Tammy Coxen relayed a request to me from Hugo Administrator Dave McCarty to remove the post with the finalists released on the Chengdu Worldcon website today because “it was released in error and not correct.”
There will be a new post here when a correct list is available.
Dave McCarty has written on his Facebook page:
So yes, IT people are nightmares all over the world.
They share that.
If you saw it, be aware, that is *NOT* a correct list.
Helen Montgomery further explained:
Official statement is that the list was posted in error by IT as part of their set up / testing process, but it is an earlier version of the ballot and is not correct.
I’ve actually read all but one of the Best Series finalists – and I was intending to read that one. I guess I’ll have to quit moaning about Best Series being too much work.
Wow, I’ve actually read a couple of the novels this year!
This is an incorrect ballot released in error – I was just talking to the Hugo Admin. He’d really appreciate if you could take this down until the official list is released.
I’ve read 3 of 6 of Best novel and two more were on my TBR (Legends & Lattes was the odd one out – so nice to have an extra book to read). Only one was on my ballot (Nona the Ninth)
Thanks, Tammy. Do we know in what way it’s incorrect?
It might merely be “incorrect” in the sense of “not supposed to go out yet.”
Click to follow.
Just to update my earlier comments. I don’t know how much of Best Series I’ve read so I can briefly re-instate my policy of moaning about how much reading is involved in that category.
Marshall Ryan Maresca: I don’t know what is incorrect from the Hugo Administrator’s side. However, someone did ask me if it was allowable for a full season of a show to be a Dramatic Long Form finalist while an individual episode from the same season is also a Dramatic Short Form finalist. It would be educational to know the thinking if those finalists remain on the ballot.
@Camestros
L&L is a lot of fun!
So….will Babel be in the correct one if the last list is incorrect? Not saying Hugo award voters can’t have their own choices just because Babel is nominated or awarded by most of other si-fi awards. Just wondering if it will be in it, since it’s a little bit unusual this year.
The duplication of a streaming series in the short form / long form dramatic presentation categories makes me wonder if this entire interminable delay was the result of Hollywood people not replying to the “which category would you like your show to be in?” e-mail message.
Presumably the published ist must have been approximately correct? All the people posting to say that they’re O Hugo finalists must have been told beforehand? Chennai did say that they were contacting Pele to confirm they wanted to be on the shortlist a couple of weeks ago.
Given the list published is incorrect, what’s there remains informative – it says a lot about the split between the familiar anglophone works and the Chinese. It is available to look at on the Wayback Machine for anyone like me who woke up to find it already redacted.
(Mike, feel free to delete this if impolitic)
I note that the works were not listed in alphabetical order. Maybe they have been posted in the order of votes?
If this guess is correct, that’s good news for the Scholomance (YES!) and Everything, Everywhere at Once.
I went ahead and looked at the draft list using the Wayback Machine. It will be interesting to see how different the final list is. If I was a betting man, I would guess that we see more Chinese finalists for Best Novel plus a cleanup of some of the weirdness around the BdP categories.
There was also a very long novelette in short story. At least the English translation at Clarksworld is novelette. Possible the original Chinese publication met the criteria, but seems doubtful.
“IT people are nightmares all over the world.”
Speaking as an IT person: No, people are nightmares. IT people are not better or worse. Sigh.
Best practice for testing is to use obviously bogus data. I used to pull credit reports from a test database, back in the days of asynchronous modems, and the people had names like Test Case and Speed Racer (both of whom had terrible credit, btw). But I appreciate that they’re under pressure here.
So, for all the assumptions that this was basically going to be a ballot mostly made up of Chinese-language nominees, such appears not to be the case. Interesting: I had reached the point where I didn’t care one way or the other.
Hopefully word will get out to remaining unconfirmed, responses will get back, and we’ll get the final list soon.
It will be interesting to compare the withdrawn and official ballots and see if any of the names not on the final ballot are ones the authorities might dislike.
The longlist should be interesting too.
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Gary McGath says It will be interesting to compare the withdrawn and official ballots and see if any of the names not on the final ballot are ones the authorities might dislike.
I given this some thought. many Filers assume that the Chinese authorities actually care about the these Awards but we have no proof that they do. They may well not. We just don’t know, do we?
Let me know if you’d like to borrow Octothorpe’s regular ‘Chengdu is a shower’ artwork for posts like this, Mike.
I doubt the central government has any interest at all – but people will anticipate what they imagine a powerful central authority may think, want or do and then act accordingly.
Camestros Felapton says I doubt the central government has any interest at all – but people will anticipate what they imagine a powerful central authority may think, want or do and then act accordingly.
I think it’s the idea the that authoritarian governments control everything down to the smallest detail. Well not really. They do control what they want to do, but even they have their limits and the Hugos just ain’t that important really.
Cat Eldridge: many Filers assume that the Chinese authorities actually care about the these Awards but we have no proof that they do. They may well not. We just don’t know, do we?
Given that the Chinese government has hijacked this convention into a big PR event for their country, I think it’s a safe bet that only approved titles will be appearing on the Hugo Finalist list.
If by “the Chinese authorities” you mean Xi, no, he doesn’t care. But some local guardian of public morals may decide that keeping a moderately significant local event in line will lead to better job opportunities.
Surveillance states don’t run solely on central plans prioritizing the most important events. During World War I in the USA, a pastor was imprisoned for speaking Swedish at a funeral service — and Sweden was a neutral country. The unpredictability and arbitrariness helps to keep people scared.
“We just don’t know, do we?” is the situation in a nutshell. We don’t know, or at least I certainly don’t. For whatever it may be worth, someone cares enough to build a new facility in what would be record time in the U.S., something that’s never happened for any previous Worldcon. I don’t know what’s going with that either.
Jim Janney says “We just don’t know, do we?” is the situation in a nutshell. We don’t know, or at least I certainly don’t. For whatever it may be worth, someone cares enough to build a new facility in what would be record time in the U.S., something that’s never happened for any previous Worldcon. I don’t know what’s going with that either.
I suspect that the Chinese government likes the idea of a Worldcon as a spectacle to show off to the world but not something serious which is the Hugo end of it.
I’ve been in countries in Asia that were packed with fantastic buildings but nary a library to be seen.
New traffic warnings for US citizens regarding China https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-recommends-americans-reconsider-traveling-072837449.html
Andrew (not Werdna) notes New traffic warnings for US citizens regarding China
Hardly surprising. India is on the travel warning list as is Turkey and more than a few other authoritarian states. The world is getting increasingly unstable and unsafe for travel.
I lived through one civil war in an Asian country, that was more than enough for a lifetime.
I think it’s more like “No unapproved titles are likely to make the list”. If a work had been up that was, say, pro-Tibet (or pro-Hong Kong protestors), that would likely have run into trouble. I don’t think that’s quite a distinction without a difference – there’s just a difference between saying “Here’s the list you can choose from” vs “Here’s the stuff we /really/ don’t want to see”.
And as others have indicated, fear of getting the wrong sort of attention is more likely to be a motivator than “actual” attention.
This will be interesting, especially if somebody comes out later and says “I did not consent to withdrawing my item” (or “I was pressured to withdraw my item” or similar).
[On a related note to this point and the prior one, admittedly well after the close of nominations, I wonder if Jeannette Ng was eligible for anything this year? As far as I can tell there was only an essay, which might have fit under BRW. For very obvious reasons, that’s one author I can NOT imagine the local authorities wanting to end up getting a podium.]
This seems frustratingly possible, but I feel like at some point the answer would need to be “If you don’t tell us what you want by X date/time, this is what we’re doing” (e.g. “If you don’t tell us you want the individual episodes to be in BDP-Short instead by 2359 on February 31st, we’re putting the season in BDP-Long”).
My baseless speculation:
This convention has been a debacle of epic proportions, which suggests to me that the Chinese government does not care. The 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony with its 15,000 volunteers and $300 million budget shows what things look like when it does care.
The developers of the Chengdu Science Fiction Museum are the ones who care. They wanted a Worldcon as part of their efforts to get that built. It’s being built so whether the actual event runs competently is immaterial.
I’m not familiar enough with the final Hugo nomination list to know if there was anything on it that would offend some Schodinger’s Kitten of a Chinese government censor. So does anyone here know if there was?
Ng is a British citizen who was born in Hong Kong and used their then-Campbell Award acceptance speech to express solidarity with the democratic protestors in Hong Kong, receiving widespread global news coverage.
I can’t imagine them going to the con.
The Mountain and the Sea apparently has an independent Tibet as a significant plot point, can’t confirm, I’ve not read it.
The one I’m suspicious about is Babel. Yes, the English are shown as utter bastards, the opium trade as evil and the Opium Wars as indefensible, but it also (historically accurately in my Western biased opinion) shows China as very weak and unable to defend itself. I don’t think modern China approves of people pointing out that historical China was weak.
While it’s not unknown for the Nebula winner to not make the shortlist, it’s unusual. Especially when the author has regularly appeared on the Hugo and not-a-Hugo ballots before.
Does anybody honestly believe that Dave McCarty or Tammy Coxen would go along with any kind of government or other external interference with regard to the Hugo shortlist? Cause I doubt that they would go alone with it. A Chinese Hugo administrator might have no choice due to fearing for themselves or their families, but any potential Chinese government censors have no leverage over western SMOFs.
More likely is that if someone undesirable made the ballot (and apparently there was at least one person on the ballot posted who cannot travel to China due to fearing arrest) they would be denied a visa, if they tried to attend. And if a virtual finalist said something undesirable in their acceptance speech, there would be “technical difficulties”.
From an outsider’s POV, it seems to me as if Chinese officials initially wanted this Worldcon very much to show off their country and its technological prowess and also to make potentially useful contacts with western writers, fans, scientists, etc… However, sometime between Chengdu winning site selection in late 2021 and now, something changed and Chengdu seems to have lost most of the official support they initially had. This might be due to something as innocuous as the one official who really wanted this Worldcon retiring and their successor having no interest or it might be something more sinister.
Cora Buhlert: Does anybody honestly believe that Dave McCarty or Tammy Coxen would go along with any kind of government or other external interference with regard to the Hugo shortlist?
Based on how things have gone thus far, my impression is that the Chinese Hugo Administrators have control of the process. Which, given past criticisms that the Hugo Admin structure is too insular, would ordinarily be an admirable goal in terms of knowledge- and responsibility-sharing,… but in this case, not so much.
I have no reason to think the people you mentioned would participate in something underhanded.
And let’s look at the draft list of finalists that briefly escaped. There’s practically no Chinese fiction or nonfiction on it except things that ran in English translation on Clarkesworld. Be serious. If I was a conspiracy theorist I wouldn’t be expecting a state-dictated ballot to be filled with Western works or empty of works in the Chinese language.
Mike Glyer: I have no reason to think the people you mentioned would participate in something underhanded.
I don’t think Dave or Tammy would.
But the Chengdu website, including the voting functionality and vote recording, are not being handled by them. They can only go by the data they are handed by the people who have access to the raw data.
Considering the complete CF this whole convention has been thus far — including having the actual dates arbitrarily changed by someone higher up than the Convention chairs and obvious interference and control by the provincial government, never mind the nearly non-existent comms over the last year — I have very little confidence in the integrity of anything coming from the Chinese side of the equation.
As someone else previously said, even without overt direction from governmental authorities, it is entirely believable that someone might feel pressured to ensure that nothing occurs which will anger the government… and that Dave and Tammy would have no visibility on that.
Reconstructing the leaked ballot from memory, there are quite a few things there that I imagine a hypothetical Chinese censor would not be happy about, e.g. at least two works that very blatantly deal with oppressive systems and people rising up and fighting against them, a TV show about a hellish hyper-capitalist workplace, several stories featuring LGBTQ characters and relationships and even a fairly innoccuous animated film that was.not granted a theatrical release in China because of some controversy or other. Plus, at least one finalist on the leaked list is a Chinese ex-pat whom the Chinese government really doesn’t like. Of course, if all of those works are gone from the final ballot, we would be right to be suspicious.
At any rate, seeing the voting and nomination data will be very interesting.
JJ:
If the current delay is about someone wanting to remove controversial works from the ballot, then Dave McCarthy and others are aware of it. And presumably fighting against it. (But apparently keeping the debate internal for now.)
It might have been possible for someone on the Chinese side to remove nominations for “undesirable” works, without alerting Westerners on the Hugo subcommittee about it, by tampering with the raw nomination data – but then they would have had to do it around the time the nominations closed.
Any censorship or data tampering that happens now – when Hugo admins have normalized the nominations, have run the EPH algorithm on it, and have a preliminary list – will be obvious to everyone who has seen the preliminary list.
Am I wrong in thinking that Tchaikovsky’s trilogy would not even be eligible yet, as the third volume only came out in 2023 and the category requires the finalists to have at least 3 instalments published by the previous calender year?
Or was it published in 2022 somewhere else in the world, making it eligible for this year’s Best Series award?
I know I could just wait for the correct list to be published but I need my Hugo fix, and discussing a false ballot is more fun than just sitting around waiting until we finally do get some real information.
Dina say Am I wrong in thinking that Tchaikovsky’s trilogy would not even be eligible yet, as the third volume only came out in 2023 and the category requires the finalists to have at least 3 instalments published by the previous calender year?
Or was it published in 2022 somewhere else in the world, making it eligible for this year’s Best Series award?
ISFDB says that Children of Memory was published by Tor UK in November of 2022. So yes, the Children of Time trilogy is indeed eligible.
It should be noted that the current provincial governor of Sichuan Province came to his current position by way of being chief propagandist for the regime…it’s a safe assumption that he cares about appearances. That knife could cut both ways of course, but that the current Chinese government has upped the ante in regards to pettiness AND cruelty means all options are on the table.
Honestly it feels like there are two competing Hugo admin teams at work right now. The experienced Western admins and a second Chinese team. That would explain some of the slipups and contradictory information that we’ve been getting. For example, when the original late May target was missed, we were told unoffically that emails had gone out but responses were taking much longer that usual to come in. That directly contradicts the “lucky emails” post that happened around the same time as the draft ballot leak. However, both statements could be true if the original emails had come from the official hugo admins and the second batch from some kind of shadow admin team. It wouldn’t shock me at all if the leaked ballot was something pretty close to what would have been the ballot had there not been significant pushback by the authorities once some local official or other saw the draft list and had kittens. Unless Dave comes out publicly and says that he was fired and/or some authors publicly say that they accepted a nomination but then left off the ballot we’ll likely never know for sure, though.
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