These events keep getting held in places like China and Saudi Arabia, where the organizers know they are going to have to make major concessions to those governments, because the organizers care far more about money than they do the event. At least that's my theory.

It's a better argument to not trust the awards admin with anything from now in, given that they did that independently and removed a ton of Chinese authors from the ballots.

I'm $ure the deci$ion was completely unbia$ed.

The Hugos have always been a clusterfuck. Explaining all the nuance is beyond a single comment (I can't even find a good writeup) but it boils down to the voting committee largely being opt/buy-in. If you buy a membership to the World Science Fiction Society, you get to vote on where WorldCon will be held which means you are voting on where The Hugos will be held. You ALSO get to vote in the Hugos themselves

Yes, that sounds really shitty but it is also why the Hugos are a lot more prestigious than a Goodreads award. People need to give enough of a shit which, historically, has resulted in more people who actually have read multiple entrants.

Of course, a couple years back we had the "sad puppies" incident where a bunch of racist incels basically voted as a bloc to shut down people of color and non CISHET male voices.

And... a lot of signs point toward "China" having gamed the system again. Whether that is a focused effort by the CCP or just passionate Chinese SFF fans is up for debate*.

As for excluding authors? I very much assume that is just a function of operating in China. The CCP cracking down on the event would not end well for anyone involved.

Personally? I think this is yet another indication that the Hugos, like most "old guard" SFF, can fuck off. It was just a few years back that George R R Martin rambled and talked about the good old days while butchering every single "ethnic" name on the ballot. I think the issue of "who gets to vote" is still a major issue but I also think there is absolutely zero reason that an event about celebrating forward thinking should restrict itself to an in-person gala. That shit should be going above and beyond vtubers and focusing on new voices who might have a day job because being "a full time author" is increasingly impossible for any newbies.

*: Because China actually has a ridiculously strong SFF community. In large part because there are authors who are very much pushing the boundaries of what they can and can't say to actually tell interesting and thought provoking stories in the way SFF has always been able to.

The worst thing is that the organization censored things that even the CCP doesn't - several of the excluded books are freely sold in China. Self-censorship is a hell of a drug.

It's bigger than "China and their censorship."

The problem, as always, is maximizing profit. As long as people put profit before everything else, whoever has the most money is going to control what happens.

Fwiw, this is not a case of China stepping in and censoring anything about the awards. Rather, it's a case of the Hugo administration in the West self-censoring their nominees because they feared China might step in if they didn't get ahead of the curve.

Of course, that doesn't really change the situation, but we shouldnt get the story twisted here. The blame falls on the administrators who were so afraid of a threat that they imagined that they caved to non-existent demands, rather than the Chinese (at least for direct fault, since you could argue the Chinese government's policies indirectly led to this situation and I wouldn't fight you on that).

I mean, that depends.

There was a campaign from 2013 to 2017 by rightwingers to game the Hugos by buying non-attending memberships to worldcon and nominating works they deemed to be sufficiently non-woke. Thing is, there's one nominee they couldn't game: "none of these."

So most of the time where the only nominees were gamed, membership voted that there was to be no award in that category that year. The exceptions were authors that likely would have been nominated anyway due to name recognition, like Neil Gaiman.

The award can maintain its integrity despite the committee's lack thereof if Worldcon members vote for no award to be given in the categories leadership fucked with.

Hocus pocus, Hugo's a joke to us

No awards should if they're connected to industry insiders.

I'm legitimately flabbergasted every single year by the sheer number of people who think shit like the Oscars or the Emmy's mean anything given the degree of bullshit that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it out in the open.

They're industry circle jerks for marketing and giving favors to friends. It's insane we give them any credit at all. But if the Game Awards have proven anything, it's that the only thing you need to make an award show "legitimate" is a lot of money to market it enough year after year.

They say China's and American's capitalism with beastly grin is to blame

Tankies can justify anything

I've only read a couple of his books but don't remember this specific trope. Can you give notations?

And even if you dislike this trope and think it's lame does that mean he should be booted out of the Hugo awards?

Yeah, he does like to play around with the sometimes confusing, fragmentary, and disorienting nature of subjective experience, especially during traumatic events, doesn't he