Literary Clusterfucks 2013

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

tl;dr: because the 2023 science fiction world convention was being held in chengdu, the hugo awards selection committee privately disqualified anything that they even vaguely suspected might upset the chinese government

On June 6, Kat Jones wrote an email to the administration group titled “Best Novel potential issues.” In the email, Jones raised concerns about the novels Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Jones wrote that 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’” while adding that The Daughter of Doctor Moreau talked “about importing hacienda workers from China. I have not read the book, and do not know whether this would be considered ‘negative.’”

Ahh thanks for this. I haven't been following the stooshie, but that explains why (as a Glasgow Worldcon 2024 attendee) I got this email the other day:

As Chair of Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, I unreservedly apologise for the damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards.

Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.

I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress.

I, and Glasgow 2024, do not know how any of the eligibility decisions for the Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards held at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention were reached. We know no more than is already in the public domain.

At Glasgow 2024 we are taking the following steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.

The steps we are committing to are:

1) When our final ballot is published by Glasgow 2024, in late March or early April 2024, we will also publish the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot.

2) Full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.

3) The Hugo administration subcommittee will also publish a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.

Glasgow 2024 will continue to address this matter as we go forward as a Worldcon.

this blew up and...idgi, is she trying to say that she literally invented the term 'hanging out', or is she trying to say that his article was so similar to her book she should have been cited? idk

I actually cite @DKThomp in my book about … wait for it … Hanging Out. Which his magazine, @TheAtlantic, published an excerpt from in December 2022 (and never paid me for).

But @DKThomp didn’t manage to cite me or my work. Interesting. https://t.co/OMB8PcEX0B

— Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak) February 14, 2024

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

Was that the focus of the "sad puppies" dustup a few years ago?

is she trying to say that his article was so similar to her book she should have been cited?

I presume this, although there are lots of people writing about this sort of thing lately (the loneliness epidemic, the friendship recession, etc.) that it seems churlish to complain about this article just bc it uses the phrase "hanging out."

That said, The Atlantic should pay her for that excerpt.

Yikes...

https://i.ibb.co/pPjgyP4/Screenshot-20240217-162149-Chrome.jpg

lmao

the editors probably should have clued him in, but lol at her owning “hanging out”

I teach a research methods class for nonfiction writers. Just let me know if you’d like to sit in and I’ll be happy to share the Zoom link! https://t.co/9I1NYKd8wo

— Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak) February 15, 2024

I seriously can’t tell if she’s doing a bit

She seems like a pretty typical high on their own supply tenured writing prof

pretty sure no one who started instructing or even got to associate prof since 1998 has ever gotten tenure but you’d know better!

I think she probably views it as publicity

twitter-beefing that is

Honestly, I'm kind of on her side here -- she ran the piece in the Atlantic, she feels that Thompson, a staff writer there, probably read it there, forgot he read it, then borrowed her phrasing; it would be incredibly irritating to run a piece, not get paid, then feel like the guy who is getting paid is making use of your phrasing without even remembering where he got it from! I don't think that's churlish really.

That said, I think Thompson handled it as well as he could have.

Also I am not so convinced there's anything wrong with human life today and I think the ability to have low-key text conversations constantly with people far away is a feature of modern life that pushes the other way from diminished face-to-face interaction and for all I know even outweighs that diminishment.

isn’t associate prof typically tenured?

He claimed he hadn't read it in a tweet and she said he should have googled since he called it Hanging Out

The idea someone should have Googled a phrase that's been in common use for half a century or more is ridiculous.

i’ve spent most of my life hanging out all the time and still manage to do it a fair bit, but i now have some friends who don’t hang out at all. it’s interesting. for them any social gathering must be a planned activity with a well-defined beginning and end, and almost always needs some intrinsic function to justify it. like i once met up with this guy for a movie and we met up outside the theatre 5 minutes before and then as soon as the movie was over he caught a cab home, didn’t even do the “so what did you think of the movie?” chat. another time my partner and i went to dinner with him and his wife on a saturday night, we met at the restaurant at 6 then they went home promptly at 7:30. not even a hint of a consideration that we’d grab a drink or walk around a bit. the restaurant was a block from their place; they could’ve invited us over. and they don’t have kids. for the longest time we thought they just didn’t like us, but then at one point he told my partner he considered me his best friend. he does text me a lot. it was really confusing, but i think for some people the idea of idly spending time with your friends because you enjoy their company is just not a concept they are aware of. so i could see Sheila Liming thinking she invented “hanging out” if she’d previously exclusively lived amongst these kinds of people. like to her she’d unearthed some kind of lost tradition. the subtitle of the book calls hanging out “radical” which is consistent with that

that’s kind of foreign to me, too. I guess the main difference between now and when I was younger is I’m just hanging out at a friend’s place less than I used to.

part of that is the shared urge to get out of the house and we’ll bounce around a bit before going back to our respective homes. people in my sphere also have tighter schedules when you figure in kids, different work hours, etc. so things can seem time-boxed

obviously most of humanity’s greatness comes from just chilling

Man that is disappointing when people don’t want to engage in the post-movie stroll and chit-chat. Weather permitting of course.

The whole idea of hanging out at a friend's house is dead for almost app my friends but two.

One of them now can't really have me over as much because he's promised not to drink in front of his kids anymore and most of the time we'd be drinking fancy whiskey or beer and watching football.

The other sometimes has me over or comes over but ALWAYS wants to go out while simultaneously saying she needs to save money.

But there is no activity more enjoyable to me than just hanging at a friend's pad or having them over mine. Don't gotta worry about "finding parking", or feeling overwhelmed in public which happens often to me lately.

And then more money to do more substantial things with these friends, like the road trip to see Snoop Dogg with this same friend and her boyfriend last year, which was an amazing two day trip

*all

yeah kids change the calculus. but my friend from the above post is childless and both he and his partners have jobs with very flexible schedules—so no excuse

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

Feel like I only hear about widespread efforts to remove books from libraries as the result of organised campaigns by a tiny coterie of right-wing creeps, maybe they should scrap libraries.

Fuck sake.

tbf, removing books from libraries is done by external, (mostly) right-wing forces, and the Hugos shot themselves in the foot, thigh, and sternum during the 2023 awards, based on the details that have just come out

one thing im a bit confused by with the hugo stuff—isn’t babel by rf kuang quite widely acknowledged to be terrible? everyone i know who attempted reading it basically threw it across the room, and the excerpts ive read were awful

yes but that book throwing helped people increase muscle mass

shot themselves

has tipsy been hearing about the 2024 awards since 2013 or was it something else

xpost I haven’t read the book, but it won the Nebula so apparently not everyone agreed it was terrible

Feel like I only ever hear about the Hugos because of blunders and controversies, maybe they should scrap them.

With respect, this might be a you problem, it's kept on being one of the two big awards (which is why the Sad / Rabid Puppies went after it, though they never really got very far) - if you don't follow sci-fi awards, where would you expect to hear of it?

xp also the Blackwell's book of the year for fiction (also my wife loved it)

lol my primary source on Hugos is Chuck Tingle. I don't really have an opinion about them.

Hugo winners are a good way to get new scifi reading in - well, they were on point with NK Jemisin anyway she's awesome.

Any awards that keep being given to Sean McGuire are deeply suspect awards. And they're popularly voted, so the literary equivalent of the Logies.

Hmm, except that no one knows what the Logies are

xp I am assuming you're not deadnaming Seanan McGuire there?

Just autocorrect kicking in, annoyingly

I actually wasn't aware she'd had any other name.

And the Logies thing was my point.

Logies have only been open voting for a decade or so, you used to have to spend $2.95 on the form and 37¢ on the stamp, at least

(so they were rigged by publicists instead of the public)

Any organisation’s membership giving awards, contrarily, is a completely normal and reasonable process for awards. And rarely results in a significantly more demented slate than one which has juried noms and attendee voting tbf.

(I have no opinion about the recipients of any of them in the last 8 years except that two went to a friend and those ones are, unrelatedly, good and justified. if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho)

all awards are bad

thread winner

Historic Hugos (and Nebulas) award winners still a dece enough guide to the best in the genre for newbies.

if tipsy wants to call for the awards to be scrapped bcz he has now heard of them four times, not twice, in eleven years, go ahead tho

I dived into the whole sad puppies thing when it was going on — which ran for like five years, didn't it? — and now obviously this whole China debacle. All of which suggest — to, yes, somebody who doesn't pay much attention or attach any particular significance to the Hugos — that there are some organizational/structural issues or vulnerabilities. I don't care if it gets scrapped or not, but it looks like they're going to have some work to do to re-establish whatever credibility they had.

There are probably 50 different awards for SF writing given out yearly, but the only ones most people know of or care about are the Nebulas and the Hugos. That's why the Sad Weirdos tried to hijack the awards in the first place. It makes more sense to replace whoever was making censorship decisions in this case than to get rid of a fan voted award entirely.

all awards are bad

NY Times is leaning toward mean takedowns: Alexandra Jacobs on Anne Lamott and Ducks, Newburyport's Lucy Ellmann on Danielle Dutton.

where's the takedown of Ducks?

no the author of Ducks (Ellmann) published a much-maligned takedown of Dutton

Ducking A!