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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/caeciliusinhorto on 2024-04-07 14:00:10.
The Hugo Awards are a reliable source of Hobby Drama, which has been written up several times here. This is its most recent incarnation.
For the uninitiated, the Hugo Awards are some of the most important awards for science fiction and fantasy, nominated and voted on by people who attend WorldCon, an annual science fiction convention which takes place in a different city every year.
Prologue: Chengdu WorldCon
The venue for WorldCon is decided by a vote of members of a previous WorldCon. The site selected for 2023 was Chengdu, China: this was as controversial as you would expect. The anti-Chengdu position was that (1) China is run by a repressive government which practices censorship and is involved in human rights violations up to and including genocide, and (2) a lot of the votes from Chinese fans looked dodgy and there was suspicion of ballot stuffing. The pro-Chengdu position was (1) this is WorldCon, not USA-and-bits-of-north-western-Europe-Con, and so we shouldn't decide that we can't hold it in China because we don't like their government (2) quite a lot of WorldCon members don't particularly like the US government's human rights record either, and (3) everything will be fine don't worry about it. The first two points perhaps had some merit, but events would prove the third very wrong indeed.
The Hugo Awards
The 2023 Hugos started off normally enough. There were some early teething problems with the nominations system going down, and final voting was initially delayed, before an erroneous shortlist was published, and finally the correct shortlist was released later than anticipated. This was unfortunate but nothing disastrous or too dramatic. As usual there was discussion about who was and wasn't on the shortlist. For instance, many expected that R. F. Kuang's Babel, which won the Nebula and Locus (two other prominent science fiction awards), to be shortlisted. When it wasn't on the list, there was speculation that Kuang might have declined the nomination.
The Hugo Awards were presented on October 21. Following the awards ceremony, statistics are made available for both the nominations and the final vote. Usually these are published immediately after the ceremony so that the stats nerds have something to talk about at the afterparty, though according to the rules there is a 90-day window for publication. Chengdu's stats were highly unusually not published on the day of the ceremony. There were various discussions about the delay before the stats were eventually published, and the Hugo administrator, Dave McCarty, explained that this was because of work and family commitments. The finalist voting statistics were eventually published at the beginning of December, while nomination statistics were not posted until 20th January 2024: the last possible moment.
Statsgate
Once the statistics were finally published, it soon became apparent that something weird was going on. Most obviously, six nominees on the longlist were marked as "not eligible" without any further elaboration – including the previously mentioned Babel by R.F. Kuang. This was especially odd because other works ruled ineligible were explained – e.g. The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was ineligible because it was published in 2020. Of these six, one was relatively uncontroversial: "Color the World" by Congyun Gu was ineligible due to its date of publication. It wasn't clear why this wasn't explained, as it was for The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, but as the ruling was correct this was generally considered only a minor concern. The other unexplained ineligible nominees were:
- Babel by R.F. Kuang (novel)
- "Fogong Temple Pagoda" by Hai Ya (short story)
- Sandman: "The Sound of Her Wings" (dramatic presentation short form)
- Paul Weimar (fanwriter)
- Xiran Jay Zhao (Astounding Award for Best New Writer)
All of these were deemed ineligible for apparently no reason. Dave McCarty, who was responsible for the Chengdu Hugos, explained:
After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.
This satisfied approximately nobody.
There was some speculation that "Fogong Temple Pagoda" had, like "Color the World", been ruled ineligible due to its publication date, but if so this was an error: the English translation was first published in 2022, making it eligible. Speculation about why the other nominees had been ruled ineligible quickly began: one leading theory was that someone somewhere had deemed them politically unacceptable to the Chinese government. The fact that two of these nominees, R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, are of Chinese descent and speak Chinese, and might therefore deliver an acceptance speech in Chinese critical of the Chinese government, was cited in favour of this. If there was a political reason, though, it probably didn't apply to "Fogong Temple Pagoda", as Hai Ya's novelette "The Space-Time Painter" was not disqualified.
The Sandman episode was doubly controversial because the entire Sandman series had been nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, where it was ruled ineligible because "The Sound of Her Wings" was a nominee in BDP Short before being disqualified for unexplained reasons. This is an edge case which isn't explicitly spelled out in the rules, so the BDP Long disqualification is technically correct, but it feels questionable and especially given all of the other issues many people were pretty annoyed.
Statsgate: We need to go deeper
This section goes deeper into the rabbit hole; if you don't care about the minuitae of voting systems, the TL;DR is that the stats released were provably mathematically impossible in a bunch of different ways and you can skip to the next heading.
The unexplained disqualifications were the most obvious irregularity, but they were hardly the only one. In three categories, the numbers given for nominations were provably wrong. The way nominations work is that each nominator gets one vote per category, which is divided up among the up to five works they nominate; when a work is eliminated from the ballot, its votes are redistributed according to what else was on its nominators' ballots. So if I nominate Alice, Bob, and Carol in one category, they each get 1/3 of a nomination. When Carol is eliminated, my vote for her is redistributed and Alice and Bob each get 1/2 a nomination from me. If Bob is then eliminated, Alice gets my entire nomination in that category. Therefore the sum of the points available must be less than or equal to the number of ballots cast.* In three categories, the longlisted works collectively ended up with more points than ballots were cast – for instance, 1,652 from the 1,637 ballots cast in the Best Novel nomination. The most egregious category was Fanwriter, where the fifteen longlisted candidates had a collective 364 points out of 241 ballots – over 50% more than was mathematically possible!
Another anomaly again related to Babel. Across all of the rounds of voting for which statistics were released, Babel did not gain a single point. This is very implausible: it would be possible only if not a single one of Babel's nominators also nominated any of the eight unsuccessful longlisted works. In fact, the fanwriter Camestros Felapton collected 20 Best Novel ballots from his followers, which showed that this was not the case: based on checking only twenty ballots, in one round the nominations for at least three of the finalists were undercounted.
A third issue was the so-called "cliff" in the nomination data. Normally the nominations tail off gradually: for example the top 10 nominees in a category might get 100, 95, 90, 80, 75, 70, 60, 50, 35, 30 votes respectively. Instead what happened was that after around the top six or seven nominees, there was a sudden drop in many categories. Best novel in particular often has a very flat distribution, as so many novels are published (and nominated) every year it's unlikely for any given one to do exceptionally well compared to the others. In 2023, the top seven nominees for Best Novel all got between 831 and 767 votes, with the eighth-place nominee dropping to only 150. This is an enormous and uncharacteristic drop, and the same phenomenon is noticeable in the nomination data for best novella, series, fanzine, and fan artist. (For a v...
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