Glasgow 2024 Worldcon chair Esther MacCallum-Stewart today responded to public concerns about how the Chengdu Worldcon handled eligibility decisions for the 2023 Hugos, and also announced the resignation of Glasgow’s Hugo Administrator Kat Jones, who participated in doing assessments of potential finalists which others on the Chengdu committee used to make those decisions.
Glasgow 2024 Chair’s Statement, 15th February 2024
As Chair of Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures, I unreservedly apologise for the damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards.
Kat Jones has resigned with immediate effect as Hugo Administrator from Glasgow 2024 and has been removed from the Glasgow 2024 team across all mediums.
I acknowledge the deep grief and anger of the community and I share this distress.
I, and Glasgow 2024, do not know how any of the eligibility decisions for the Hugo, Lodestar and Astounding Awards held at the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention were reached. We know no more than is already in the public domain.
At Glasgow 2024 we are taking the following steps to ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.
The steps we are committing to are:
1. When our final ballot is published by Glasgow 2024, in late March or early April 2024, we will also publish the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists, and any withdrawals of potential finalists from the ballot.
Full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
2. The Hugo administration subcommittee will also publish a log explaining the decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution immediately after the Awards ceremony on 11th August 2024.
Glasgow 2024 will continue to address this matter as we go forward as a Worldcon.
(signed by) Esther MacCallum-Stewart Chair, Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon for Our Futures.
[Based on a press release.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
What’s the structure of WIP? Nonprofits have directors, and have bylaws which specify how they serve and might be removed. Directors of a nonprofit are normally elected in some fashion by the “members” of the nonprofit. In many nonprofits, including those I have served on the board of, there is a rule defining the members to be the board members, and as such the board members elect themselves, and may have power to remove one of their number upon some sort of vote (majority or 2/3rds.) In some cases board members have terms, and are replaced when those terms expire. They may not be removable but typical bylaws will allow removal via a 2/3rd vote.
Don’t know about WIP’s by-laws, do you know what structure they take? I know that WIP’s directors were set to be the members of the MPC or something like that but I don’t know precisely how that is executed.
Brad Templeton: The bylaws of Worldcon Intellectual Property Inc. are online. You could Google and read them.
Indeed, but having a board member/former chair “Marshall Mcluhan right here” offers the chance at more context and what has happened in practice. Because, having a fair bit of nonprofit board experience myself, I know that what happens in practice often varies from the bylaws by quite a large amount, and there are many signs this is quite common in fandom too. In fact, I have glanced over the bylaws before, having googled them at the start of this mess, and should have made note of that.
@Brad: Marshall McLuhan has been strongly advised not to give opinions on any aspect of this mishigoss, on the basis of the first rule of holes. That’s even when the questions don’t look like “what did you [individually or as an organization] do that varies from what it says you should be doing?”
@ Camestros Felapton:
I was wondering when someone would point out the obvious. The SECOND vote, the one where fans voted on what they believed was a legitimate list of finalists, was not, as far as we are aware, tampered with. (has anyone gone back and checked for messed up math there?)
So while it’s possible every single thing on that entire list was put there by McCarty’s Shenanigans, the people who looked at the list, read/watched/played/reviewed the 6 competitors they were told were finalists, and chose their preferences among those finalists (including no award), did that entire step in good faith.
Everyone who voted for Nettle and Bone over The Daughter of Doctor Moreau,
The Kaiju Preservation Society, Legends & Lattes, Nona the Ninth, and
The Spare Man voted with sincerity while believing those were the legitimate choices. (As did the people who voted against it and for one of the others). Vernon can’t arbitrarily give her trophy to Kuang and say Kuang definitely would have won, or to the front runner among the Chinese nominees who were rejected, because absolutely nobody can prove they would have had more votes without running an entirely new ballot with an entirely new list.
@Gary Farber:
Is there any provision in the WSFS Constitution that permits the Hugo Award balloting, including the preliminary voting, to be run in the manner that it was in 2023?
To put it another way: given what everyone now knows was the widespread arbitrary and capricious invalidation of both nominees and ballots, can it reasonably be said that the 2023 Hugo Awards were Hugo Awards?
It was unusual for the number of wins that were completed in 1 or 2 rounds but I don’t think there were any obvious numerical errors. It was reasonable to expect the 2023 Worldcon votes to be a bit different than normal.
I love philosophical questions.
@Camestros Felapton
What makes it philosophical? Seems like a reasonable question given what we now know happened.
If the Hugo admin discarded otherwise valid ballots because they were, in his opinion, “slate ballots,” and if the Hugo admin disqualified otherwise valid nominees because they were, in his opinion, likely to offend China, is it reasonable to say, “there weren’t 2023 Hugos; it was just a giant fraud”?
Apologies. Looking at my reply now it looks flippant and/or dismissive. It was intended to suggest “that’s a great question but my reply will be long-winded, wander off into the topic of the nature of sorites paradoxes and not actually resolve the question and I’ll appear to agree with you strongly and disagree with you strongly at the same time in what will be a way unhelpful to everybody”
In other words, having thought about it my answer is “I don’t know, but it is a good question”.
I’d had a similar thought back on probably January 22 but of the form: if a Hugo team releases the stats on the deadline but the stats aren’t correct have they actually released the stats. If so can they just release a bunch of gibberish, and if not how many mistakes do they need to make before the stats don’t count?
I decided the issue wasn’t resolvable. You’d need a procedural ratification step where somebody (who?) signs off on released stats or sends them back. But that doesn’t answer your question.
Fair enough, thanks for the explanation.
As I read them, the WIP bylaws define the directors as being the members of the WSFS MPC (plus one optional Director if no members of the MPC are California residents, to comply with California law).
However, the bylaws also make it possible for the WIP directors to alter the bylaws, so they could change that.
More importantly, as far as I can tell, that is the only control the MPC actually has over WIP, so WIP could actually take immediate action to control the administration of the Hugo Awards without any requirement for two business meetings, etc.
I will leave it to actual lawyers (since my legal training stopped with Law & Order, Twelve Angry Men, and a single stint as an actual empaneled juror) as to whether or not the WIP taking action immediately and without deferring to other parties is a good thing, bad thing, or utterly neutral as far as the protection of the service marks in question.
@Mike Dunford:
People can say whatever they wish. I can only speak for myself.
Personally, I admire the “winners” who are renouncing their Award as not fairly awarded.
What I don’t understand is why anyone would now be the slightest bit proud of “winning” in such a dishonest, corrupt, failure of a genuine contest.
The honor of winning a Hugo comes from receiving the judgement of the members of that year’s Worldcon. It’s not generated by the little metal rocket itself, which is meaningless without a genuine win. The (fake) map is not the territory.
Anyone who “won” at Chengdu who in future brags about being “a Hugo winner” doesn’t, in my opinion, understand where the genuine honor comes from.
But that’s just my personal opinion. Again, I speak for no one at all besides myself.
@Gary Farber
Consider this: at the time of the presentation of the awards, the winners had been selected by the fans participating in Worldcon as the best of a list of otherwise highly-qualified and Hugo-worthy works/authors. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Until the data was released, no one was saying about any of them “How did this crap slip in? It’s not very good”. Yes, the award now has an asterisk beside it. But the nominated works were generally accepted as “Hugo worthy”; the awarded works were all very good, and for a few months generally accepted as the best of the year; the awards as presented recognize that; and the events of the last few weeks do not change those facts.
Think of it like winning a Golden Globe award for a movie. It’s no Oscar, but it’s still pretty good.
(And this isn’t a statement about what any individual winner should think, or even what I would think if I was in that position. Just a possible answer to Gary’s question, and support for anyone who decides to keep their Hugo.)
What you describe is the honour from the phrase “it is an honour just to be nominated.” And indeed, the standard by which one should judge awards is whether it truly is an honour just to be nominated. In some categories in 2015, it was not the case, and No Award was given.
However, we’re talking about the special honour of winning here.
I will not criticize any of this year’s Hugo winners for any of their actions relative to the awards.
They have been put in a horrible position. An impossible one, really.
I can understand renouncing the award, as a couple have publicly done already.
But I don’t require it of anybody. Feels to me like it is not kind to demand that the Hugo winners all do the same. I think each has to figure out what’s right for them, personally, without unnecessary pressure from outside. They’re already in a terrible bind.
Dave McCarty’s poor judgement screwed over a lot of people. The Hugo winners are victims too, along with so many voters and all the people whose hearts have been invested in the Hugos.
I feel like people should allow these folks to grieve in their own ways, without pressing upon them to perfom any particular penance.
The winners I have seen actively grieving their wins (Damn near everyone I’ve seen comment on it) I do understand, but there has been some flat out harassment trying to demand they take some performative action, and I therefore warn against anyone pushing the line that if they don’t, they’re somehow horrible people (To be absolutely clear, nobody here is taking that stance at this time).
I doubt any of the ones who are at all aware of the controversy will actually brag about their wins, so if I saw someone doing so, I might assume ignorance first, not poor personality. (At that, the only ones I expect might be even a bit unaware are the Dramatic Presentation winners and maaaaaybe Best Related Work)
@Brad Templeton
“What you describe is the honour from the phrase “it is an honour just to be nominated.” And indeed, the standard by which one should judge awards is whether it truly is an honour just to be nominated. In some categories in 2015, it was not the case, and No Award was given.
However, we’re talking about the special honour of winning here.”
No, what I describe is the winning of the award — “been selected . . . as the best”.
Pingback: The mess that is the Hugo Awards – A. P. Howell