“Rabbit Test” unwins the Hugo (original) (raw)

I cannot convey the supreme depths to which I’d rather be doing anything else with my Saturday afternoon other than writing this blog post, but here we are.

If you have been blessedly insulated from the current furor over the 2023 Hugo Awards — good for you! (I’m going to have to explain this post to my mom when she reads it — hi, mom. ;_;) I’m summarizing here as much for my own benefit as anyone else’s, since this is my primary hub and record of my writing career goings-on.

In January, the full 2023 Hugo award nominating and voting statistics were released. They showed that a variety of potential finalists had mysteriously been marked “ineligible,” and also included frankly incomprehensible nominating numbers. Cue weeks of speculation and upset.

On February 14, a report written by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley was simultaneously released on the Genre Grapevine and File770. It’s too much for me to repeat everything here, so head on over for the full story, but the short of it is: one of the 2023 award administrators leaked a set of emails showing that the American/Canadian contingent of the committee (voluntarily! proactively! and incompetently!) vetted potential finalists for political statements relating to China, and then the main administrator presumably used that info to mark some of them ineligible. It should be said: there’s no indication that Chinese censors even cared about the content of the English work. Some of it had already been translated into Chinese for goodness’ sake! So the Western members of the committee appear to have been flailing about based on what they thought China wouldn’t like, and preemptively self-censored, rather than, oh, I dunno, refusing to censor anything in the first place.

But oh it gets worse! Because we also got a look at the validation list itself, aka the tables of frontrunner nominees being vetted for the final ballot, and a horrible pattern emerged, especially in the fiction categories: there were a whole lot of Chinese nominees in frontrunner positions who just… vanished, and never made it onto the final ballot. There were so many, in fact, that if I am reading this document correctly: not a single fiction winner (short story, novelette, novella, novel, or series) would have even been a finalist if those nominees hadn’t been taken off.

There’s an indicator of why in the apology letter from the admin who leaked the emails and validation tables: “We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated.”

Except that, even if it was intended as a slate, slates are not unallowed in Hugo nominating! And unless there is an even larger scandal waiting to break, there is no indication that there was any kind of illicit collusion (say, an individual or group mass-purchasing memberships). Instead it seems like there was something entirely ordinary going on: the Chinese magazine Science Fiction World published instructions on how to nominate for the Hugos, and included some reading recommendations (which included both Chinese and English works, in Chinese and English publications, with a varying number of recs for each category). (Thank you to Vajra Chandrasekera for finding the link.) And since Chinese fandom is huge and extremely enthusiastic (a good thing!), they voted for what they wanted. As one is supposed to do.

Looking at the information we currently have, it’s hard for me to conclude anything other than: I shouldn’t have been on that ballot. On the one hand, it seems as though the final vote hasn’t been tampered with, and the voters engaged in good faith with the works they were told were the finalists, for which I still say thank you! But it’s really, really hard for me to see past the initial fact, which is that I shouldn’t have been on that ballot.

This entire experience has been very stressful and fraught. Initially I assumed I wasn’t going to be a finalist, because even though the story had taken off like mad in the U.S., the bulk of the membership was not going to be American. I assumed we would see a lot of Chinese nominees — which would have been cool! We’d get a slice of international scifi that I rarely ever see! And then I was really pleasantly surprised to be informed I was a finalist after all. When the full ballot was posted, I was also surprised at how few Chinese nominees were in the fiction categories. There were four in the short story category, though, so I thought it was legit, and that wow, John Wiswell and I somehow made the cutoff anyway, isn’t that amazing!

I accepted the nomination because, you know, it is supposed to be an honor. But then due to concerns about the Worldcon event itself, I elected not to participate in programming or accept a free trip to Chengdu. This was also fraught. I’ve never been to a Worldcon, and I’d never been nominated before. And as I said in my previous long-winded post on the subject, I have nothing against the fandoms at play. But I wasn’t comfortable being one of the faces of local PR under political circumstances that felt entirely above my pay grade, so I bowed out.

And now? Four months later, with all this trouble? I’m embarrassed to have been used in this way — as a nice “no issues” name on a list, in order to further what appears to have been a xenophobic quest to keep the awards firmly American. I’m sorry for everyone whose enthusiasm was tossed in the trash. I’m sorry for everyone who should have been on the ballot. A Chinese fan went through the lists working out what was dropped or moved around. I don’t know how reliable my browser translation is, so I’m hoping to see more analysis soon.

The way that things currently stand, I don’t think I can fully consider myself a Hugo winner. As I said, barring another rug-pull (good lord please no), I think that I was voted the winner of the published finalist list, and I remain grateful for that. But unless somebody comes along with information that the nomination numbers were not the final tallies and I would have been there after all, or some analysis showing that those works would have been ineligible or moved to other categories anyway — barring those unlikely circumstances, I have to consider my award ill-gained.

I spent this morning logging into my various accounts and taking “Hugo” out of my bio. There are almost certainly going to be places it was printed that I miss, so my apologies for that. Here’s the most embarrassing one: my novel already went to the printer and it has “Hugo winner” on the cover. Fucking mortifying! It’s a holiday weekend and I don’t like to nag people on their days off, so on Tuesday I’ll send a very awkward email to my agent and editor summarizing the situation (if either of you see this beforehand… heyyyy teaaaam…. ;_;) and figure out the logistics of removing “Hugo winner” from the ebook and future printings. The first print run will be a limited edition novelty, I suppose? Jeez.

All that said: I’m fine, I promise. The most affected people here are the ones who should have been honored with a nomination, but weren’t. The next down is Chinese fandom and the rest of us who got tangled up in this mess, but of everyone I feel like I’m the least entitled to complain, so please don’t interpret this post as some kind of righteous call for any of the other nominees/winners to react in the same way I have. I won three other awards for “Rabbit Test” last year — a true wealth of love and attention. I appreciate the honors that have already been granted me.

If the awards are ever restructured in a way that eliminates the possiblity of this happening again, then hopefully one day I get another crack at it. If they aren’t restructured after all this… it’s putting it mildly to say I’ll be severely disappointed.

[ETA: I’m updating with a few more links for when I inevitably have to explain all this to my offline friends!

Here is a great write-up by Abigail Nussbaum, with a lot more detail than my navel-gazing up above: https://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-2023-hugo-awards-somehow-it-got.html

I want to switch my focus to sharing the authors that were bumped. Here are two of the novelettes, which appeared in Clarkesworld (they are, as you might expect, really good):

“Upstart,” by Lu Ban, translated by Blake Stone-Banks

“Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles,” by Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang

There is some analysis in this blog post by zionius of other authors that were removed – I’m hoping the attention will lead to more translations.

It feels weird appending my usual sign off but: as always, if you’d like to start getting SamtasticBooks blog posts straight to your email, sign up for my newsletter in the menu at the top of the page. You’ll get the full text of new posts, plus other bonus material. Hopefully my next update is more upbeat.