The Long and Winding Road to Hugo
Latest and Greatest Worldcon-troversy
Perhaps you have heard that there’s been shenanigans coming to light regarding the Hugos. Perhaps you haven’t heard. Perhaps you haven’t heard of the Hugos. Strap in, we’re going on a Hugo-related road trip.
The Hugos are a prestigious award in science fiction and fantasy (SFF) writing. Each year, Hugos are awarded for the best novels, novelettes, novellas, short stories, television series, television episodes, and more, in the SFF space. The Hugo award is named after actor Hugo Weaving, who famously played Elrond Half-Elven in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie series at the same time as playing Agent Smith in the Wachowski Siblings’ Matrix series, completing an SFF hat trick in 2003 when he starred in the third- and fourth-top-grossing SFF films of that year.
The above is not true at all. The Hugos are actually named after Hugo Gernsback, who launched the SFF magazine Amazing Stories in 1926. The Hugo awards were first given in 1953, ten years before Hugo Weaving was born. Hugo Weaving’s parents actually named him after the Hugo awards in the hope that he would go on to perform an SFF hat trick exactly 40 years later.
The above is not true at all. Or maybe it is? There’s just no way we can know for sure how it all went down.
The Hugos are awarded each year, to works published or translated in the previous year, at a science fiction and fantasy convention called Worldcon. Worldcon is the annual meeting of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). The WSFS membership consists of anyone who join Worldcon. It’s kind of circular. The 2024 Worldcon is coming up in August in Glasgow, Scotland. You can buy a membership in the Glasgow Worldcon that includes attendance at the convention, or you can buy just the WSFS membership through Glasgow Worldcon. Or you can buy just a ticket for attendance at the Glasgow Worldcon, but that’s only for those who are ineligible for membership (kids and teens).
Membership in a Worldcon conveys the right both to nominate and vote on the Hugo awards. For your $50ish membership (strictly speaking it’s £45 because, you know, Scotland) you can vote for the best SFF novel, novella, novelette, short story, pro magazine, fan magazine, pro artist, fan artist, and so on. Anyone can vote, who pays for membership.
This is in contrast to the Nebula award, another of the premier SFF awards, for which voting rights are limited to members of the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). Membership in the SFWA is limited to verified authors of published SFF works and the personnel adjacent to the writing of SFF works (publishers, editors, librarians, and so on). This makes the Nebulas akin to the Oscars (nominees are voted on by their peers) while the Hugos are more like the People's Choice Awards, in that essentially anyone may vote.
Controversy is not new to the Hugo awards. Between 2013 and 2017, a voting bloc called “The Sad Puppies,” led first by author Larry Correia and later by author Brad R. Torgersen, accused the Hugos of being awarded on the basis of “political correctness” rather than merit. The Sad Puppies worked together to create slates of works to nominate and vote on that promoted white and male authors over works by “diverse” authors. Several authors whose works were appeared on the Sad Puppies slates withdrew their work from consideration rather than associate with the Sad Puppies. In 2015, several categories consisted of only works nominated by the Sad Puppies, and the Worldcon membership voted to make no award in those categories rather than award to a Sad Puppies–nominated work.
In 2016, the Hugos moved to a new nomination tallying system called “E Pluribus Hugo” (“Out of Many, a Hugo,” or EPH), which I don’t totally understand because math but which is explained in great detail on the Worldcon75 website. The move to the EPH tallying system was intended to cut down on the effectiveness of bloc voting on slates. Dave McCarty and Jamison Quinn did an interesting analysis in 2016 on prior Worldcons (2015, 2014, and 1939) to look at how the final ballot may have been different under the EPH tallying system. You can read the results and analysis here if you enjoy math (or even if you don’t, I guess).
You can also read more about the Sad Puppies in this Bookseller article from 2022 if you’re interested in learning more. I’ve really only scratched the surface here.
Anyway. Another thing the Worldcon membership gets to vote on is where the next Worldcon will be held. In 2023, Worldcon81 was held in Chengdu, China, capital of the Sichuan province. It was held last October, but it’s back in the literary world new this week, which is why I’m writing about it now.
The road to Chengdu did not run smoothly. From the start, after Chengdu was chosen at Worldcon79, more than 100 authors signed an open letter in early 2022 requesting that the location for Worldcon81 be reconsidered due to the ongoing human rights violations against Uyghurs, also known as the Uyghur Genocide, in China. The location was not changed and Chengdu hosted in 2023 as planned.
Last weekend, the voting statistics for the 2023 Hugo awards (those awarded at Worldcon81, in Chengdu), as well as the Lodestar and the Astounding Award, were publicly released. The community was quick to notice that certain nominated authors and works had been marked as “ineligible” for unknown reasons, including
Author Xiran Jay Zhao, nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, who would have been the fourth-ranked finalist had they not been disqualified.
Best Novel nominee Babel, by author RF Kuang, which would have been the third-highest ranked finalist if not disqualified.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form nominee Sandman Episode 6: The Sound of Her Wings, written and executive produced by Neil Gaiman, which would have been the the third-highest ranked finalist if not disqualified.
Gaiman, on Facebook, asked Dave McCarty—co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division—for an explanation of why Sandman Episode 6 was ineligible, given that the reason the full series had been considered ineligible for the longform category because so many episodes had been nominated for the short form.
McCarty responded that he had made a call to put Sandman in the short form category for episode 6 rather than put the full series in the longform category, but declined to answer why episode 6 was later determined to be ineligible for the award. McCarty later went on to be, pardon my Czechoslovkian, a real jerkface about the situation on Facebook.
I don’t know about anyone else but I can’t decide if my favorite part is where he insists he’s answered the question of why the works were ineligible by stating “we reviewed the Constitution and the reason was in there” or the part where he accuses those asking questions of being developmentally disabled (“are you slow?”).
Xiran Jay Zhao, a Canadian author of Chinese descent, speculated in a Tuesday tweet that their expressed views on the CPC, and Kuang’s, may have been the cause of their exclusion:
Speculation notwithstanding, there has not yet been any statement about the reasons for excluding Gaiman, Zhao, and Kuang—as well as Paul Weimer, who was deemed ineligible in the Best Fan Writer category, for which he would have been the third-ranked finalist—beyond that the Worldcon constitution was consulted and these writers and works were found to be ineligible.
I’ll report back if the truth comes out about why these specific writers and their works were disqualified from the 2023 Hugos. They seem like a somewhat disparate group at first: A couple of white guys, a Chinese American woman, and a nonbinary Chinese Canadian person. But in 2014, Gaiman was a signatory to an open letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping urging him to release imprisoned Chinese writers. Kuang and Zhao, both born in China and living in North America, have been openly critical of the ruling party in China. Frankly I don’t know anything about Weimer and can’t say why he may have been excluded. I didn’t find anything but third-party speculation when I looked so I’m omitting that here.
Given that the Hugos already dealt with several years of right-wing election-rigging in the previous decade and are now, again, under fire for disqualifying nominees without making the reasons transparent, several people in the SFF community are speculating whether the Hugos are headed the way of Romance’s RITA award. The RITAs, managed by the Romance Writers of America (RWA), ended in 2019, rebranded as the Vivian Award for 2021, and then ended again due to controversy around lack of diversity among the nominees and winners and the promotion of objectionable content.
The Hugos won’t be the first SFF award to kick the bucket if they do. The Campbell—sorry, that’s the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel—was sunset in 2019 after running for 46 years (first awarded 1973). The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer is still around, albeit rebranded as the Astounding Award for Best New Writer—the category in which Zhao was disqualified.
While the Campbell was a prestigious award, and ran for a long time, the Hugos have run longer and are considered the premier award in SFF writing (neck-and-neck with the Nebula, in my opinion, but not in everybody’s). Personally I think it would be tragic if the Hugos ended. But it would be more tragic—again, in my opinion—if they continue to gloss over and cover up unfair nomination and voting practices.
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