Hugo Awards Under Fire Over Censorship Accusations (theguardian.com) 93
The 2023 Hugo Awards for science fiction hosted in China sparked controversy by excluding several authors without explanation, raising censorship concerns. Works removed included RF Kuang's bestseller "Babel," an episode of "The Sandman," and author Xiran Jay Zhao. The prestigious Hugo Awards are voted on by science fiction fans and marked the first time the annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held in China. With no reasons given for the exclusions, revealed only when nomination statistics were posted, questions emerged whether there had been interference or censorship in the process from Chinese authorities. The removed works included Kuang's speculative fiction novel "Babel," which recently won fiction book of the year in the British book awards.
Bruce66423 shares a report: Recently released documents showed that several works or authors -- some with links to China -- had been excluded from the ballot despite receiving enough nominations to be included on their respective shortlists. The excluded nominees include Kuang and Zhao, authors who were born in China but are now based in the west. Concerns have been raised that the authors were targeted for political reasons, connected to the fact that the ruling Chinese Communist party exerts a tight control on all cultural events that take place inside its borders.
[...] Episode six of The Sandman, which is based on a comic book written by Neil Gaiman, was excluded from the best dramatic presentation category, despite receiving enough nominations to be on the final ballot. Gaiman has publicly criticised the Chinese authorities for imprisoning writers. [...] Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: "Until now, one of the things that's always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process ... This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don't damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years."
Bruce66423 shares a report: Recently released documents showed that several works or authors -- some with links to China -- had been excluded from the ballot despite receiving enough nominations to be included on their respective shortlists. The excluded nominees include Kuang and Zhao, authors who were born in China but are now based in the west. Concerns have been raised that the authors were targeted for political reasons, connected to the fact that the ruling Chinese Communist party exerts a tight control on all cultural events that take place inside its borders.
[...] Episode six of The Sandman, which is based on a comic book written by Neil Gaiman, was excluded from the best dramatic presentation category, despite receiving enough nominations to be on the final ballot. Gaiman has publicly criticised the Chinese authorities for imprisoning writers. [...] Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: "Until now, one of the things that's always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process ... This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don't damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years."
Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Insightful)
Because this isn't the first time the credibility of the Hugos has come under fire, and they didn't have a lot of credibility left to burn.
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Nice to see another progressive with a low Slashdot ID number.
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And I'm sure your smoking hot beauty queen girlfriend from Canada will show up for the ceremony . . . as soon as the money order arrives.
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The very idea of an award that confers "best" on some work of art lacks credibility.
It's best to see any award as a *select* group of individuals choosing to *celebrate* certain works. Naturally the works they choose are going to be different than the works a different group chooses, and that's OK.
The Hugos belong to Worldcon, specifically the supporting members of Worldcon. If they hand out more awards to brown and female authors than you would like that's their prerogrative, and you can set up your own
Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Funny)
Your comment is interesting, but what does it have to do with the current issue regarding China and the mismatch between the results?
The venting of the spleen knows no reasons! Complaints gotta complain!
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He was answering someone's direct question. Complainers gonna complain alright...
No, I was responding to someone wondering why someone was complaining about something not directly related to the actual story.
On a positive note, reading comprehension is a skill and you can work to improve it!
Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty clear that the Hugos got more political in recent years, which the grandparent is kind of alluding to. The fact that they then run in a country where political dissent is punished suddenly makes you wonder if that country has been manipulating the politics of the Hugo in previous years as well as this one? In any case, the choice to run a literary award in a country where some literature is punishable with imprisonment is extremely dubious.
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A supporter of TFG upset by namecalling? ROTFLMAO!
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If, by expanding to "the world", you kowtow to a dictator and censor, that's really a piss poor virtue signal.
Re: Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:1)
Because the SMOFs have zero moral compunction against censorship of their political opponents.
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Two chinese women and a British man get ruled ineligible for a worldwide prize, and some dumb chud goes off about how things are unfair to white men in America.
Honestly, I don't know how you have so much energy to keep whining. Most toddlers eventually cry themselves out.
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Let's check the bingo card
OK!
orange man bad
woo!
woke
oh good one!
Marxist
yep...
Kek!
Bingo!!!!
Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Orange Man is bad, his supporters have surrendered themselves to a cult of victimhood, which they believe gives them license to be assholes to everyone, and even overthrow democratic institutions.
And you are the weak, you just can't see how fragile you are.
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The Left play the victim hood game WAY better than the right. In fact their whole culture is based around victimhood of class oppression.
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Everyone knows things can only be unfair in one way, and that if something is unfair to someone then elsewhere is universal fairness.
And while you may be right that by "equality" OP means "unfair in my favor" there is a very slight chance he meant what he said.
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Because there's a group people who for political purpose is preaching constantly that white males are the most repressed group in the entire world. And some idiots actually start believing this. No better way to get people aligned with you politically than to convince them that they're the underdog and you're here to fix that.
I mean look around. Who is staffing the majority of positions in C-level spots in major corporations? White males. Yes, they're not trailer trash dues getting drunk every night on
Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Informative)
There has only been one black woman who has won a Hugo so your precis is obviously false. And you've obviously never read her books because they are some of the best science fiction books of all time, let alone for the years she won the awards for.
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Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Informative)
Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.[24] The sequels in the trilogy, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2017[25] and 2018,[26] respectively, making Jemisin the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy.[4]
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It ain't all that (3.9 / 5 on Goodreads).
Aaaahahahahahahahahahahaha
You're going on good reads scores?
The Name of the Wind (one of the worst, but not the worst) books I've waded all the way through (mostly out of spite) got a whopping 4.52 stars.
The wise man's fear, which was twice as long, 3 times as whiny and had the sex fairy worship at the altar of Mary Kvothe, uh Sue for being so good at sex has a whopping 4.55 which is the highest store I know of. Yes I read the whole thing. No that makes no sense, and
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+1 for this line, "which is all the most obnoxious parts of the previous two books carefully distilled and aged into a fine artisanal spirit of awfulness".
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You're going on good reads scores?
Well, I could have just gone with my own opinion that the book sucked (I still finished the trilogy) and it's one of those I basically wish I'd skipped. It wasn't worth the time and I disagreed with the majority that Jemisin's work was all that praiseworthy.
In my opinion, Goodreads definitely has more trustworthy results than Amazon, IMO, but it doesn't reflect my taste 1:1. It's just some point of reference.
The Name of the Wind
I'm definitely a fan of the Kingkiller Chronicles as a series, but I will also admit that it has a
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I'm not commenting on the Jemisin book (have not read).
In my opinion, Goodreads definitely has more trustworthy results than Amazon, IMO, but it doesn't reflect my taste 1:1. It's just some point of reference.
I mean... they're pretty consistently between about 3.8 and 4.2 with no correlation of quality as far as I can say. You occasionally get extreme outliers like TWMF, which even if you like Rothfuss, presumably wouldn't think is one of the, possibly the outstanding book of all time, and Twilight which se
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Unfortunately not, well, not the average ratings anyway. Best as I can tell, an I've read a lot of books an reviews.
Ignoring the ones that hit the big time then get review stuffed (which are 0.0001% of them), mostly people read books they believe they are going to like. That's not necessarily a bad thing per-se, because reviews by people who hate the genre are useless (and you do get quite a lot of "1* this is a scifi book i hate scifi" to be sure, just not a large proportion).
I think that makes book review
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Oh and if you don't mind one review of general fiction per fortnight with no star rating, just a full page of text, then there's always the book review in Private Eye. They're pretty accurate (if a little negative).
Re:Remove the beam from your own eye (Score:5, Informative)
Googled this...there's NK Jemisin, but Octavia Butler also got several Hugos (as she should, she's amazing).
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Different people find different styles and themes attractive. There is no such thing as "a best novel" except in the limited context of the opinion of an editor, critic, or poll. Some of the books I thought were the best a decade ago, I no longer find even very good. The evaluation is interactive between the book and the reader. If the reader changes, the evaluation may change.
If you had said "they are some of the most popular", you'd be making a meaningful point.
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There has only been one black woman who has won a Hugo so your precis is obviously false.
What kind of fucked up logic is that? Maybe the publishers were keeping the black women out. Or maybe there were just no good stories written by black women. Regardless, the logic doesn't work. I recall periods of my life where we were actually striving to get rid of the nonsense that it matters WHO wrote the story. The only real question is: Is it a good story?
I didn't care if my stories were written by Ursula K LeGuin, Anne McAffrey, Robert Heinlein, or Isaac Asimov. All of them wrote really good stories.
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The puppy mess played out entirely in the open, the worldcon voters voted no award, they introduced a new algorithm after a couple years and that was it.
China? (Score:1)
Why did anyone think it's a good idea to host this in China?
Money I'm guessing.
Re:China? (Score:5, Informative)
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Maybe they need to host the Hugos there next year.
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It's a bad idea to host this in any state where the government has a history of using its political power to attack entities whose speech it doesn't like (e.g. China, Dubai, Florida, etc). These states are worthless for celebrations of art and new ideas.
Stick to free states in the future.
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I'm glad you included Florida in you list of examples but be advised that Republicans want that censorship regime for the whole country.
Let's hope for a healthy response from the winners (Score:5, Insightful)
They should voluntarily return their awards and admit they have no reason to be picked out above the other nominees. The authorised records should delete all references to 'winners', and merely list all those who satisfied the requirements for nomination. And the convention should never again go to China.
That would be the least bad outcome. Anyone betting on its happening?
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Sure, I'll take that bet for one dollar. I'll be LOADED if it actually happens, and if it doesn't, no big deal.
Not much different from the Oscars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not much different from the Oscars (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, I knew the whole Oscar/Hollywood/woke crowd was all about race, but I didn't realize they had actually written this in the rules. I'd be curious to see if there were any oscar-worthy (whatever the hell that means) films that were denied due to not meeting the correct number of certain colored skin requirements.
Reading through them, it seems like it would be pretty easy to meet their requirements (seriously, you can just have a few brown-skinned interns to meet one of the two requirements).
The other loophole you could jump through to meet these requirements is to get one of your leads to say, "Yeah, I've kind of questioned my sexual orientation once back in college", because then you would hit the 'Q' in LGBTQ+.
If I was making a movie, I would so screw with these people....
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Doing nothing and hoping it just gets better has been tried. It doesn't work. So either we throw up our hands and say we can't do anything to fix the very, very racist history of Hollywood that lingers to this day, or we have to do pretty much the only thing we can.
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The Oscars don't have Chuck Tingle.
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Because the political requirements for the Oscars are ones which we're supposed to approve of, while the political requirements for the Hugos by China are ones which we're allowed to disapprove of. (This is different from the political requirements for Hugos in previous years based on social justice, which we're also supposed to approve of.)
Two kinds of censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
The first kind is, "you can't say that".
The second kind is, "you can't even say you can't say that, we won't tell you what it is you can't say, but you'll figure it out and go along with it".
That latter kind is incredibly oppressive and should not be tolerated.
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THAT!!!
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no surprise to see China doing what it's been doing for ages. What is surprising is that the Hugos would invite the controversy of being hosted there. I tend not to put much stock in the Hugo/Nebula/Locus/whatever awards just due to personal preferences (there are some great books on those lists, but also some books I thoroughly disliked), but I can't help but feel like this is a step on the road toward irrelevancy.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
What is surprising is that the Hugos would invite the controversy of being hosted there.
Well, maybe but it shouldn't be. Almost no organisations are set up to survive an attack from a nation state let alone a superpower, and unsurprisingly WSFS, basically a not especially big literary society, is no exception. Turns out China can just buy so many memerships that they can flood all the voting and control the organisation based on its current rules.
Here is the WSFS organisation:
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Sounds like they managed to do what the Rabid Puppies and similar groups failed to a decade ago.
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Sounds like they managed to do what the Rabid Puppies and similar groups failed to a decade ago.
Pretty much. Unlike the puppies, the Chinese state has real resources, and presumably a manager for this, not simply a disconnected grab bag of grievances.
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When Nixon opened China (Score:3)
It was always about cheap labor anyway.
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he sold it to us as a way to export our Democracy to them. Instead they're exporting their brand of authoritarian fascism to us.
It was always about cheap labor anyway.
Not only were we stupid enough to believe Nixon but we also allowed China to dictate Taiwan's status - the ONLY Asian country that has Westernized without being invaded. A leader with real cojones would have told Beijing to go fuck itself & offered Taiwan official protectorate status.
And if China made a fuss then America should have offered to purchase Hong Kong from the UK.
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By telling China we're going to renew the lease & you're going to like it
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In this instance they're not exporting anything. They imported the Hugos, at considerable expense.
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he sold it to us as a way to export our Democracy to them. Instead they're exporting their brand of authoritarian fascism to us.
Someone has clearly forgotten the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Was it really a question? (Score:3)
questions emerged whether there had been interference or censorship in the process from Chinese authorities.
Seriously, have these people MET China before?
Up Yours China (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that backfired. Now I'm going to go read Babel and check out Xiran Jay Zhao. Never would have heard of them otherwise!
Mental midgets (Score:1)
Hugo Admin Resign! (Score:2)
Every member of the Hugo administration, who took Chinese money, should resign or be sacked immediately. This is completely unacceptable.
Babel is published in Chinese (Score:2)
There is also a fan writer who was not eligible, and I thought he had no relation with China.
Transparency is needed about exactly what happened. A sad side effect is that this shitstorm devalues this year's winners.
"Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" syndrome. (Score:3)
I read Babel. It's neither science fiction nor top-notch fantasy. If a college sophomore was tasked with writing a fantasy novel imitating "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" while hitting predetermined political correctness beats, that would be the result. In fact, it's a little baffling the CCP has a problem with it given its choice of villains.