> the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! proactively! and incompetently!) vetted potential finalists for political statements relating to China, and then the main administrator presumably used that info to mark some of them ineligible. It should be said: there’s no indication that Chinese censors even cared about the content of the English work. Some of it had already been translated into Chinese for goodness’ sake! So the Western members of the committee appear to have been flailing about based on what they thought China wouldn’t like, and preemptively self-censored, rather than, oh, I dunno, refusing to censor anything in the first place.
That's how censorship works, though. A country with mostly free speech will clearly and unambiguously ban a list of works (or types of content). There are always some limits to speech, but debates are possible as long as the rules are clearly defined.
Authoritarians expect self-censorship and have vague rules because they expect you to be making an effort to do what they want (or at least to pretend you are). Having platforms do the censorship, and banning the platforms that do a poor job is a lot more scalable than making it all centralised.
In an authoritarian state you can't get a decent official list of banned works, and in a distopian state you can't even get a list of alllowed works. Incompetence in how censorship is applied by platforms is expected, if not always tolerated.
Some previous discussions:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 (295 comments)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132185 (74 comments)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012127 (67 comments)
Funny timing with all this is that I just read Folding Beijing (https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/) a few days ago, which won a Hugo in 2016. Great story, but I can't help but think that this year's committee would've axed it too.
I feel like the author deserves a unique Hugo for their graciousness, all things considered.
Considering how badly that whole thing went, I hope people don't give up on the underlying concept of including China in global science fiction awards or even more generally. It seems important for everyone's security to integrate culturally. My impression is that there is a significant amount of that already happening, being driven by forward-thinking writers, artists, academics etc.
Have any writers tried to bridge the ideology gap between China and the West? Maybe Taiwanese authors. I think I read an article saying that one of the top Chinese officials with enormous power had been in the US and although initially supposedly open to western ideas had found a lot of negatives that ended up reinforcing more opposing beliefs.
The Hugo awards (and the Nebula awards) have become highly political. Works seems to be chosen more for their political viewpoints than for the quality of their writing. The article is a perfect example: The story "Rabbit Test" (according to the author's website) is all about "the past, present, and future of abortion rights in America".
Abortion rights are important, but that's not what the awards should be about. If I want to read a political screed, there are plenty of other sources. The Hugos should be about cracking good SciFi/Fantasy stories.
It used to be that I would run out and buy anything that came up as a finalist for a Hugo or a Nebula, if I hadn't already read it. Nowadays, I take them more as a list of authors to avoid.
Where is the freedom in China.
Could you imagine if the US Congress called the heads of its most prominent universities in, and lambasted them for not cracking down on student groups critical of US imperialism, and then those university heads were fired? Things like that don't happen in the land of the free.
China, please look to the American example of freedom.
Ouch. Thats rough.
Pity - always thought its a credible award.
Readers should remember that for every one of these travesties that leak, there are probably more that don't.
> what appears to have been a xenophobic quest to keep the awards firmly American
The mental gymnastics required to reach this conclusion are truly impressive.
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If we are writing about writing can we please write? “Unwin”?
Ever since the same author won the award three years in a row the Hugo awards have been an utter joke.
Related ongoing thread:
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 - Feb 2024 (301 comments)