Adrian Tchaikovsky has announced on his website that due to the revelation of major problems with 2023 Hugo administration he will no longer acknowledge the Best Series Hugo presented to Children of Time.
A Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards
When the Children of Time books won the 2023 Hugo for best series I was overjoyed. The Hugos have been a major feature of the genre fiction landscape for decades. It should be a signal honour to be shortlisted for one, let alone to win.
Over the last month or so, a cascade of information has been released or uncovered demonstrating that those responsible for administering the award for the 2023 Worldcon (held at Chengdu, China) took a variety of actions that significantly distorted the result.
For details, I’ll direct you to Abigail Nussbaum’s writing here which is up to date as at the time of this statement. However the TLDR is:
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- Several works receiving large numbers of votes were ruled ineligible for unstated reasons, which from leaked emails appears to be the US-based administrators unilaterally deciding that they might cause political offence.
- A number of Chinese-language nominations appear to have been entirely disallowed.
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The second, in what seems to be a mass disenfranchisement of Chinese voters, means that the composition of the shortlists, as they were presented to be voted on, was entirely unreliable, with an unknown number of Chinese nominees denied their chance at contending.
Based on this information, I cannot consider myself a Hugo winner and will not be citing the 2023 award result in my biographical details, or on this site.
The Hugo awards have the potential to be a respected pillar of the international fan community. I would be delighted to be considered, honestly and on my own merits, for such an award in the future. I look forward to systemic changes so that future awards can be administered with an eye to clarity, equity and accountability.
[Thanks to JJ for the story.]
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Good for him! I respect him for it.
I respect him and his choice.
I’m sorry that Tchaikovsky has to deal with this.
Agree with Lis, Paul, & Andrew.
He can’t claim Best Series but there will never be a dispute that he wins Best Vest. That thing is magnificent and the whole look is splendiferous.
Cannot we not just claim that this Worldcon never happened? I mean there must be wibby wobbly, time whimey way to do so, isn’t there?
Now listening to Christopher Lennertz and KT Tunstall’s Get Your Tits Up suite, a truly magnificent piece of music.
Just chiming in to agree with rcade. The vest is fantastic.
I imagine he will be back, but you never really know. Makes me respect this decision all the more.
@Cat Endridge
Speaking for myself, I view Chengdu 2023 as being a stolen work, thus of no relevance to actual proper Worldcons.
I am sorry for the actual fans in China who wanted a Worldcon, but evidence strongly suggests that the ones who were involved with getting the con had little, if anything to do with the staged event that actually took place.
As I understand it, this means that Children of Time cannot ever be considered for Best Series again?
He is such a nice guy, no wonder he is one of my favourite writers of the century.
@Ray Radlein
Yes, since officially it did win, that is true.
When a Hugo winner from 2023 takes this action, should the WSFS honor their wishes and remove them from the official winners on the Hugo Awards website? Being listed for winning something after you’ve decided to reject it as a matter of conscience seems like rubbing salt in the wound.
(Before someone says we can’t just do that, pretend I suggested it be done through a business meeting resolution.)
If it’s a completed series and there won’t be more, yes, this was its only shot.
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Well, I don’t actually think we should remove it. We did select Children of Time as the winner from the finalists we were given. It’s his choice not to note it on his bio, etc., but I think the record should stand.
@Lis I believe he has said there will be more. But winners in series aren’t eligible again regardless.
I guess Judy-Lynn Del Rey’s posthumous Best Editor Hugo is the nearest precedent? https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/1986-hugo-awards/
rcade: I’m going to tell you why I think that’s a good question.
When Forry Ackerman received the very first Hugo Award ever presented in 1953, what he immediately said in his “acceptance speech” was “I certainly appreciate this, folks, but I really believe that Ken Slater should have it.” And abandoned the little rocket-shaped trophy on stage to be forwarded to Britain.
Despite the gesture, the fans had voted him the award, and he belongs in the history book as the winner.
But in 2023 we aren’t at all sure who the fans voted for, or what belonged on the final ballot. If somebody wants to be taken off the winner’s list, maybe they should have that option.
@Mike
Good point. I would defer to his wishes if he explicitly declined the Hugo.
@Cam
That would be a compromise.
Samantha Mills would need to be consulted as well since she has said she won’t be citing her win either.
I think it makes sense. It was a whole thing that happened, not including everybody who was declared a winner would be strange but noting those people who did not accept gives the fuller picture and also recognises the person’s choice.
@Cam Yes, l wouldn’t just go on this statement though. He should be asked if he wants to officially go on record as declining.
@Cat Eldridge: I wonder if an amendment to the WSFS Constitution could be proposed to declare that all the Hugo nominations and awards given by the 2023 Worldcon were invalid. That wouldn’t be exactly what you are suggesting but it does seem to be in the neighborhood.
I don’t really see that All awards need to be invalidated. Especially not the few Chinese winners.
But if someone , voted a winner, should decline their win, then I would have no problem with accepting their rejection, paying the rocket to next person and having their work tension eligible again.
I think that unfairly impacts people who won a Hugo – they all acted in good faith. Choosing to reject an award is one thing but being essentially stripped of an award would normally be seen as a punishment or mark of scandal.
I have been reluctantly drawn to Joshua K.’s suggested approach. I apologise if my efforts below to summarise have led to my misrepresenting some finer details.
There are serious questions (some of which which may have acceptable answers) about:
the validity of the Chengdu bid’s winning in the first place (did multiple memberships/votes come from nonexistent persons, bought by commercial players? Did MRK have a COI in overruling the Bid and Con Committees’ decisions to disallow them?);
the apparent subsequent replacements of genuine Chinese fans on the ConCom by commercial representatives;
the difficulties some overseas members had with the Great Firewall and the Con’s software, preventing them from joining, or from nominating, or from voting (What was the full extent of this? Were Chinese-resident fans also affected?);
the (dodgy) dossier compilations on, and disqualifications of, several candidates/works (four we know of, were there others?);
the wholesale elimination of a great many Chinese fans’ nominations on the grounds of “slating”, which may have been an overcharacterisation and which is not disallowed in any case (This, as others have demonstrated, could have hugely changed many of the short lists);
potential flaws in the software used to apply EPH and/or to tally the final votes;
apparent manipulation(s) of the eventually published nomination and voting data;
given all of the above, the possibility of yet further shennanigans that have not yet been identified.
In view of all this, and the repudiation of their awards by so far two (more?) of the declared winners, my feeling is that the 2023 awards in their entirety should be formally voided, perhaps to be rerun from scratch at a future date, perhaps as an additional Retro-Hugo process, perhaps at the next Worldcon to be held in China.
None of this is intended in any way to be a “punishment” for any 2023 “winners”. None of them are in any way at fault, some of them may still have won if the whole process had been above board, and the fact that they figured prominently in the nominations and votes at all puts their work very near (if not at) the top of what has become a very big international pool of artistic achievement, dwarfing the SFF genre puddle that existed when I joined fandom in the 1970s.
To get the ducks in a row in time for the necessarily time-limited Business Meeting at the Worldcon in Glasgow, we – fandom – need to discuss and finalise workable proposals for the above and other related matters well beforehand. Eastercon in Telford is one obvious opportunity to do this face-to-face (I will be attending both Cons); there are doubtless other Cons elsewhere in the World similarly suitable, not to mention all the fora on this Intertubes thingy. But we must avoid getting bogged down in the minutiae, which must inform but not derail our progress.
Terry Hunt: we – fandom – need to discuss and finalise workable proposals for the above and other related matters well beforehand.
A bunch of fans have already spent the last month doing exactly this. If you’d like to read what’s been discussed and proposed so far (and there is a great deal to catch up on), contact me at jjfile770 at the Google mail domain for more info.
That’s very honourable of him to write what he wrote about the awards. Respect to him.
Best Series is an unusual case, because Children of Time cannot win a later Hugo. For all other awards, the winner is either a work, which would normally only have one date of first publication and so would only be eligible once, or a person, who is always eligible again provided they continue to work.
But series are eligible for Best Series as long as there are new instalments – except that they can only win the award once.
The Business Meeting can normally adjust eligibility for a work. I don’t know if it can in these circumstances (the ineligibility is expressly written into the constitution). I would hope so, as book four (which, I think, is going to be the last) is due to be published this year, and that would enable it to compete for a 2025 Hugo. If it does require a constitutional amendment, then that should expressly make Children of Time eligible for the first Hugo awards after the amendment comes into effect, ie for the 2026 Hugos.
I await Glasgow’s call for business to be sent to the business meeting. I hope to write a by law based on Glasgow’s Hugo policies. It is way to complicated to make one that would ban countries from having valid bids. (Also if the US election goes a certain way in November, that could include the US)
Respect and sympathy to all this year’s Hugo winners who are struggling with how to deal with this situation.
Tchaikovsky’s solution is not a bad one. And his vest is, yes, magnificent.
@Richard Gadsden
Unless you are proposing changes to Best Series in general, an eligibility question would be a resolution which if passed would go into effect after this year’s business meeting.
I would be against it. We can’t really unring the bell of Children of Time being a finalist and a winner. It would not be fair to newly eligible series. It would not be fair to the previous finalists (including the 2023 finalists) which require two more installments consisting of at least 240,000 words total to be eligible again.
Tchaikovsky won’t get a chance to win for Children of Time unless WSFS makes it eligible again and a new book comes out, but he is a prolific series writer. Perhaps one of his other series will earn a rocket in a Hugo Awards that everyone involved can take pride in.
FWIW, Children of Memory is (AIUI) still eligible for Best Novel this year due to delayed US publication in January 2023 and WSFS rule 3.4.2.
Obviously Best Novel and Best Series are different beasts, but that’s an option that nominators/voters might care to be aware of.
and City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky is also still eligible for Best Novel this year for the same delayed publication reason.
Hmm, I’m not sure about that one – I believe the ebook of City of Last Chances was available in the US in 2022. B&N lists 2022-12-08 (same as the UK) for the ebook, but 2023-05-02 for the hc.
Both of those are the same ISBNs as the UK publications, so I guess the delay on the physical is due to the time required to freight copies across the Atlantic, whereas the ebook suffered no such issues.
Someone with better knowledge of WSFS rules than I might be able to advise on which of those dates takes precedence w.r.t. 3.4.2.
@Pete
As ErsatzCulture said, City of Last Chances had a 2022 US ebook release. Best to consider House of Open Wounds in that case.
Children of Memory was a completely different publisher in the US. Orbit put out both ebook and trade paperback (no hardcover) in 2023.
Tchaikovsky definitely has other chances to be on a more trustworthy ballot. The Final Architecture series is eligible with Lords of Uncreation this year.
No, it isn’t. A single line saying that “countries below X threshold on the list published by human-rights-organization-Y in the year prior to the site selection vote are not eligible in this year’s site selection” would do it.
That’s under thirty words. Even a slightly more complex rule would be fine.
Previously I had written that we can’t re-run the Hugos, because too much information has been published, including nomination and vote totals, and the scandals which will naturally bias in favour of works which were banned (and thus against those who were not banned, which is unfair to them.) Nothing better for your popularity than being banned, as I know better than most.
However, it appears it is possible to re-run categories where the entire final ballot is different. Biases on these would be much more limited.
It is also possible to not strip the original winners of their titles. Due to ties, there have often been two awards given in the same category. Perversely, social pressure might drive them to renounce their awards, as two winners have already done. While it’s a brave thing, it has now created the question for others of, “Hey, why are you still keeping that?” even though they did nothing wrong.
Alas, best novel is problematic. Babel is the most famous banned work, and it would have made the final ballot with all nominations, and no censorship. But it also would have a significant bias advantage due to its fame, unfair to the other nominees. Given its track record in other awards, it may not need any advantage, but it can’t shed it either.
I think something that would help is making site selection voting easier and better promoted. It made me a little crazy how many people came out against Chengdu after the fact who had clearly not voted in site selection. Perhaps because they didn’t know they could or didn’t know how. Or didn’t feel like it mattered for them to vote because they weren’t going to attend (or even were going to attend) either way. It’s kind of ridiculous how few people vote in site selection even in contested years, even amongst regular attendees.
Laura: There were 8721 members of DisCon III. 3000 were from China (though only about 2000 voted in Site Selection). But of the rest, how many joined because they were in the area — and wouldn’t be interested in where the con might be in 2 years if the alternative was as far away as Winnipeg. Obviously we already know that the remainder didn’t jump in to carry the day. I believe that’s because Winnipeg was a low-energy bid and prospective voters wanted to feel like they would be voting for a well-run convention. A skepticism later justified by the Winnipeg NASFIC. Running on a “we’re not China” platform wasn’t nearly enough.
Deep Sympathies to Adrian Tchaikovsky.
But…
Justice for Chinese Fen! Their ballots were not counted, perhaps a thousand of them. In America, when an election has been found to be totally corrupted, there can be a re-vote.
And that is what we should do.
There should be a re-vote for the 2023 Hugos, inviting all voters of the 2023 cycle to cast their nominating ballots again, since we have no way of knowing how any electronic ballots recoverable from the first cycle may have been corrupted.
Running on a “we’re not China” platform was definitely not enough for this Discon attendee, so for me it became “I won’t be able to go to either of them, so I have no dog here, and all this electioneering is really beginning to piss me off. I’m sitting this out.”
Now would I have done the same thing if I had known what would happen at Chengdu and (okay, yes, less bad, but still not good) at NASFIC? Likely, yes, unless a “No Worldcon at all” option had been available (if it was, I wasn’t aware of it).
Many SF awards have historically shown a pattern of favouritism, due to the small pool of people the judges and the voters are drawn from, even more so with awards chosen by enthusiastic amateurs, who perhaps don’t have the skills to guard against slanting of the results. But the Hugo has long prided itself on its grand heritage and professionalism, and it’s looked upon as the premiere award for writers of speculative fiction, even with aforesaid biases. This particular committee must have lacked the usual professionalism and experience required to administer the event and the award. I know that the talent pool for smaller awards, like the BSFA, is so small that it really is a case of semi professionals and very devoted and involved amateurs, who completely rely on each other and respect each others skills .. but it really is done on trust.
I think this debacle shows that something as large as the Hugo really needs the involvement of professionals in the administration side of things, to do their best not to artificially slant the results. Consultations with editors, publishers and authors and with people experienced in mass voting systems where necessary, to guard against arbitrary prejudice and suppression like this. But also, America is in the throws of a fascist uprising and extremism, with right-wing suppression of a variety of groups not considered white and masculine enough to count as equals any more. Could it be that the Hugo’s have been affected by this, too? So perhaps there needs to be some kind of internal political monitor, too, to guard against extremist elements taking control of the event. I don’t know. But I do think it’s more than just a coincidence.
I agree with some that a revote would be the best solution, if it is at all possible, considering the likely cost and the logistics of it. And the existing results entered into history, too, as a very fitting alternate reality of the Hugo awards.
@Mike
Yes, the problem for 2021 was definitely not enough support for “not China”. Both in terms of the vote itself and support beforehand of other bids. The more influential (at that time anyway) SMOFs rallied around Chengdu so the other bids fell apart or were too little too late. And as you yourself reported, Chengdu was heavily promoting voting in site selection to local fans and informing them how. Winnipeg seems to have been relying on only the usual suspects to vote. And there were never going to be enough of those. Not enough people know about site selection, know how they can vote, or the reasons why it is important to do it — even if you don’t plan to attend.
I voted for Winnipeg 1st and “None of the above” 2nd. (Probably would have put “none of the above” 1st if I’d known what they would try to pull. Not that it would have made a difference.) I was not planning to go either way, but I like the idea of the type of folks I might nominate in the Hugos being unafraid to go accept their rockets in person if they have the opportunity.
There is a “None of the Above” option in the WSFS Constitution for site selection votes. If it wins the Business Meeting is given the opportunity to select the site.
There is a “none of the above” option.
eta: ninja’d by rcade! and with more info! 🙂
The Chengdu Hugo Awards subcommittee did not lack experience. Dave McCarty was a past Worldcon chair and Hugo Awards administrator. But it certainly did lack professionalism. I wouldn’t trust the guy to run a carnival cakewalk.
Do we know for certain what happened to the 2023 nomination and final ballot data? I’ve seen many people say they were deleted/destroyed, but how do we know this?
Doctor Science: We don’t know, is the answer. What I’ve been seeing is extrapolation from things that have been said about customary practice. Whether it would do any good if somebody popped up now with the 2023 data I have my doubts.