An Audio Interview With Dave McCarty by Chris M. Barkley
Yesterday, Saturday February 3rd, my partner Juli Marr and I drove from Cincinnati to attend Capricon 44 in downtown Chicago.
We went because we were cordially invited by Helen Montgomery for a semi-surprise party in support of Leane Verhulst, a beloved Chicago area fan. The Facebook Invitation read as follows:
In September 2023, Leane posted that she had a brain tumor. Since then she had surgery to remove it, and the tumor was biopsied. As some of you may have heard, Leane has been diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma. She has completed chemo and radiation, but this cancer is aggressive and unfortunately has a low survival rate.
As some of us discussed this, Dave had the idea that we would much rather celebrate her *with* her now instead of later. (I mean, we’ll celebrate her later too. Probably often. Because we embrace the power of “and” here.)
Please come join us at Capricon 44 on Saturday night at 8pm Central for our Celebration of Leane. Capricon 44 is held at the Sheraton Grand Chicago.
Juli and I have known Leane for many years and have socialized and worked with her at other sf conventions, including several Chicago Worldcons.
Leane had been in remission and was expected to be there but unfortunately, she had a rather sudden relapse on Friday that required her to be hospitalized for immediate treatment.
As of this post, she is conscious and in stable condition but tires easily.
As a consolation, Helen Montgomery set up a laptop and people attending the party spent a few minutes chatting with and to lift her spirits up. Juli and I were among the last to speak with her and I must remark that she was bearing up very well despite the difficult circumstances. In one way or another, we all told her that we loved her, wished her well with the hope of a speedy recovery…
The other less important reason was that I was also there to receive my Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer from Dave McCarty, who was until recently the head of the Hugo Award Administrators for the Chengdu Worldcon. (He was also a co-host of Ms. Verhulst’s party.)
The party was a success and a literal Who’s Who in fandom was there including Don and Jill Eastlake, Ben Yalow, Alex von Thorn, Marah Seale-Kovacevic, Laurie and Jim Mann, Steven H and Elaine Silver, Stephen Boucher, Tammy Coxen, James Bacon, Jesi Lipp, Greg Ketter, Geri Sullivan, Janice Gelb, Ann Totusek and Kathy and Paul Lehman.
(Although many photographs were taken, I refrained from doing so for personal reasons.)
As all of you are probably aware of by now, these Administrators, and Mr. McCarty in particular, have been under fire for the shocking and unexplained disqualifications of the works of fan writer Paul Weimer, Chinese-born Canadian sff writer Xiran Jay Zhao, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman mini-series on Netflix and the novel Babel by novelist R.F. Kuang from the Long List of Nominations that was released on January 20.
Mr. McCarty, who has been involved in sf fandom for decades, was bombarded with inquiries from most of the ineligibles (save for Ms. Kuang, who issued a brief statement of her own on Instagram), from outraged sff fans on social media and from curious factions of the mainstream press as well.
(Full Disclosure: I have not stated this recently but I must make it known that I have known and worked with Mr. McCarty for several decades. I have worked with him on many conventions in a subordinate role and clashed with him on many occasions involving contentious issues that I have brought before the World Science Fiction Fiction Business Meeting. Despite this, I have maintained a cordial and respectful relationship with him over the years.)
As a journalist, I found myself in a bit of a conundrum; being the recipient of the Hugo in Best Fan Writer category this year, I am in the uncomfortable position of being a part of the story I am reporting on.
But, since I am in the eye of the hurricane so to speak, I am also in the unique position to observe and report on the situation. Keeping my bias in check, I extended an invitation to interview Mr. McCarty several days before I left for Chicago. A day before I left, I receives a text from him accepting the offer, something he did not do when asked by Adam Morgan, a reporter from Esquire Magazine, which ran the following story this past Thursday, the first day of Capricon 44, much to Mr. Carty’s chagrin: “Hugo Awards 2024: What Really Happened at the Sci-Fi Awards in China?”
On Sunday morning, Mr. McCarty and I sat down in the lobby of the Sheraton Grand Riverwalk Hotel for an extensive talk about his experiences as the Chengdu Hugo Administrator, the Chinese colleagues, he worked with, his future in fandom and the mysterious origins of and his reactions to being named, “the Hugo Pope”.
[Here is a transcript of the interview produced by consulting two different AI-generated transcripts, and lightly copyedited by Mike Glyer. https://file770.com/wp-content/uploads/Dave-McCarty-Interview-Audio-file-cleaned-up.pdf.]
One question I neglected to ask at the time was whether or not he, or anyone on the Chengdu Hugo Awards Administration team, were required to sign any sort of non-disclosure agreement by the Chinese government or any other entity involved with the convention. I sent Dave McCarty a text message asking the question after I arrived home Sunday evening. His response:
“Nobody on the administration team signed any kind of agreement like that, we’re just bound by our regular WSFS confidential customs.”
And finally, there was the matter of my Best Fan Writer Hugo Award:
I was informed via text by Mr. McCarty that the six or so Hugo Awards shipped from the People’s Republic of China to the United States for distribution arrived at his house this past Monday.
Unfortunately for all involved, all of the awards had been damaged in transit; while he did not detail the damage to the other awards, Mr. McCarty told me that mine had suffered the most damage in that the panda had chipped paint and had also become completely detached from the stargate. He theorized that this happened because the cases did not have any cushioning material inside to insulate it, so that any practically any motion during transport would cause the awards to rock and bounce against the case.
Mr. McCarty reported that all of the custom cases were for all practical purposes, unusable.
He did tell me that he thinks that the awards can be either fully repaired or possibly even replaced in the next month or so.
He did offer to give my award as is and have it repaired on my own but I declined and said that anything that he could do to have it restored would be fine with me.
This turn of events will mean that my daughter Laura and her family, my bookstore and library friends and all of ardent admirers at my local Kroger’s supermarket will have to wait just a little while longer to take their selfies with one of the most iconic symbols in literature…
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@StefanB: “We had one related work finalist who quoted very large parts of a book that dealt with CP”
On investigation this was “Safe Space as Rape Room” and the book was “Hogg” by Samuel Delany; Worldcat tells me that there’s copies of 11 editions in 246 libraries and Amazon would be happy to sell me an ebook published by Open Road Media.
The numbers presented contain what appear to at least two separate analysts to be wide-ranging fabrications – which is not consistent with Dave acting in good faith within the rules.
If Dave’s own interview is to be trusted, Dave stated a belief that would mean all the numbers used to calculate the winners were unreliable and possibly invalid.
I’m not saying that should change a friendship, but it simply is not consistent with what Dave himself has said that he ran it in good faith and according to rules.
That simply doesn’t wash. He can’t describe what those ‘rules’ are neither fans in China or outside of China have been able to make a clear guess about each of the ineligible (eg Fongong Temple Pagoda? Why? Not because of the author who had another story actually win. The story was promoted in other Chinese media, so plenty of people in China willing to mention its title in public. So why? Babel? OK, people have made guesses but this is a book SOLD IN CHINA published by a company ultimately owned by THE GOVERNMENT.) This was Dave making some arbitrary decisions not following a set of rules from any clear source.
He then purposively misled people about this. He has conceded that the underlying reason for the delay was to hide the fact of these decisions. This delay cast the Hugo wins of several people into doubt. He didn’t give any of those people the option of opting out from the awards, which I know many would have done IF they had known key works/nominees were missing from the ballot for non-legitimate reasons.
Who would want to have to say “I won a Hugo but I was given an advantage because another finalist was removed because of political censorship”? That is demonstrably Dave having disdain for the feelings of finalists.
Worse yet, these published statistics demonstrate that the nominating ballots and (probably) the final ballots were not counted properly or with due care. I can see that my choices on my ballot are not reflected in the published numbers. If the stats are to be believed my ballot was NOT counted – and if the stats are NOT to be believed then we don’t know if ANYBODY’s ballot was counted!
This is not under any stretch of the imagination operating faithfully under the rules. At best, at the very best from a moral point of view, it was blundering incompetence.
Tammy Coxen said:
“But I have no doubt that if Dave were to be Hugo Admin again in a place that didn’t have limits on freedom of expression, he would only disqualify works for reasons clearly laid out in the constitution, because those would then be the only “rules we must follow” for that convention.”
You are likely in a minority in your lack of doubt. And I’d like to see the section of the SMOF book that says hey, if you’re in a totalitarian country and counting votes, censor at will.
Seriously, McCarty doesn’t need help painting himself in a bad light. And maybe don’t make it worse by casting doubt on the integrity of all vote counts, which is what you’ve done here, by indicating that doing it by the rules of the constitution is optional.
ETA – two missing words and my semi-constant issue with blockquotes.
Brian Z: EPH didn’t amplify a secret slate; it revealed that the finalists were chosen incorrectly. Without EPH, all we would know is that some nominees were dropped for reasons unexplained. With EPH, we know that all nomination numbers are suspect. This is unsettling to know, like a diagnosis of a serious illness. But it’s better to know than to not know.
There’s no sign of EPH having done that. There is evidence of a “something” aka “the cliff” (possibly a slate, possibly ballot stuffing, possibly all these numbers were just made up on January 18 2024) but that evidence is apparent in the raw nomination totals and would have led to exactly the same results in Best Novel and Best Series (where it is most apparent. Assuming it was something in the ballots themselves (eg a secret slate) then possibly the absurd size of the numbers was a way to get around EPH by brute force.
In other categories were there was less of a “cliff” and when there were Chinese works on the longlist, EPH did help improve the mix of finalists. Indeed, I’m an excellent example. I wasn’t a finalist for Best Fanwriter even though I had more raw votes because of EPH. This is an outcome that as an EPH-cultist I accept as an offering to my god Single Divisible Vote with Least-Popular Elimination.
McCarty feels his job was to run Chinese Hugos not WSFS Hugos, and that all his decisions were 100% correct based on that principle.
Earlier I pointed out how the first rule of the WSFS constitution (a document you can’t be a Hugo admin without reading and following) says the Hugos are selected by WSFS, so it’s a bit hard to miss.
But he also missed what comes before the first rule, where WSFS is defined in what is a sort of a preamble. WSFS is a literary society, it declares. Is it a leap to say that a literary society is likely to love books, and abhor book banning? Even when it visits China?
There is no ambiguity here. It’s the first two lines of the WSFS constitution, other than the name, not some obscure clause in the middle for subtle debate. His committee must have just skipped ahead to the Hugo calculation section and not read that very well either.
We now undertand his motive, and how he took the journey, sadly all too common in history, from trying to engage the repressor to being a collaborator. Indeed, that journey is so common, and the reason that ordinary people do evil things. McCarty is not an evil mad SMOF. He felt he was doing the right thing, for good reasons, and still feels so. But the most dangerous ideas are not the evil crazy ones, but the ones that turn good people to the dark side. The ones that take somebody who, back home, understands what it means to be a literary society that loves books and the free press, but can be lured to forget it. This is the reason for stern rebuke here–not for retribution, but to make it clear for others not to take this journey.
Why is Dave talking about SQL? Is each Worldcon re-inventing the vote-counting wheel? If they are, or if there isn’t a STRONG custom against it, that’s a really serious argument for a Permanent Hugo Tech Committee, with members (at minimum):
— someone who helped build the current software
— whoever is documenting it (because this is an ongoing process)
— 1 person from previous Worldcon
— several people from current Worldcon, the ones who will be most involved in running the system
— 2 people from the next Worldcon, learning the ropes (2 so that 1 can quit)
The goal is to keep using the same damn software as long as it works, tinkering as situations arise.
What system is Glasgow using? Are they re-inventing the wheel AGAIN?!??
Glasgow is using a system developed by Chris R.
I will.
@Laura, sort of; it is likely that for counting the nominations, Glasgow will be using Kansa, which was the system used for Chicon 8, Discon III, CoNZealand, and a few others over the past few years. NomNom is only collecting the nominations.
That said, I plan to implement the nomination canonicalization frontend for Seattle and the 2026 Worldcon, at least. I just doubt I’ll get it done in time for Glasgow to use it.
@Chris R
Thanks for the clarification.
@Apple Blue:
Sorry for my trouble. I wonder if the picture in Google Drive is the most complete version of the article. We know that the passage was deleted so quickly that we could not have time to save.
In addition, the censorship in the passage includes more things than Hugo. There were several selection activities in the worldcon and the passage mentioned “1512 works in the field of cultural creation, literature and arts.” Hugo was the latter”Literature and arts”, while the former one meant other activities. Also, 1512 isn’t the number of Hugo nominations. The committee overstated the numbers which were about 18000. They are not the same. I think Hugo was checked by “others”; others were checked by others, too.
What annoyed me the most was still the absence of the Chinese committee. Chinese fandom was blocked from the message of the Hugo chaos. The Chinese members in the committee are missing just like their missing mummies. They refused any doubts and refused to answer any questions. They messed up everything and ran away, leaving the Chinese fandom to save the situation.
If possible, I still recommend Mr.Barkley and others try to make contact with Chen Shi, Yao Chi, Liang Xiaolan, Wang Yating, and other Chinese members instead of just asking McCarty.
I wonder if anyone on WSFS has contacted Chen Shi to confirm if he is coming to the Glasgow Business Meeting to support the F.7 ASFIC proposal, of which he is the first of four named proposers?
Perhaps this is a rare case where the Business Meeting’s insistence on in-person attendance rather than remote participation is a good thing?
Tammy I have no idea how much my Ineligibility stems from some rule of the CCP, perceived rule, vibes or maybe for all I know McCarty just decided that two Chinese fan writer finalists was better and I was a useful pawn sacrifice.
This rationalization is so awful that I would fear your involvement on a future Hugo Awards committee. How can you support WSFS votes being tabulated under secret “rules” known only to the admins enforcing them, never shared with the voters? Those aren’t rules. They’re whims.
The Hugo Awards cannot survive if the people who nominate and vote lose faith in the integrity of the process.
I would never participate in the Hugos if there was an implicit unwritten rule that “we won’t count your vote if local authorities object.” As Camestros suggested in his comment, a lot of nominees would also want no part of that. They’d ask to be excluded if they knew the process was that unfair to other creators. I didn’t nominate or vote in Chengdu because of how badly it was being run, but even at my most cynical I didn’t expect this.
Let McCarty worry about his own ruined reputation. Our focus should be on how to prevent this from ever happening again.
@ChrisR:
What systems did Chengdu use, do you know?
Did they use NomNom for collecting nominations, or did they roll their own, and if so, why? (I assume this is not NomNom the savegame editor …)
Did they use Kansa for counting, or did they (Dave?) roll their own, and if so, why? (I assume this is not Kansa the incident response framework …)
What do you mean by “the the nomination canonicalization frontend”? Is this something that Glasgow would need, um, today, in which case yeah, it won’t be ready, or something they’d need when nominations close? In which case, would it be ready if you had help, and weren’t doing it all yourself?
Is there documentation for all these systems, taking knowledge from your head and recording it in case you’re hit by a falling StarLink?
What do you think of the idea of having a Permanent Hugo Tech Committee, on which you’d have a position like High Guru (possibly shared with others, I don’t know how many gurus are involved), with someone doing documentation, and then a shifting membership of people from just past/current/upcoming Worldcons, to ensure smooth & consistent handling of nomination & voting data?
I am not surprised if I hear that the Chengdu committee tracked the tickets manually. NomNom is unnecessary if the thing you need to do is just to write down some numbers from your imagination instead of speculation.
NomNom and Kansa are both on GitHub. I would guess canonicalization would be done at close of nominations to catch all variations (i.e. Nona the Ninth, Nona the 9th, etc.), yes?
@Laura
That’s what I think they mean. I’d call it standardizing the nominations. It is always a problem.
What Laura says, on both points.
NomNom is here if you’re interested. I wrote it as a favor to the Glasgow WSFS / Hugo division heads, and it looks like it’ll be sustainable for at least a couple of iterations.
There are several Kansa variants lying around, including the one I used to operate the bid that preceded Chicon 8, but didn’t use for the Hugo Awards myself, although a different Kansa variant was used instead. Wellington was used to collect nominations and votes in that instance.
As to a standing Worldcon software team… well, in my observation, convention committees all seem to have at least one person on them, in a position of authority, who wants to be the one to invent the software suite to rule them all that will solve all future fannish endeavours henceforth. I’ve seen it result in thousands of hours of volunteer software development in the short time I’ve been in this community, and I don’t foresee it starting. Everyone has an ego (myself included). I’ve written NomNom to be as small and easy to use as possible, in the hopes that it’ll fit into whatever passion project people choose for it, but … who knows what the next Worldcon will want ¯_(?)/¯ ? I know I’d argue strenuously against _mandating a suite, because needs change faster than regulations do, but I do wish cons would stop wasting effort.
Chris R: There definitely have been a couple publicly known issues of someone on a Worldcon who insisted on writing their own Hugo software. I take it from your comment there have been more examples.
@Mike
Is that what happened when ConZealand didn’t open final voting until 2 weeks before Worldcon and closed it 1 week before?
@Mike Glyer: There’s a marvelous (and now quite old) book called “The Psychology of Computer Programming” about (well) the psychology of computer programming (and computer programmers). I’ve never forgotten this story about what happens when someone really really wants the fun of writing some particular code:
How do we know that this is the first time Dave McCarty put his thumb on the scales?
Dave Weinstein: How do we know that this is the first time Dave McCarty put his thumb on the scales?
We don’t. Indeed, it seems very likely that it wasn’t.
https://bsky.app/profile/peripateticmeg.bsky.social/post/3kjm6dmqk3t2x
At this point, all we know about McCarty’s past work as Hugo Admin is that he did whatever he wanted to do — and if we’re very lucky, “what he wanted to do” coincided with what he was actually required to do by the WSFS rules.
@Chris R:
convention committees all seem to have at least one person on them, in a position of authority, who wants to be the one to invent the software suite to rule them all
I have a suspicion that Dave McCarty was this person for Chengdu, and that’s one reason the numbers are so borked.
I’m proposing a standing Tech Committee precisely so no-one can try this again, because the temptation is just too great.
I know I’d argue strenuously against mandating a suite, because needs change faster than regulations do
That’s why the Committee should be a Working Group. It’s job isn’t to tell other people what to do, it does the actual work. And that’s why the membership should include:
• a flexible number of Gurus (who’ve done most of the work on the current suite)
• a Scribe or two to document changes & keep the manuals up to date, because I know how bad programmers are at this
• one tech from Worldcon N-1 to talk about what didn’t work last time
• the lead techs from the current Worldcon N
• 2 techs from Worldcon N+1 to learn & talk about future needs
And since it’s a Working Group, it should, as much as possible, work by consensus, not by voting.
My idea is that there should be a suite of Hugo Awards Software that is stable from Worldcon to Worldcon even though that’s boring and a lot of fans really really want to roll their own. It has to be maintained & updated & monitored for technical debt, because at some point it will need to be redone — but a more stable Working Group can plan the project rationally, without being under the gun of being part of an active ConComm.
@Doctor Science
I was wanting something like that – and a standard set of test data – back in 1984.
Reinventing the wheel every couple of years was a PITA….
@Chris R: I’m probably missing something, as I’m not a programmer. But why would you need to write new ballot/nomination management software for the 2024 Worldcon? Why not just use the same software that was used in 2022 or 2021 when the ballots were presumably counted correctly?
There are a lot of issues that would be between fans and a successful lawsuit over this, but McCarty has admitted to engaging in fraud here.
People paid money to have Worldcon memberships, and the WSFS Constitution says that every member has a right to vote in the Hugos. That’s a contract. By admitting that he didn’t really see much need to bother ensuring the vote was accurate, McCarty arguably intentionally violated that contract, and by hiding the fact that he was doing it until it was too late for people to take any effective action to prevent it, he engaged in fraud.
Now, there’s a lot of other things that would have to be resolved here before there was a viable cause of action – who are the defendants, can a court gain jurisdiction over them, and so on, but there is a potentially legally actionable item here, and it exists largely because McCarty can’t stop blabbering about his malfeasance.
Because it’s a challenge to write the code yourself, to make it a little bit more efficient or user-friendly or just more like the way you like things to be.
2020-2022 all used Wellington, which was a combination registration/nomination/vote system (but not canonicalization or shortlist calculation system). Chengdu and Glasgow both declined to use Wellington, and since I was its only maintainer — the original author having burned out in the crunch for CoNZealand — and I felt no need to work on it if it wasn’t in use, I abandoned it. It had several flaws that could be patched over as needed, but in particular it was very dependent on being the registration system and untangling voting from it wasn’t feasible.
So, when Glasgow asked me to put together something to solve the nominations/voting problem for them, I wrote a new one, aimed strictly at that problem (well, first I looked at how hard it would be to restore Wellington, or one of the several other systems of that kind that I’m aware of to function, but all of those would have entailed at least as much work to get operable as “writing a new one” was given the narrow requirements)
Sure, I got to do it a fun way given I was greenfielding it, but that’s secondary. Bluntly… there isn’t a working implementation of this particular part of the process available right now other than mine. There are several that might be eventually made suitable, but not on any reasonable timeline, or by anyone who has the time and inclination.
As a Hugo voter it’s nice when the user interface is more consistent from year to year. Last year’s seem to be trying too much to look cool and lost some ease of use in the process.
@Chris_R, what do you think of having a Permanent Hugo Tech Working Group, as I outlined above?
Mixed.
There’s nothing constitutional that requires a convention to use that software, and if a convention decides not to — as happened in 2023-2024 — then there’s no motivation to keep theoretical software going. I’m also not a huge fan of mandating that the software be used, since if it’s not well supported, it may not end up fit for purpose.
And, I’ve seen that paying for it isn’t workable either.
I dunno; I’m going to sit with that and think about it. I honestly don’t see how it would work in practice.
The idea would be to (over 2 years) pass an Amendment setting up a Hugo Tech Working Group, and mandate that after that Cons can’t decide to start over fresh on their own. The desire to start fresh, to roll one’s own Best and Most Perfect Hugo Software Evar, is too enticing to leave it as an opportunity–and it’s bad for the Hugos as an ongoing process, and IMHO Chengdu shows it can be disastrous.
But as soon as a bid is voted in, that Con gets seats on the Tech Working Group, they immediately get to have input into how the software works and what problems/opportunities it addresses.
@Aaron Pound
Hence the entire Greek Chorus of lawyers yelling at him to shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP.
@Ryan H: I think you are confusing McCarty and Kevin Stanlee. Most people are angry at McCarty for not talking, although when he does it doesn’t seem to help much.
The lawyers were shouting at Standlee, but McCarty’s interview above, where he says he knew the SQL numbers had errors & gave out the awards anyway, could be an actionable admission of fraud? I am not a lawyer, but it was a wince-worthy admission nonetheless.
Ah yes, my bad
@Chris R
1971 and 1972 used the same software for the final ballot counting. It was in PL/I. Figuring out what it was doing, even with comments and data in and out, was not easy. I’m still not sure if I got it right, but my Pascal version got the same results with the same input, so…
@P J Evans: figuring out what PL/I is supposed to be doing is easy while figuring out what it’s actually doing is something else. If your Pascal version got the same results as the PL/I version, it was probably wrong.
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I miss PL/I.
But I miss Smalltalk much, much more.
@Maytree
https://file770.com/barkley-so-glad-you-didnt-ask-81/comment-page-2/#comment-1604556
Your labors in transcript-making have not gone unremarked. I loaded yours into a word processor and deleted the pause-fillers and restarts, which shortened a 17-page document to 14. My comments thereon are at Camestros’s blog. Grateful thanks!
@shrinking Violet
You’re welcome, I’m glad you found it useful. There’s always a tension doing transcriptions between wanting to get down exactly what was said (appropriate for depositions, for example) and wanting the end result to read smoothly (a standard magazine interview.) In this case, I didn’t want to risk missing or misrepresenting any of Dave’s statements, so I decided to leave in most of the hem-and-haw and just try to format it in a way that made some sense to read.
Here’s one thing Dave McCarty said in the interview that surprised me:
Does anyone know Dave may be referring to? Are there really such locations in China, or did he misunderstand something he was told, or was he just misleading Chris Barkley and his readers?
@Joshua K:
Possibly this? https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2022/07/written-on-the-walls-how-graffiti-in-china-went-mainstream/
But frankly, that would imply Dave has far more awareness of China and Chinese people than he displayed in the rest of that interview.
“How do we know that this is the first time Dave McCarty put his thumb on the scales?”
And the puppies were right and the count is fixed? 🙁
They’re going to say that. If they haven’t already. Just watch.
Gaah.