different for each line item?

When we include an event that included participation of companies on US sanctions lists it would have been wise to maintain books that clearly indicated that no China Telecom or Huawei contributions entered the accounting of DCCW. As they were left entirely off the books this is opaque to me.

What I really want to highlight here is that this is a culmination of a series of decisions that significantly predate the Chengdu Worldcon. The absence of a unified financial reporting model is present for the same reason as the absence of any overarching formal guiding body for the WSFS. An old libertarian drive to resist incorporation has blocked any sort of year-to-year consistency surrounding standards and practices since ~1953. Hilariously a key fear appears to have been that incorporation would provide a method for incompetent volunteers to remain in positions of authority of for various cliques to exercise out-sized influence. Of course, now, this simply happens informally as many perennial volunteers, of various levels of competence, reoccur year over year and, in fact, decade over decade.

In fact, the Chengdu financial reports are more detailed than many other Worldcons. The financial report of Worldcon 76 has no entry for legal expenses despite a $4,000 settlement to Jon Del Arroz. Worldcon 79 has no line item for charitable donation expenses despite their board having publicly said they would do so.

NASFiC 15 provided a four-line financial statement claiming both a deficit of $24,468 and a cash balance of $5,964.27. Their notes include that they expect additional income and expenses but aside from statements regarding an application for a tourism grant they provide no real detail on how they will close this deficit gap. Nor is it clear, with how WSFS is structured, who would be responsible for paying the deficit if they cannot balance their accounts. Probably Cansmof.

Finally there is the involvement of the office of Representative Mike Gallagher. Xiran Jay Zhao says that a representative of his office contacted them saying that Gallagher was interested in this situation. This isn’t entirely surprising. Gallagher is described as a “China watchdog” and probably apprehended the existence of this issue from early reporting that suggested the big story here was CCP censorship of an international literary award. Gallagher is the chair of the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – a republican-led committee which lacks any Chinese diaspora members and that tends to issue inflammatory rhetoric and little else. Gallagher also has prior history of being interested in nerd shit having issued a strongly worded letter to Activision Blizzard over their rather shameful behaviour during the Hong Kong protests of 2019.

However Gallagher is in a tight position over his recent refusal to vote to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The end result is that Gallagher will not be seeking re-election. This is to say that this is an ineffective politician from an ineffective subcommittee. I would suggest the likelihood of a congressional star-chamber for members of the concom is vanishingly small. The fact that he contacted Zhao is telling. Xiran Jay Zhao is a celebrity. They’re well-known, have a large online platform via Tik Tok and have been vociferous with their criticism of the CCP. If we treat Gallagher as a propagandist, which we honestly should, then they’re pretty much perfect for his purposes. But I doubt he has the influence in Congress, as it is currently composed, to do much beyond write another strongly worded letter. Frankly Zhao is, at best, a peripheral person to this whole mess. The people who would be best situated to answer questions about what the heck the concom were thinking are a collection of volunteer conrunners scattered across the United States, not a Canadian Tik Tok star.

I will note that there is a small silver lining here as two of the Hugo winners, Samantha Mills and Adrian Tchaikovsky, have renounced their Hugo wins from 2023 on the basis of the blanket exclusion of Chinese authors. I didn’t personally like Rabbit Test much on aesthetic and structural grounds but I do want to say that Mills, who was the first Hugo winner to make this move, deserves recognition for her strong ethics. I hope more of the Hugo winning authors will follow the example set by Mills and Tchaikovsky.

The hilarious truth is that of all the broad assortment of people and organizations involved in this bizarre story one of the most blameless is the CCP. Dave McCarty actually seems to have foiled the main CCP objective of the Chengdu Worldcon by excising Chinese authors so thoroughly from the ballot. Instead we see the American SMOF contingent at the heart of year-over-year conrunning struggling to adapt the calcified traditions of an 85 year-old institution that has aggressively resisted means and standards to an international context that desperately requires means and standards.

Please don’t take this to mean I am bringing forth the shadow of WSFS Inc. once more. Because the truth is that I don’t believe there’s anything of value left to Worldcon. As a vehicle of international connection it’s a failure: the immediate response of the Worldcon core audience to irregularities was to blame foreigners when the call was coming from inside the house. As a vehicle for a prestigious award it’s a failure: there is no good reason to believe that there has been a clean Hugo award in the last decade. I have alluded to this previously but the only period, in the history of the Hugo Awards, in which non-white authors won for Best Novel was between 2015 and 2018; it seems like the interest in honoring diverse authors dropped off sharply once the Sad Puppies were safely vanquished back to the margins. I’m sure many of the voters who gave N.K. Jemisin three Hugos in a row and then never awarded another Black author would have also voted for Obama a third time if they could.

Worldcon is a millstone around the neck of the genre community. Genre authors should not seek its awards. The WSFS should wrap itself up and any bank balances remaining on its various threadbare books should be donated to charities that can persist more than a year without falling into delinquency. Should some other international Science Fiction gathering present itself, perhaps one not so intrinsically tied to a late-1930s schism between libertarians from New Jersey and New York communists, then there could potentially be a successor to Worldcon in the future. But not as Worldcon. It’s a year-over-year embarrassment. Let it die.

Chengdu 2023 – the least important front of the new Cold War

/ Simon / 1 Comment

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.

The Obligatory Award Eligibility Post 2023

/ Simon

As it is once again That Time of the Year I regret to inform you I’m putting together an award eligibility post. Currently my work is eligible in most genre media awards excluding the Nebula awards as I am not, and have no intention of becoming, a member of SFWA. As a Canadian I hold the Aurora Awards in particular regard and would especially appreciate support in those awards.

If an award category is best suited to a single essay such as in a fan writing category I would ask that you nominate Notes on Squeecore. This is certainly one of my most widely read essays as well as being one of my most notorious ones. I also like to think it’s a decent work of literary and culture criticism.

If an award category is best suited to nominating a fan / amateur publication then you may wish to nominate simonmcneil.com as a whole.

If an award includes a creative non-fiction category I would ask you to nominate Preliminary Notes on a Disaster – my meditation on temporality and grief.

I was a guest on two podcasts this year: The Left Hand of Le Guin (episodes one and two) and Rite Gud – Writing Beyond the End of History and I would encourage people to nominate these two podcasts independent of my own eligibility as a guest.

Quick Raytheon / Hugo Update

/ Simon / 1 Comment

I am throwing this up really quick just as a situation update to my recent post on the ethics of participating in a fan convention with an arms manufacturer sponsor. The chair of the DisCon III concom, Mary Robinette Kowal, released an official statement yesterday and it’s actually… pretty good all things considered.

A picture of con chair Mary Robinette Kowal's statement and apology, along with her signature, regarding the sponsorship DisCon III received from Raytheon Intelligence and Space.

Now a few notes, mostly positive. This letter did several things that were required. First, Kowal has taken responsibility for this action personally. One of the things I was worried about previously was how the loose and rather byzantine organization of Worldcon created a risk of a diffusion of responsibility that passed the moral burden to the aggregate membership rather than a single person. I’ve said elsewhere that, based on my past professional experience in non-profit advancement teams, major sponsorship agreements don’t get approval without going up to senior leadership within the non-profit so it was always going to come back to her. I’m encouraged she recognized this and took that responsibility.

Second, while a full accounting of the process might have been interesting from a root-cause-failure approach I appreciate that Kowal elided on specifics because she didn’t want to be seen as making excuses. This is actually probably the right course of action all things considered.

Likewise the fact that Kowal declines to mention the charity she and DisCon III have selected by name is actually a good choice. It is good for two reasons: the first because it takes out any opportunity for praise over the donation. This is an act of restitution and the removal of the ego-effect of being probably a significant donor is a good choice. The second is because the ideological landscape with regard to NGOs is pretty fraught and even a slam-dunk donation (like to War Child, for instance) probably would have upset somebody so from the perspective of resolving the current social conflict an anonymous donation was a reasonable choice.

Finally it is good that specific recommendations for future con organizers were made. We all wanted transparency and this is part of that.

The main two pieces of missing information that would have been good to include here are a timeline of when the sponsorship deal was signed and when it was publicized and the amount of the donation. However the former is very minor and the latter is important but will likely come out eventually.

There is one other item I want to address here and that is the question over why Raytheon attracted such ire when the other banner sponsor – Google – is also bad. Again this ties back to my discussion of ethical ambiguity and ethical bounds. Google is not good. They’re an evil company that does bad things. But, as we discussed before, the same could be leveled of any organization able to throw around “major sponsor” money.

There is a powerful left-critique of the NGO that treats the non-profit as a form of social control whereby the wealty are able to invest in the direction of the power their wealth represents. In this frame of treating charitable giving as being a form of directed power relation we cannot remove the non-profit and the volunteer-run organization from the superstructure of capitalism as its base economic conditions are inextricably bound to that superstructure. The non-profit, under capitalism, is an organization within capitalism. This is where “no ethical consumption under capitalism” kind of actually lives. However, as I said, there are some ethical distinctions that don’t partake in the ambiguity of operating within the interior of capital as all non-profits do. And, with a product of imperial death, Raytheon is beyond all possible ethical ambiguity in a way that even pretty wholly awful companies like Google are not. Simply put, arms merchants are a special kind of evil that goes beyond even the mundane evil of Google and its ilk. As a communist I would bring the whole edifice down and Google is as much a target as Raytheon. But I am a communist living within the bounds of Capitalism and as such I need to be able to draw ethical distinctions within that territory. To put it in theoretical terms, the Socius is a field of inscription. It exists in being marked. The territory within Capitalism is delineated in a way that the outside of Capitalism simply is not by dint of its non-being. As such moral distinctions within Capitalism are inevitable. And so, yes, the donation from Google is also bad but, no, it was not hypocritical to be especially upset by the donation from Raytheon.

Last word on this subject from me: I don’t particularly like Kowal and I think her leadership of this concom was pretty disastrous between this and the increasing likelihood that Worldcon was a COVID superspreader event (17 possible exposures identified and counting). But, as I’ve said before, no ethical failure precludes the possibility of future right-decisions and I think this letter is a very positive first step. I think we should, on the left, be willing to acknowledge that this was a good first step and continue to kindly encourage accountability and restitution from the concom as a whole and Kowal in particular. I also think we should probably all lay off of the finalists who were caught flat-footed and may have responded defensively to being thrust into an uncomfortable position.

Drawing the line: Capitalism and Wrong Livelihood

/ Simon / 5 Comments
(Image c/o Wikipedia)

The Worldcon that never should have happened has had a wild ride after an all-too-easy to call COVID outbreak, some shady business at the business meeting that seemed likely an attempt to influence the site selection process away from the (ultimately winning) Chengdu bid for next year and then, the piece de resistance, the revelation that a major sponsor for the convention, with a branded red-carpet photo wall at the Hugo Awards was the Raytheon corporation.

This raises an interesting question regarding the duty of participants in Worldcon to respond to the interface of their science fiction convention with a “defense contractor” that was supplying materiel to Saudi Arabia at least as recently as 2017 and that is a key supplier of the US military. Should a concom be held responsible for how sponsorships are used to launder the reputation of corporations? What about the ethics of working for such an organization? After all, it’s something of a received wisdom in progressive spaces that corporations are de-facto evil; if we cannot work but to work for an evil organization is there a gradient of evil to mark against? How far is, ultimately, too far beyond the pale?

Buddhism provides a very concrete starting point for what constitutes a boundary with the Aṅguttara Nikāya, in particular containing discourses accredited to the Buddha and his disciples on the topic of right livelihood – one of the eight subjects of the Noble Eightfold Path. According to these early Buddhist texts, a right livelihood is one that does not involve traffic in, “weapons, living beings, meat, alcoholic drink or poison.”

As such it’s clear that, at least from an orthodox Buddhist perspective, there is a very specific line and it is one that Raytheon is entirely beyond. Of course the same could be said of the butcher and the liquor store down the road along with any pet store proprietors and certain garden shops that sell plants that could potentially be used for the production of poison so we could, perhaps, argue that such specificity is somewhat unhelpful to a modern context.

The Buddhist proscription is bound, inextricably, to a Buddhist ethical universe that seeks to avoid the causation of harm. As such proscribed livelihoods are proscribed because of their specific interaction with the Buddhist perspective on what constitutes the Good. However what the Buddhist example is best for showing is that a boundary can be set. We can, in fact, say that even if all things are not intrinsically ethical some things, in particular, are unethical enough that they should be avoided as moral hazards.

No ethical consumption under Capitalism

There is something of a mimetic phrase within progressive circles that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. This phrase appears not to have a clearly fixed origin although it does seem to arise out of online spaces. Now this argument – that ethical consumption is impossible within Capitalism points in two disparate directions. First, it is deployed as a form of absolution. “Yes I know this product was made by an appartheid state in an occupied territory but there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism,” at the extreme sure but also, “I’m aware that fast food restaurants deploy environmentally destructive agricultural practices to keep prices down but there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, I live in a food dessert and have few choices and ultimately I have to eat something,” would be closer to an ideal example of this absolutory use. The second is as a critique. A celebrity backs a T-shirt slogan – or some other commodified piece of political rhetoric – and critics point out that it was manufactured with exploited labour. Does a feminist really look like a white woman getting rich off of sloganeering at the expense of vulnerable workers in Bangladesh? There is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.

And so, effectively this statement means either, “I am aware of the contradiction in my position and cannot avoid it,” or “you should be aware of the contradiction in your position,” depending upon whose consumption is the subject of ethical assessment.

Now a fan convention is most certainly an example of consumption. In fact, fewer things are more purely consumptive than a fan convention – an event that seeks to lionize and institutionalize a category of consumption, to bring consumers into the proximity of producers so that they can consume more effectively. And with a fan convention being a form of institutionalized consumption, sponsors of a convention are certainly to be counted both as consumers of the product the convention offers (largely the attention of other consumers) and simultaneously as producers of the event. Raytheon is both a consumer of Discon III and also a product that Discon III attendees are being invited to consume. And anybody who took a photo at the Raytheon branded red carpet photo station, anybody who went to the Raytheon booth, they were consuming Raytheon. So when people respond to this consumption of Raytheon by attendees that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism our question then becomes whether this is the consumer being asked to be aware of the contradiction in their position or if it is the consumer aware of the contradiction claiming they have no choice.

It honestly seems mostly to be the latter.

Certainly, unless that consumer was on the concom they had no choice about whether to invite Raytheon to be a sponsor so we may be able to absolve most attendees of that specific blame. Although members of the concom should certainly be called to account for their funding decisions. However, while the attending membership had no choice whether Raytheon was to be a sponsor, this doesn’t mean they had no agency in this situation at all. And this is where things become even more difficult.

Ambiguity

In her seminal work, “the Ethics of Ambiguity,” Simone de Beauvoir grappled with the fundamental problem of making ethical judgments in recognition of the inability of a person to have an objective understanding of all consequences. In this book Beauvoir remains consequentialist in her outlook, maintaining that the ethical value of an act had to do with its movement toward liberation but problematized consequentialist ethics by pointing out that it would be nearly impossible to judge, in a moment of action, whether any given well-intentioned action, in fact, moved in the direction of liberation. Antagonistic to the virtue-ethic of the Buddhists that would declare it is wrong livelihood, a consequentialist might ask to whom weapons were being sold and to what purpose. Beauvoir then points out that, no matter how great the purpose the consequentialist cannot possibly know what the ultimate consequences of selling those guns must be.

In the end, Beauvoir’s ethic proposes something of a Sisyphean life – one of constantly striving toward a greater freedom fully aware that it can never be obtained. The struggle for liberation is an endless and ever-changing task. All a person can do is their best. As Beauvoir puts it, “Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods. Thus, in science the fundamental problem is to make the idea adequate to its content and the law adequate to the facts; the logician finds that in the case where the pressure of the given fact bursts the concept which serves to comprehend it, one is obliged to invent another concept; but he can not define a priori the moment of invention, still less foresee it.”

Beauvoir argues that meaning is constantly changing and that the movement of life with purpose, of a good life, is thus also constantly a moving target. But that doesn’t mean she provides no lodestone. Instead Beauvoir takes a nearly Epicurean approach, saying, “However, it must not be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.”

And, of course, this idea of a good life as being one that pursues some sort of genuine happiness both on our own account and through others is something of a shared quest between Beauvoir, the Epicureans and the Buddhists.

What then is the ethical weight of a red-carpet photo against the death of a child in Yemen? It should be such a simple formula – arms dealers bad – and yet it brings with it so much other baggage. Did the actions of the red-carpet walkers contribute to Raytheon’s ability to sell the weapons that kill? Were factors such as the ability of convention members to pursue a career in the arts (which received wisdom says necessitates participation in fan conventions) ones that moved their own actions, in that moment toward a concrete mode of liberation? Should an artist who discovers their participation might give a company like Raytheon access to an audience disengage immediately? How much burden to know what, in fact, Raytheon is and does should be ascribed to the hosts of a Science Fiction podcast or the creators of a popular semi-pro zine? I don’t think I need the certainty of the Noble Eightfold Path to say that Raytheon is ethically compromised. It sells weapons to many of the most aggressive and warlike militaries in the world. No country has as many extraterritorial military bases as the United State. Few states wage war as readily and egregiously as Saudi Arabia. That Raytheon partners with these militaries makes it obvious that there’s very little ambiguity at play with working in their employ or with deliberately selling them advertising space at your convention. A good Raytheon employee is an employee who quits.

But I think the “no ethical consumption” line creates more problems than it solves. Certainly it’s true in as far as capitalism is a system that pushes back against Beauvoir’s idea of a life of love on our own account and lived through others. It’s a system that depends, instead, on a zero-sum gamification of existence where every moment of joy we squeeze out of life must, at its core, be a moment of joy denied to another. But the moment of radical freedom we call revolution depends on a level of mass action that doesn’t reside with some atomized individual. Turning around and walking out of the Hugo awards upon sighting the Raytheon banner would have been a decent action. It would be what Buddhists call “right intention” but it would be ineffectual. It would not overthrow the rule of Capital; it would not unmake the missiles and the bombs. In order for it to be a truly revolutionary moment it would require a total desertion of Discon III – for every single person there to spontaneously refuse to cross that threshold. And absent that sort of spontaneous and revolutionary moment ambiguity rules here. Hugo awards make careers and it’s just a banner.

Ultimately the concom of Discon III has earned scorn. It was the height of irresponsibility to hold a convention in Washington DC in 2021. We all knew perfectly well the pandemic would not be over and I think it’s not too much of a stretch to assume most people knew the pandemic would not be over in the United States specifically considering the disorganized way it responded to the crisis. Frankly there should have been no opportunity to pose in front of a Raytheon banner at all. And even if we set aside the irresponsibility of holding an in-person fan convention during a plague year the concom should not have sold its sponsorship opportunities to a “defense contractor.” Awarding a sponsorship to Raytheon was an egregious lapse in ethics by the standard of the Buddhists, the Epicureans, the standards of Beauvoir and frankly even those of Kant who would have fixed upon the concom the duty of acting in a manner that advanced respect and dignity of all people. Death from above at the hands of missiles manufactured half a world away is, at its core disrespectful. It is a death lacking in dignity to be snuffed out like an unwanted candle.

Capitalism operates through a diffusion of responsibility. People who have worked within the IT divisions of defense contractors talk about jobs that center around entirely abstract snippets of code – work toward abstract benchmarks where they haven’t the first clue what their code is even intended to do. This sort of diffusion permeates capitalist organization such that, ultimately, no one person is ever to be blamed for the cruelties of the system. And the concom could argue, in their defense, that then never dropped a bomb nor asked one to be dropped.

Ultimately the question becomes: where do you draw the line? As Jello Biafra said, “I’m not telling you, I’m asking you.”

For me, the line is drawn not at being an audience for Raytheon but it is certainly drawn before collaborating with Raytheon to give them an audience. But each person must construct that line for themselves. This is the ultimate paradox of collective spontaneity. We must each, alone, decide to act together in the moment. If a spontaneous moment is lost to ambiguity we should, rather than ripping at those people who, enmeshed in ambiguity, may have made a wrong choice, aim toward building better preconditions to make the right choice in the future.

As such my final word is this: No more arms manufacturers at fan conventions. And if anyone violates this clear line by inviting arms manufacturers to participate, let’s deem them outside what we see as the genre community. In that moment of collaboration they have put themselves beyond the pale. But let’s stop there and work to build solidarity around this line.

About where certain authors should fuck off to

/ Simon / 5 Comments

The Hugo awards have provided us a few controversies. There is, of course, my quixotic quest to turn a consumer culture against one of the principal sellers of cultural product. However there have been a few other things brewing below the surface. And these have mostly been questions about whether certain prickly works deserve to be included. On all but one of these issues I’d rather remain silent. This is because, in all but one of these issues, I have not yet read the work in question.

I have read George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into The Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition) and it’s…

Well…

It’s art criticism.

Now I’ll precis this by saying first that it isn’t good art criticism. And I wouldn’t be voting for this blog entry to get a Hugo award. But if it did somehow win the Hugo (something that is more likely thanks to reactions such as calling for Worldcon to censor the title) it still wouldn’t even be the worst rageblog to ever be given a Hugo for best related work. Not by a long shot.

I’m calling the Fuck Off Into The Sun blog art criticism because I’m treating award ceremonies as art works. Luhrs certainly makes an honest attempt at critique when she says, “The proper role of an awards show host is to keep the audience entertained between awards and get the fuck out of the way of the people being honored. Martin did neither.” And this blog does not read like a grievance letter about Martin’s poorly organized loser’s party but rather a systematic attempt to look at the tone of the awards ceremony, its adherence to the tropes of the genre, its ethical and aesthetic characteristics, and the messages it communicated. That’s art criticism and that makes it an appropriate nominee for a best related work Hugo. That it wasn’t very good is neither here nor there.

But, of course, things have gotten silly. I read the blog on the strength of its amusing (if somewhat over-long) title when the Hugo nominees were announced. When I told some co-workers who aren’t tied to the “fandom” scene about the Hugos this essay was the one they wanted to know more about. Even normies have heard of George R.R. Martin and it isn’t surprising that they wanted to know about why someone wanted him to fuck off into the sun – or that they wanted to know why this opinion would be popular enough to be nominated for an award. And I laughed. I told them there’s a long tradition of such silly entries in the Related Work category because not that many “fans” care about it and it’s easy to slip something onto a ballot with even a small kernel of support. Let’s not forget the minimum threshold for entry onto the Related Work ballot this year was 31 votes.

I said there wasn’t a chance in hell it’d actually be the winner. I mean even that Bronycon video was a better critical work. And there was that tantalizing translation of Beowulf; there was a highly rated book of critical analysis about Octavia Butler for goodness sake – related work has an embarrassment of riches this year. But this idea of subjecting a nominee for an award to scrutiny for a supposed ethics violation of the convention that is hosting the award for which she was nominated is some next-level childishness.

I’ve talked before about the defensiveness of the consumptive fan – the idea that even the weakest criticism (and this is weak criticism) is met with extreme hostility because the associated identity as a fan is so fragile that it cannot suffer anything that might harm the reputation of the product the fan has invested meaning in. It’s been pointed out already that the calls to censor the title of this nominee have come from fans of George R. R. Martin including one who runs a fan website that is not affiliated with the author. Of course this will almost certainly end up as an example of the Streisand Effect and frankly, if by some unlikely circumstance the Fuck Off Into The Sun blog wins the Hugo it should be presented to Luhrs by the administration of the Westeros site – after all, they will be the ones who have given it to her. This is, as I said before, all very silly. Thin-skinned fans can’t bear the thought of their favourite TV Producer / occasional novelist being criticized for being an old, white, wealthy American who acts like an old, white, wealthy American. They have constructed so much of their own identity with their affiliation with the Game of Thrones brand that her criticism, which was pretty obviously a surface level criticism wherein Martin was being used as a stand-in for a series of systemic grievances that are hard to get at in a blog post and thus not exactly a thorough evisceration of his oeuvre, was too much for them to take. It was as if Luhrs’ act of criticism was an assault upon the fans. This sort of fan behaviour is, as I’ve harped on about many times, to the detriment of the arts.

Then there is the bit of legalistic wrangling that has become the lynchpin of the complaint of these disgruntled fans: “Comments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave…” This is honestly kind of laughable coming from the same concom that took several days to debate whether to retain a GoH who was the administrator of a forum that included Trumpist Insurrectionist discussion. We need to seriously consider whether a person who administered a safe-space for hate speech is an appropriate guest of honour but we wouldn’t want anybody to feel unwelcome. And this cuts to the heart of the problem I raised during the Baen’s Bar imbroglio. There is no way to make everybody welcome. A welcoming space for a bigot will be, by definition, not a welcoming space for the subject of bigotry. Now I am not calling Martin or his fans bigots, nor am I suggesting that Discon III should be unwelcoming to Martin – who is something of an establishment at the Hugo awards notwithstanding how he may have succeeded or failed as a presenter. Rather I’m saying that the idea of censoring the name of a Hugo nominee in order to avoid the risk that Martin or, more importantly, Martin’s fans might get their feelings bruised is childishness. So no. George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into The Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition) should not win a Hugo. But it has earned its place on the ballot and the fans who are lobbying to censor it should take a deep breath and learn to cope with a world where some people may have bad things to say about popular old rich men.

I’ve noticed that due to certain viral trends of December 2021 this article is getting a significant up-tick in views. I want to note that the subject of this article was not a member of the concom for Discon III and, just as she should not have been held to task by them for an “ethics violation” so too should she not bear the blame for the ethical failures of the Discon III concom. In light of their misuse of the term “ethics violation” in this instance though it should be noted that the Discon III made some serious ethical errors and I have some pointed things to say on that topic. Check them out in this article.

Hugos: Have we forgotten Disney Must Pay?

/ Simon / 2 Comments

Yesterday the 2021 Hugo Award nominees were announced. There’s a lot of interesting stuff on it. Harrow the Ninth and The City We Became are both high up my to-read list. Aliette de Bodard is one of my favourite authors in general – I’ve previously written about her books and I’m very tempted to dig up “The Inaccessibility of Heaven” soonest for all of the Hugo nominated print fiction on offer this year.

I am also very excited to read Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley Moving out of print work, dramatic presentation, Long Form, includes the best comic book adaptation to come out in the last few years with Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) and another very strong contender within the category with The Old Guard – a movie I enjoyed perhaps not as much as Birds of Prey, but would still consider one of the best genre entries of 2020.

Short-form dramatic presentation has strong contenders with the series finale of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a possible contender for a future Kid’s Stuff essay and with the series finale of The Good Place, for which I have a lot of affection. All in all this slate of finalists looks far better than the painful slates we suffered through during the tumultuous Sad Puppy years. And yet I’m not happy.

Because it seems like the entirety of SFF has forgotten that, as of the time of writing, Disney still has not paid Alan Dean Foster. Disney’s insufferable expression of unadulterated brand-as-entertainment, The Mandalorian, is nominated in short-form dramatic presentation not once but twice, and the Pixar movie Soul is nominated in long-form dramatic presentation. I have never felt even the slightest whit of interest in The Mandalorian as I consider the entire enterprise almost entirely lacking in artistic merit. On the other hand, Soul may very well be a very good cartoon. I don’t care. It’s shocking that the genre “fan community” would show so little concern for the material conditions under which artists labour as to heap fan-accolades upon the Mouse that Eats.

Recently Disney bought and shuttered a minor competitor of Pixar in Blue Sky Studios. This is on top of their widely-covered acquisitions of Fox, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar that have marked its monopolistic quest to control all of entertainment over the last fifteen years. In my opinion there is no greater threat to artistic expression, in the world, than Disney. Not even Amazon is as harmful. Disney has now begun using its streaming service to directly supplant cinema as a result of the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, charging exorbitant mark-ups to access feature movies like the Mulan reboot in which Disney attempts to cement its ownership of a poem older than even Beowulf and Raya and the Last Dragon. There is no reasonable frame in which Disney’s corporate maneuvers, their acquisitiveness and their monopolism can be divided from their art.

Disney’s rapid acquisition of genre properties should be of grave concern to genre fans. It has a long history of homophobia, colonialism and racism. It is a four-quadrant obsessed producer of massive tentpole films in which people don’t fuck or swear, queers exist in subtext alone, and where violence is safely PG-13. It is deeply in bed with the US military. Disney’s vast acquisitions have the effect of flattening and circumscribing the imaginations of audiences who have very few options that aren’t the Mouse. And this also plays into the construction of consumer communities that reduce the act of engaging with art to merely being an unpaid amateur brand ambassador. And so I’m pleading with fan communities to remember that Disney doesn’t care about artists. It just cares about hoarding art and treating it as a revenue stream. If we’re fans of art and not of brands we must show Disney as much distain in 2021 as we did to the Sad Puppies in 2015. The risk to art from Disney is far greater than the risk to art ever posed by the Puppies.

So please do not vote for any Disney owned artworks at this year’s Hugo awards. And spread the word.

Fandom is not a family

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happy-family-1316701-639x797Ok, I know this one will probably get me some flack but it needs saying, because it’s an idea which has impacted the frames of reference for our current conversations: Famdom is not a family. What this means is that it’s a cop-out to say, “I put up with homophobe uncle John and besides he doesn’t know any better,” as a justification for why we should just accept that our sub-culture will always include bigots.

But what is Fandom if not a family?

Fandom is a loose-knit collection of communities

Seriously, even calling Fandom one community, let alone one family, is a misnomer. There is a professional organization called SFWA, another called the HWA, there are various convention boards and membership lists, and each of these things could be called a community. And some people cross between these groups, some people might be in dozens of these groups, but that doesn’t mean the groups are all one polyglot community.

And this is important, because people can choose who they want in their communities. Part of the core of all this year’s kerfuffle was when, a while back, a certain individual was invited to leave one community (SFWA) after a public meltdown.

Fandom is a sub-culture

With specialized language (mention a SMOF to one of your non-fannish colleagues and see the look of complete unrecognition), dress (not just cosplay either, the ribbons, the pins, they’re dress markers), and interests (obviously) fandom is almost the textbook definition of a sub-culture. And, looked at in this sense we don’t have much choice about who adopts those cultural markers. Anybody can like genre fiction if they want. Anybody can learn the Turkey City Lexicon and the acronyms that get tossed around at cons. Anybody can learn what the in-jokes are and what those damn ribbons mean.

But here’s another example of a sub-culture: punk rock. Now both Jello Biafra and Michale Graves are very much part of the punk rock sub-culture but they probably have almost entirely different takes on politics, philosophy and well… everything. There’s probably nobody who would suggest that the former lead singers of the Dead Kennedys and the Misfits are not real punks; and yet Biafra is a left-anarchist, while Graves is a staunch conservative.

And yet, I doubt anybody would try to talk those two into touring together either.

Fandom is a workplace

Not for everybody, but for lots of people: writers and actors, makers and booksellers. For these people Fandom is where they work. It’s simultaneously built of their suppliers, colleagues and customers, sometimes all in one body.

Now here’s where we can make some progress between the wide-open, anybody can sign on nature of a sub-culture and the much more exclusive nature of specific communities. Because we have a pretty strong understanding of what is acceptable and not acceptable reasons to invite somebody to leave a workplace. And it’s not because you don’t like their politics. But when it crosses a line from, “I disagree with this person,” to, “this person is harassing their co-workers,” then we’ve got a pretty good reason to exclude them.

And this is a pretty good litmus for how to decide what people we want in the Fandom tent. We want the people who don’t:

  • Touch inappropriately, stalk and sexually harass people
  • Threaten people with violence or incite other people to violence
  • Advocating for the extermination of a sub-set of people or for discrimination against people on the basis of inherent traits
  • etc.

And I’m going to say right now that there’s plenty of conservatives who don’t do any of these things. And there are leftists and centerists who do some or all of these things. And how we treat them should not be dependent on their position on a political spectrum but on their actions.

And besides, why do you tolerate bigotry from your relatives?

My relatives are pretty cool so I don’t have much experience with this, though I have to remind certain relatives on occasion that Conservative does not equal stupid or evil; and the thing is I do that even though I disagree entirely with everything Conservativism stands for, because I understand that it’s possible for decent people to disagree wildly.

But if a relative told a racist joke at Thanksgiving dinner, I’d say, “that’s racist. Why would you say that?” Progress depends on us, personally, having the courage of conviction to confront outmoded and harmful discourse.

If you say, “Oh, that’s just Aunt Jane, she’s from another time / some specific place / this or that faith; she doesn’t know any better, bless her heart,” you’re letting that particular thread continue unchallenged. And bigotry should be confronted by all decent people wherever it’s found.

Fandom is my workplace. I come there to network, to sell and to buy. I come there to learn and to teach. Many of my friends are members of the communities that compose fandom, and I’m happy to use the elements of material culture that signify membership in the sub-culture. But it’s not my family. So while I’m happy for the big tent to include communists, anarchists, socialists, liberals, centerists, conservatives and libertarians, I won’t tolerate harassers and unrepentant bigots. A big tent is great, but we can choose what is acceptable behaviour in our group. And if somebody violates that behaviour we can invite them to leave.

Post Hugo Roundup

/ Simon / 3 Comments

Another roundup of links related to the fallout of the Hugos. Again, sharing link doesn’t imply either endorsement or chastisement of the contents.

Let’s start with the absolute craziest as John C. Wright produces an absolutely unhinged screed claiming that us not awarding him, the greatest gift to writing since clay tablets, lets Patrick Nielsen Hayden (also the gays?) win.

Brad Torgersen says he’s afraid he’ll never be allowed to forget his leadership of the Sad Puppy campaign and also that the Hugos really aren’t that big a deal anyway.

Larry Correia claims that Fandom is both monolithic enough to require Sad Puppy slate voting and so fractuous that the slate voting isn’t really needed to push names onto the ballot.

Vox Day probably said something too but I don’t care what he thinks.

John Scalzi suggests that acting like a jerk doesn’t pay.

This tumblr thread discusses why the Alfies were not the secret SJW Hugos.

Black Gate suggests that the failure of the Puppy slate might have to do more with the quality of the work than any political consideration.

Nick Mamatas also invites Sad Puppy partisans to defend the quality of the nominated works.

The Guardian reports on GRRM’s reaction to the Hugo results.

Tobias Buckell mocked up an alternate world ballot for the Hugos in which the Puppy campaigns hadn’t overrun the nominations.

Wired provided a moderately measured piece on the entire affair. Which was justifiably criticized for striking a tone as if women and people of colour were new to SFF (which they certainly aren’t).

Flavorwire attempted a brief summary of the whole mess.

Asia Times (and the China Daily) mostly just concentrated on the Best Novel win for Liu Cixin, entirely ignoring the puppy kerfuffle in their coverage.

NPR warns that this may not be a loss for the puppies, depending on how their goals are defined.

The Nielsen Haydens hosted a discussion thread on their blog which is mostly interesting for some otherwise quiet big names who popped in to leave their five cents.

Aliette De Bodard saw the Hugos as a win for a global vision of SF/F between the Liu Cixin / Ken Liu and Thomas Olde Heuvelt wins.

This is from before the awards but it is still relevant so I’ll include it: Kelly Robson suggested mediation between Puppy and other interest groups would be more productive than fighting.

Mike Selinker proposed a suggested fix for the Hugos based on video game testing methodology.

Abigail Nussbaum argues against the Hugos being seen as elitist or progressive to begin with, suggesting they tend to be populist and middle of the road.

Adam Shaftoe seconds Kelly Robson’s proposal for mediation and discourse.

Frank Wu suggests puppies abandon block voting in exchange for some big-name authors providing exposure to some Puppy-favourite work.

File 770 published a thorough collection of quotes from all sides.

An exceptional analysis from Eric Flint.

Arthur Chu suggests that the Sad Puppies really only exist online, thanks to the ability of the internet to favour those willing to burn the most time on an issue, and are effectively absent from physical spaces.

I may add to this as I see new things of interest. I moderate comments with a light hand but I too have a copy of Scalzi’s mallet of loving correction which I will use as I see fit. Please feel free to share links to either side of this discussion, except for Vox Day. No link to his blog will get out of moderation.