Diane Lacey shared 2023 Hugo administration team emails with Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford for use in “The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion”. And she sent them the following letter, written to “sincerely apologize to my community”. Their report links to a copy, however, Lacey has accepted File 770’s offer to publish the letter as a separate post as well.
January 25th, 2024
Let me start by saying that I am NOT making excuses, there are no adequate excuses. I am thoroughly ashamed of my part in this debacle, and I will likely never forgive myself. But the fans that have supported the Hugos, the nominees, and those that were unfairly and erroneously deemed ineligible in particular, deserve an explanation. Perhaps the only way I can even begin to ease my conscience is to provide one.
I was asked to join the Hugo committee for Chengdu, and I agreed to do so because I care about the Hugos. I’ve been a member of several Hugo committees going back to 2009 and I was the Hugo Administrator in 2012. The Hugos have always been important to me, and I believed, in part because of the depth of Dave McCarty’s experience, and because I thought he felt the same way, that they would be run with integrity.
It happened gradually. We vetted entries, as always, checking length, publication dates, etc. Then things began being removed from the vetting lists. We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated, exactly as many have speculated*. This certainly accounted for some of the disappearances. These were all Chinese language publications so I don’t know who the authors might have been. I was never privy to the actual nomination numbers.
Should I have resigned? Probably, but hindsight, as they say, is 20:20. It was apparent that there were issues beyond the slate. We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so. Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn. I just didn’t imagine that there would be so many issues, and that they’d be ultimately handled so poorly by Dave. (Okay, so maybe I do have a certain level of naivete.) Dave insisted that there needed to be more time elapsed before the Chinese nationals would be safe from the ensuing uproar, and he made it clear from the time the finalist names were released that he intended to wait the entire 90 days. Are they safe now? I hope so, I truly do, but I can’t imagine that ensuing uproar and the international media attention that came along with it has done them any favors.
As far as Dave’s apparent actions in cooking the results, I have to say I didn’t really expect that either. And if I had I, like many others have said, would have imagined he’d do a better job. (Again, my non-zero level of naivete at play.) Had that been the case I might not be writing this, but he didn’t do a better job. The fallout has negatively affected something I care deeply about, the Hugos, and I’m not sure they can recover.
Again, I am not making excuses. I sincerely apologize to my community. I don’t expect you to forgive me when I can’t even forgive myself. I’ve violated your trust, and I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I am so very sorry. Mea Culpa.
Diane Lacey
*Although since then, a better explanation has been given for the “cliff” phenomenon in the data.
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Well, I believe at least 4 of the 7 “cliff top” best novels already have Chinese translations.
@ Laura,
What are the other three besides Babel you know of, and who is the publisher? I didn’t find them in a casual search, have they been published yet?
@Brian Z
Zionius’s rundown; the text is Chinese, but the tables speak for themselves.
In Best Novel, 6 novels tie for first, 4 Chinese-language.
In the first column of the EPH spreadsheet for Best Novel, only two Chinese-language works are in the top 10, and (if my perception of the characters is right**) one of those two wasn’t tied for first.
I would have expected that the top 6 vote-getters would appear toward the top of the first column in the first round.
** people who can read Chinese, please correct me!
All the Best Novel entries that were on the nomination report have reasonably complete entries on ISFDB. I wonder who did all that research and data entry? 😉 (Albeit it was mainly a case of transcribing what was already recorded in CSFDB – hat tip to Arthur Liu & co for that.)
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ay.cgi?23+2023
The other categories I haven’t gotten round to – one of the other ISFDB editors added stub entries, but I’ve not had time/inclination to fill in the details – not helped in the slightest by Dave & co’s failure to provide author names.
@mark asks
Why? Because she is a woman on the internet. From your name, I’m guessing that you are not, so maybe you don’t know that women on the internet get rape threats and death threats any time they do anything that some men don’t agree with. Heck, I know that Dave had to lock down his Instagram after people found it and started leaving nasty comments on pictures of his daughter.
The police and the FBI do absolutely nothing even in cases of extensive online harassment and death threats, so there would be no point in reaching out to them.
@Brian Z
Daughter, Kaiju, and Spare Man had Chinese excerpts in the packet. What appeared to be from professionally produced translations. So either published or about to be published as of last summer.
What Tammy Coxen said.
@Laura
The Spare Man was only in the packet as English language PDF and EPUB files.
One of the Lady Astronaut novels was available in Chinese as (IIRC) a long extract in the Yao Haijun Best Editor Long Form packet.
https://sf.ersatzculture.com/chengdu-worldcon/voter-packet-contents.html#best-novel
(I just double checked my downloaded files to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake)
@John S / ErsatzCulture
Ah, yes, just checked my own notes. I misremembered. Could be the Lady Astronaut I was mixing it up with. Thanks.
Brian Z: It looks like a Western group organizing a secret slate for Western works knew that it was unable to expand beyond, say, 50-100 ballots by drawing on the usual pool of Western Worldcon fandom, without getting caught. But they could have easily shared their secret slate with a Chinese group that was hoping to publish some of the works in Chinese translation.
That’s even more preposterous than your original proposal that there were 850 Western fans nominating from a slate.
After reading the Validation document, I’m now fairly convinced that what happened on the slated fiction categories is that McCarty moved up entries in the left-hand Title column while leaving the (admittedly totally-bollixed-up) EPH totals on the right — overwriting the names of the slated Chinese entries.
This would explain:
@Diane Lacey – If you’re still here, do you happen to know what the “invitation spreadsheet” referenced in the spreadsheet you provided was? It’s making some of us on Bluesky utterly bugnuts trying to figure it out.
(Yes, we know some people were invited to China. I was one. But that’s not noted on my line, and Scalzi, who does have that note, appears to also be ranked #7, which may mean the “invitation spreadsheet” has yet another ranked list that we haven’t seen yet. God help us all.)
@Brian Z
Glad you like them! My typo posts are mostly about Tolkien and posted in https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4348 . Most of my thoughts on SF can be found in https://www.douban.com/people/zionius/reviews , which are in Chinese and mostly on errors in Chinese translations, therefore probably useless for you. I guess only the posts about Asimov Short Stories, Babel and Andy Weir are of potential general interest.
IMO the leaked list is strictly ranked, even though the first 6 works appear to have no order. See discussion in https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2024/02/17/hugo-2023-validation-list-rankings So by “top 5” I included Babel.
Hard to say why Daughter wasn’t much influenced, could be (1) it received many nominations from US/UK fans as well (2) it received few nominations from Chinese fans (SFW brought its right, that’s why it was on SFW rec list, but the translation is yet to be published) (3) Dave decided not to manipulate its figure because it is not a Chinese work or heaven knows why.
Kaiju in Chinese is published by New Star Press right at the worldcon. This publisher often cooperates with 8LM (they are the joint publishers of Space-Time Painter), but they are still not one.
After 1~2 years, when more of the shortlisted works are translated to Chinese, we could go back to check, and might have more insights of the slates.
@JJ A very interesting theory! There are actually at least three items appearing twice in the published longlist.
I tried to identify the possible original titles from correlations in EPH data but failed. For instance, if Space-Time Painter’s data actually belongs to Color the World (no.1 in the leaked longlist), one would expect it grows in a similar pattern as no.2 & 4 (the other two works on SFW list), when Turing Food Court (the fourth work from SFW list) was knocked out, but I can’t find such phenomenon.
Perhaps the EPH data of Babel is actually from Residual Light, the Qidian work no one in the fandom heard of? That would explain why its point never grows. But I can’t link the pattern of the rest of EPH data to the other Qidian work, the three works on SFW list and Babel.
@RedWombat
I was guessing the invitation spreadsheet would be where they were gathering potential finalist contact info. (“Invitation” to confirm you accept the nomination.) And, yeah, that seems to have yet another ranking order.
@JJ Yes, I think that’s the simplest explanation. And perhaps a little more f****ing around with the numbers explains anything else. (Or yet another ranking order of things pasted from the “invitation spreadsheet”.)
@zionius What was the third double-listing? The one corrected to Upstart, In the Serpent’s Wake (which should probably be Unraveller), and ?
@Laura Song of Fungus appears in two categories.
On invitation spreadsheet/list: It appears this mysterious “invitation list” determines which work could appear in the finalist. Seven works are marked as “invitation” (Spare Man, Nona the Ninth, Kaiju Preservation Society, DIY, Stranger Things 404, The Mountain in the Sea, A Dream of Electric Mothers), none of them are among top 6 of the initial list (most are not even in top 10), yet 6/7 entered the finalist. OTOH, four works are marked as “disappear on invitation list”: three from top 6 of the initial list, one ranked 8 (Upstart, Hummingbird, Sandman 106, Tongji Bridge), yet none entered the finalist.
@zionius
Oh, yes. I forgot about that. Does anyone know what the actual character or word count is on that?
My guess is that the validation spreadsheet is before removing what they decided were invalid ballots. And the invitation spreadsheet is maybe after they re-ran EPH without those ballots. So some things disappeared from the top 10 or so. But I haven’t looked closely to see if that holds up. It’s just a guess based on what it sounds like it could be.
Just to be clear, has EPH made the malfeasance a) possible to detect, or b) easier to detect?
I say you could possibly suspect the malfeasance without EPH if not much effort had been put into manipulating the raw nomination numbers. But I believe EPH makes it next to impossible to cover up.
@JJ
That’s even worse. Thanks for spotting it. Disgraceful end-to-end.
@JJ
Since you have previously accused the Discon Chair of colluding with her Chinese publisher to stuff the ballot to select Chengdu, I’m not sure why you dismiss the suggestion that Westerners with a slate could pass it to interested Chinese parties. Also, I never said only Western fans participated, that was you.
@All
Many, but maybe not all of the removed nominees were removed after running EPH, and before re-running it.
Point 1: EPH produced Western skyscrapers
Point 2: After the removal of Chinese slated works between two runs of EPH, more removal continued gradually.
GrandUniversalDave wrote two days after circulating the spreadsheet:
Lacey told us earlier in this comment thread that she’d written to Barkley:
The first 6 novels on Lacey’s vetting list are ranked “1” but that doesn’t literally mean they are all exactly tied. It indicates, here and in every other category too, that they were the presumptive finalists at that point (before the “category moves and voids”). This is followed by items numbered 7 through 10, a rank telling the validation team how close it is to being put on the final ballot. English works were Daughter and Babel, already finalists, Nettle, which at 7 was next up to be a finalist if anything got removed, and Legends at 10.
Then McCarty met the Chinese team and some of the slated Chinese novels were removed.
However as Lacey wrote in her letter above, they were removed gradually.
Uniquely in Novel, Lacey’s list of the top 10 has an addendum listing 4 more items. McCarty clearly reran EPH as promised because (according to the validation document) now Spare Man, Nona and Kaiju are added to the ranked list. In this iteration, according to Lacey’s spreadsheet Spare Man and Nona are now also listed as 1 – they’re now finalists – and Kaiju is now 7, or the next up to be a finalist should anything else get removed. If McCarty hadn’t rerun EPH, these couldn’t be ranked.
Then, as Lacey noted, some additional removal(s) were announced. It looks from her document as if Mountain was added subsequently but not actually ranked.
Either Lacey stopped noting the changing rankings, or was told this was the final list with no more changes, which are both plausible, or McCarty didn’t run EPH a third time, which is also possible.
(Legends doesn’t appear again or get re-ranked on the vetting spreadsheet because they had already vetted it.)
So it is somewhat conceivable that a fourth Chinese finalist was removed very late in the game with no chance to rerun EPH, and the Hugo team somehow could not do anything but tinker with the existing stats in some creative way that seemed plausible but still left space at the bottom to add Kaiju. But I don’t see how that could have given to Babel points belonging to Residual Light, which was not on the June 5 list at all. OK, I can see one way: the Chinese works were canonicalized using Chinese characters, which McCarty can’t read, so maybe he accidentally gave the vetters an incorrect list or, hell, accidentally reran EPH with voided ballots.
More likely, I am starting to think, the numbers are correct. SFW’s overpowering slate took four or five slots (depending on whether you count Daughter) until their ballots were voided and removed from the total count. There was a bullet-vote campaign for Babel alone, which nobody could argue with, and it remained standing, but nevertheless nobody hastened to correct McCarty’s delusion that he must declare it ineligible. (Or they flat out lied to him.) The Western slate filled the gap after SFW was removed. This can’t be the least probable scenario.
(This addendum doesn’t reoccur in Series, for which canonicalization was completed later. There, they were asked to check all the way down to 15, and the list goes to 16 to be safe. So we can’t do a similar blow by blow for Series. But it gets really weird. I’ll leave it aside for now.)
Side note: in the middle of this they started to worry none of the finalists would show up and decided to issue all-expenses-paid invitations. Once can sort of see how, before cutting a check, a committee might want reassurance about whether someone was likely to scream Free Tibet! from the stage, or shout so-and-so is a fucking fascist! A better response by these Hugo volunteers would have been “It’s up to you who you want to invite: go research that yourself.” However, the correct response to being asked to compile political dossiers on all the potential finalists would have been to quit immediately, and go public if you felt safe doing it. A textbook case of groupthink and drinking the Kool aid.
I should add that numbers being correct for those novels cannot mean everything is correct. For example if Babel has numbers from a real bullet vote campaign, Mountain must have been moved on the longlist without rerunning EPH, since some people said they nominated both.
Is that a little TOO conspiratorial? That was around the time they panicked and started inviting lots of finalists, paying their international airfare, hotel, etc.. It makes sense that the draft of who was getting invited was a work in progress, and that they might remove those not determined to be Hugo finalists from the invite list.
I suspect that EPH is more like a CRC32 checksum — very good at detecting random errors and clumsy tampering, but not designed to be proof against sophisticated deliberate tampering.
The so-called “cliff” could be detected without EPH i.e. you can show that the distribution of raw vote totals has a very unusual pattern compared to other years – which is what Heather Rose Jones showed. It also means she could compare 2023 with years prior to EPH.
EPH then shows that not only are the numbers high but the ratios or votes to points is high which means each finalist is mainly on ballots that also list 4 or more of the other finalists (Babel is close to 5). That shows these ballots were all very similar.
EPH then shows that the points transferred between works is very odd (Babel’s points don’t change). Then it also shows by comparing the results with a small number of actual ballots that the vote transfers are impossible.
Finally, EPH shows that the number of ballots cast in Best Novel cannot be the number shown in the headline. This is the issue Dave McCarty blamed on a SQL query bug.
Really by that point you can sensibly say the numbers must be false and that the Hugo admins should have been aware that the numbers were false.
EPH makes things so interconnected that I think you would have to do a lot of ballot stuffing and create “real” stats, and even then knowing a very small sample of actual ballots could show that things are irrefutably wrong. Here just knowing my own ballot shows me these stats are impossible. And if my confirmed ballot wasn’t counted, then I still know something went wrong.
@Brian Z
The emails are from early June when McCarty was in Chengdu. About a month before the finalist announcement. Contacting the finalists started toward the latter half of June. I thought Chengdu extended their offer for Western finalists to come after that.
Brian Z: Since you have previously accused the Discon Chair of colluding with her Chinese publisher to stuff the ballot to select Chengdu
Ah, Brian, I see you’ve never stopped your lying behavior. I suggest you straighten your act up before Mike decides to resume sending all of your comments to the Trash Bin again.
What I actually pointed out is that MRK interfered with Site Selection by overriding WSFS’ decision that a couple thousand ballots in support of the Chengdu bid did not comply with the rules.
That override/decision on her part was a clear Conflict of Interest. because her Chinese publisher was a member of the Chengdu Bid Committee. She should never have been allowed to have any influence or control over Site Selection because of that.
@Danny Sichel
EPH made it ridiculously easy to detect. However, part of that seems to be the deep ineptitude of the people involved. They were so incompetent that it would be hard to imagine the malfeasance not being spotted under a different system, assuming equal levels of incompetence
Conflicts between Chengdu Business Daily and Science Fiction World are not a secret. I believe that the slate disclosed which led to the deletion of the Chinese nominees is the ones posted by SFW. As a robust measure of cracking down on competitors and seizing power, CBD considered that they could use their staff to make secret whistleblowing. Thus, they told McCarty, “Look! A slate!” And naive foreign staff tried to make it fair without any investigation.
A public recommendation list seemed to be acceptable. As we had discussed, the publishing houses wanted their readers to know there would be a Hugo in China and tried to raise their willingness to join the Hugo. Spending over 600CNY is a high risk for most people. So they made many lists and appealed to nominating. This is understandable. Many companies, like Qidian (Yuwen Group), SFW, 8LM, New Star Press, SF cube, and other sci-fi-related publishing houses, joined the companion. However, only the list from SFW was figured out and punished.
And we can think further. Why must the houses take action to let readers know Hugo? We know Liu Cixin’s award made it famous in China.
You know the promotion in China is bullshit. Videos and essays are few. The word”Chengdu Worldcon” only appeared in several reports. A fan work about Worldcon might beat official videos. If more Chinese fans know there is a Hugo they will join and select their preferred ones. And closed-door politics could have been stopped by wide monitor.
Recommendation lists are acceptable. The American science fiction trade publication Locus has compiled a recommended reading list for years. Here’s the one for works from 2023.
McCarty’s decision to call the Science Fiction World list collusion and exclude the top vote-getting Chinese nominees on that basis is without predecent in Hugo Awards history. If he had announced this decision publicly at the time he made it, WSFS members would have raised hell until it was reversed and he was removed from his position over the Hugos.
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I almost felt sorry for provoking you, but it is good you said the quiet part.
Mary Robinette Kowal didn’t override WSFS’ decision. She was WSFS. The Chair of the sitting Worldcon rightly perceived that the kneejerk defensive reaction from the SMOFs was not fair to the new members from China, who were, I don’t know why I have to be pointing this out to you, also WSFS. That’s all the WSFS Consitution is, really, a statement about the principle of fairness.
As an anarchic institution WSFS has proven itself robust enough over so many decades that it has the mettle to go up against any mere national government. We should keep it. But creating SMOF overlord committees dictating terms to Worldcons will kill it.
Recent events have shown that at this point we should ask Zimozi Natsuco et al. to take over for a while. Time for the SMOFs to stop trying to run everything. Preferably they might consider saying their farewells together on a stage with theatrical prop daggers in the style of the Judean People’s Front, but I’ll take what I can get. I mean, they should stick around, and train the next generations, but SMOF rule is over.
Just a note on whether the SFW list is the “slate” mentioned in the leaks.
I believe these are the works on the validation list that did not appear in the longlist
The NanTianMen Project
Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles <- on SFW list
Spiritual World Walker
Base No. 7
[EDS] Chen Yao ?? <- on SFW list in Ed-Long and Ed-short but only missing from Ed-Short
Major missing works weren’t on the SFW list. Ignoring the editor entry three-quarters weren’t from SFW-list.
Brian Z: Mary Robinette Kowal didn’t override WSFS’ decision. She was WSFS.
MRK was most definitely not WSFS in 2021.
You are confusing someone being the Chair of a Worldcon with being the Chair of WSFS. Those are two very different things, and MRK was very definitely not the Chair of WSFS in 2021.
Not only did MRK not have any additional rights or power over WSFS doings than any other WSFS member, as one of her novels was a finalist for the 2021 Hugo Awards, and DisCon III invoked Section 3.13 of the WSFS Constitution to enable her to be eligible, she had even less power in WSFS than other WSFS members.
MRK’s intervention in WSFS Site Selection decisions in 2021 was absolutely inappropriate and a huge Conflict of Interest, given that her editor was a member of the Chengdu Worldcon Bid Committee.
@rcade SFW list is a little different from Locus list. Like Qidian and 8LM, SFW only listed its own publications and editors, more like a Tor list.
Maybe you’re right. MRK, half the business meeting, all the new members and every fan with at least one foot planted in the 21st century were wrong because a SMOF clique called up this old stalwart, what was his name… not Noah Ward… oh right it was Ward’s rougish, elusive cousin, Noah Bindin’ffect.
Time to step back gracefully and get some new faces on the dance card. Sorry.
I was thinking about this some more.
There’s a document trail showing McCarty saying he was about to rerun EPH a second time. I guess there’s a case, potentially, that he didn’t in Series, where he acknowledged there were canonicalization problems and delays, but in Novel we can assume he did unless there’s evidence to the contrary.
I don’t see why Babel’s bizarre points would be fabricated – why do that? We know Mountain eventually bubbled up some distance toward the top amidst the Chinese work carnage, because it enters the validation document late without any EPH ranking. Maybe at the time EPH was run that produced those points, Mountain was eliminated earlier?
Wouldn’t that open the door to multiple other interpretations? Or did McCarty keep points intact but have to fiddle with the nomination totals for some reason?
Well, for whatever reason, they are wrong.
Once a work has been disqualified it plays no part in the EPH calculation, so there is no clear right or wrong. What was odd that the other politically disqualified works did get EPH calculations, and Babel got only the first round, after which calculation stopped.
My best explanation is that Babel was disqualified before the EPH calculation, and the others were disqualified after it was completed. They must have “hand patched” the calculation in this case. It’s not clear if the EPH numbers for the other nominees factor in whether they shared a ballot with Babel, and whether their score was bumped by Babel’s elimination or not. The “right” answer (for a work being disqualified, which is of course not a right situation) might be this. The work should be considered eliminated immediately, and no other work should be counted as sharing a ballot with it. Otherwise works that share a ballot with it would be penalized compared to works that don’t. (Admittedly some could argue this is fair as it is slates being penalized here, and a slate that nominates an invalid work is still a slate.)
The other alternative was done for the other disqualified works. Run the normal process, and when they make the shortlist that way, just drop them out and bump up the next work.
I don’t know if the other novels which shared a ballot with Babel lost points in their EPH calculation because of it or not, nor do I know if it’s right or wrong either way. That no EPH adjustment was made to Babel’s score as other works were eliminated isn’t particularly wrong, because its score isn’t relevant. The one way it would be relevant would be if it was going to be eliminated during the EPH rounds, which would affect the scores of its ballot-mates. It was not eliminated, however.
What a mess.
(I will also say that the minor changes in all the nominated novels through their EPH rounds is surprising, as is the fact of the cliff, now allegedly connected to the removed SF World “slate.” It seems that most of the allowed ballots were very similar in listing this set of top works, including Babel, in a way that doesn’t seem natural.)
If it were DQed before EPH, why would it be there at all? In that case, the EPH scores are definitely fabricated.
Yes, this would be a difficult thing for them to do and serve no purpose. Either way, the check done by comparing ballots people volunteered shows that there were points not counted from Mountain in the Sea for Nettle & Bone and Nona 9th as well. The lack of points was more obvious for Babel but there was something generally off with Mountain the Sea’s data.