Well, that was a clusterfuck.

[rogueslayer452]

The whole 2023 Hugo Awards fraudulent controversy has truly been something. Reading the exposé and angry responses, including the responses from other authors affected by this such as Xiran Jay Zhao and Neil Gaiman, it's honestly astonishing how much of a shitstorm it is. I, like many others, started paying attention to this when it started circulating around (mainly on Tumblr, for me) about a week ago because authors being disqualified without reason and rumors of intentional censorship seemed rather sus, and I didn't think we'd get an actual answer. But then the whistleblowers leaked the emails of what happened behind-the-scenes of how this shitstorm clusterfuck came to be, and it's just a mess. A nuanced mess, but an incompetent, cowardly, spineless mess regardless.

I don't know much about the Hugos aside from how it's supposedly a prestigious award, and the only thing I have ever paid attention to over the years regarding it was when Archive Of Our Own won a Hugo in 2019 and the whole Puppygate ("Sad Puppies"/"Rapid Puppies") block-voting controversy. Although based on the latter and this recent scandal, it makes me wonder how much prestige the Hugo Awards hold anymore, because unless they do some serious reconsidering of how they handle and run these events it doesn't look good for their overall reputation.

Comments

[autumndaze]

It's such a mess. I twigged into it from Xiran posting initially about it on twitter, and I've been paying attention to it on twitter and Blue Sky Social. Just... monumental stupidity and racism from the ground up.

[rhoda_rants]

It's wild out there. I've been keeping one eye on it, and just wondering how anyone could possibly take them seriously after all this. I think it was Council Of Geeks who made the observation that "Because China" was just a convenient excuse for the US and Canada to be exclusionary and bigoted on their own, and this is one of the most egregious examples out there. Good grief.

[elizalavelle]

The Hugos seem to go from one scandal to the next these days. I remember the Sad Pippies and that took a while to bounce back and now we're onto them self censoring and just... what? From what I gather they decided they would get censored by China (likely true) so just made the call on their own to pull the material which... no. And maybe let's not hold awards in countries who are going to disallow books to be nominated because of their own prejudices.

Countries are free to have whatever rules they want to have but we shouldn't give them events that are going to need changes in order to abide by those rules. Especially when the rules tend to oppress the rights of people.