The slogan for this year, "Hugo's so cowardly" springs to mind
Plus that would make it easy for authors to fix their new book covers, just overprint a large asterisk and it's all good!
I disagree
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.
Obviously, the level of censorship from the PRC is hugely problematic, and something to seriously consider when deciding where to hold the award ceremony, but the fact that this one was a disaster should reflect mostly on McCarty and the other administrators. This shouldn’t be evidence that Chengdu was a problem.
15 years ago conferences were legitimately free and everyone felt free. I felt comfortable visiting China.
Now, I get emails asking for slides ahead of time to make we don't say anything. Chinese faculty members show up with minders. I get pleading comments in private to make sure to never say anything political because my hosts would be punished.
Heck, we had to change the ethics section of a paper recently to make my student comfortable in case he plans to return home because employers and the government would hold him accountable for what it said originally. Nothing crazy by the way, nothing even directly mentioning China, just about the general idea of freedom.
15 years later, I don't feel comfortable going to China anymore or letting any of my students go to conferences there anymore.
The only thing you know about Dave McCarty's actions is that he was extremely concerned about the locals. I could have said something in my talk about the Uyghurs and Hong Kong when I was there. And if it was a Chinese funded event in the West I would have. But it would have been my innocent friends and their families who were hosting us at the conference that would have paid the price for that. You're really buying into exactly what the system wants you to think here.
(Not a criticism of the magazine or the authors, it's just where I am).
You might be thinking of Wang Huning's "America Against America" (1991). Scott Alexander's June 2023 blog post on the subject hit the front page of HN last month. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/assistant-dictator-book-clu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051100
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.
The difference between the US and China is that in the US, political hacks can call for people to be fired from their job.
In China those same people instead are put in front of a firing squad.
So, not hard to imagine that happening further up the chain.
I mean, I didn't get shot or put in jail, so there's that. At the same time, the US ignored rather large protests and proceeded to get around 1M folks killed.
I think that's a reasonable summation of freedom in the US- the folks with the power know they have it, so it's more a question of "stern talkings-to", and then they do whatever the folks who own the place want to do.
Which, I suppose is "freedom". Not a very satisfying freedom, at least from my point of view.
My understanding is that the controversy you are referring to was regarding what circumstances it is ok for students to call for genocide against Jews, and whether that specific speech would violate the universities' policies against hate speech.
I don't think it's accurate to reframe that controversy as "critical of US imperialism".
Funny to speak of genocide when the self-described Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza and is being brought up on charges of genocide at the ICJ. The words Jews and genocide will be linked from now and in the future - the genocide the Jewish state is committing against the Palestinians.
In November the UN voted recently Palestinians have the right to self-determination. The only countries who voted against were Israel, the US, US compact member Micronesia, and the 10,000 population island of Nauru which gets a UN vote although the US blocks Palestine from having one. 70% of Americans want a ceasefire incidentally.
The world and 70% of Americans stand in horror against the genocide the self-described Jewish state is committing.
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.
Think about the west. Between Europe and the Anglosphere, there are a multitude of norms for what you can show or describe depending on the medium, the rating, the location, the platform, and the era.
In this case, there were a ton of Chinese books published by Chinese people in China, voted on by Chinese people in China, in a competition held in China. The censorship was decided by a foreigner.
One might assume that those multitudes of Chinese authors, Chinese publishers, and Chinese fans would be best positioned to know where the line sits in China.
It would be a shame if the result of a foreigner deciding to exclude all Chinese authors from one competition was the community deciding to avoid hosting in China in future.
> The way that things currently stand, I don’t think I can fully consider myself a Hugo winner.
Not a writer, but I expect any Hugo is partly hard work and talent, and partly luck. Very few winners can consider themselves objectively the best.
There's a video on YouTube called "Last man standing", about Steven Bradbury's 2002 Winter Olympics gold medal. He was the slowest, but everyone else fell over. So what? He should have won a medal in 1994 but was pushed over. He stood a chance in the 94 World Cup but almost died from blood loss in a crash, and it severed his quadriceps. Then he crashed again in the 1998 Olympics and broke his neck in 2000. And he still won his heat in the 2002, he wasn't a total amateur.
Sure, the Hugos don't have as much physical hardship, but there's luck and hard work in every win. As long as you're playing fair, and asking for the committee to keep it fair, a win is a win.
That kind of break your whole argument. They did not.
Or do you mean that it's enough to just ask ??
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.
I think there _was_ a period, maybe from the 50s to the 90s, where there was some degree of split, with scifi covering social issues (1984, Handmaid's Tale, Children of Men) self-consciously considering itself _not scifi_ (Atwood was particularly emphatic about it), but even then it wasn't a clean split; a lot of Clarke's stuff covered social issues, say.
Also Heinlein, obviously.
* 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)
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 - Feb 2024 (301 comments)
Hugo Awards – A Report on Censorship and Exclusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39382323 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)
The 2023 Hugo nomination statistics have been released and we have questions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132185 - Jan 2024 (74 comments)
Hugo Nomination Report Has Unexplained Ineligibility Rulings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39083571 - Jan 2024 (3 comments)
2023 Hugo Awards - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012127 - Oct 2023 (67 comments)
Pity - always thought its a credible award.
Hopefully, as it has done in the past, the Hugos will update policy in a way that mitigates this sort of thing in the future. I don't see an easy solution, but I wish them the best.
[0]: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/01/worldcon...
Science fiction authors were excluded from awards for fear of offending China - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415234 - Feb 2024 (301 comments)
The mental gymnastics required to reach this conclusion are truly impressive.
