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.]
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Good.
Good.
Like I said on Bluesky, though, we’re going to need a couple of rivers, Heracles style, to clean up this mess.
Good to hear.
(Still no check box for comments.)
This is good news.
(Still no checkbox)
I have kept my copy and will write it up for presentation at the WSFS meeting for our consideration and voting. Seems like good practice for any Worldcon.
I’m not sad about the decision makers, but this makes me sad. Maybe this person should have been more-nearly-perfect, but I don’t feel like this is an ideal result for doing research they were told to do while indicating that they weren’t thrilled with doing it.
@Kent Pollard:
Nope that take is wrong. She did help make this posible. She did research that she knew shouldn’t have made (who is not oportune for our host, is somethink).
I am angry that everyone went along with Dave. Kat exspecially as Administrator for the last year should have known better.
And then there was her statement on File 770.
I know she did a good job 2022 but she was part of the problem and nowhere near nearly-perfect.
Kent Pollard: I don’t feel like this is an ideal result for doing research they were told to do
A whole lot of truly reprehensible things — where the person definitely should have known better — have been excused as “I was just following orders”. Which is certainly the case here.
Kent Pollard: while indicating that they weren’t thrilled with doing it
I didn’t see a lot of reluctance. What I saw was someone actually doing serious, extensive digging into political beliefs, going back many years — with what looked to me like a horrifying zeal for the work.
I don’t understand how anyone could have written the e-mails Jones wrote and clicked “Send” without stopping to ask themselves “what the fuck am I doing, this is some next-level McCarthyism I’m committing???”
Bridge on the River Kwai-ass behavior by Jones especially, who by her own account didn’t even have a formal role in the process. (Unless I forgot last night’s reading already.)
This is miles away from “more nearly perfect.”
Kat Jones willingly assembled political dossiers on Hugo nominees to be used in decisions on whether to throw out all votes cast for them and take them off the ballot.
Jones also remained as Hugo Awards administrator for Glasgow for weeks after what happened at Chengdu first came to light, knowing her actions could come to light and drag Glasgow into disrepute.
She and the others involved may have a great record of contributing to Worldcons in the past. That makes it worse, not better. The more experience they had, the more they knew the damage they were doing.
I have to say that Jones’ comments is one of the most shameful things I have read in a very long time. I am literally shaking.
Full marks to Esther and the Glasgow team. Such transparency is to be applauded.
@ Kent Pollard: I could even pardon her in the heat of the moment not thinking through the implications of the research she was doing…if she realised it, horrified, and blew the whistle as soon as it was clear her research had contributed to removing valid candidates from the final ballot. If she had done what Diane Lacey did.
Instead she is more horrified that the emails were released, and more worried they make her look bad.
This statement however makes Glasgow look much better than they did yesterday, and I was already inclined to hold them blameless for everything in Chengdu. Sort of wishing I could possibly make arrangements to visit Scotland in August.
I don’t really understand where there aren’t more calls for people to hand back their awards – especially Vernon who would at the very least have faced stiff competition from Kuang (personally I think she would have lost – no disrespect to her intended).
The award now lacks a skerrick of integrity, and anyone holding on to their Hugos at this point is effectively endorsing the removal of nominees and vote manipulation.
Maybe because they’ve been victimized as much or more than any Worldcon member and while there aren’t actual rules about harming them further, good manners would seem to dictate not doing so.
Nettle & Bone was the best book I read all year and while I wasn’t able to nominate or vote (or get Chengdu to answer my emails trying to straighten out the problem), I was delighted it won the Hugo.
@patrick
Overreaction like you’re wanting makes it much worse. It’s an aberration, not a usual part of the process, and the nominees and winners should not be punished for things they had no part in.
And patrick says with so much certainty that it drips out that The award now lacks a skerrick of integrity, and anyone holding on to their Hugos at this point is effectively endorsing the removal of nominees and vote manipulation.
No, no and no. As the Award winners had nothing to with the process that led to them getting their Awards, they are not by keeping their Hugos doing what you say they are doing.
But it’s not about “punishing” the nominees – No one is forcing anyone to do anything here. It’s about the validation of the awards and their integrity. The Hugo isn’t about who “deserves” it, it’s about who got the most votes; if you didn’t get the most votes, you shouldn’t get the award.
I’m confused why so many folks says the winners have been through enough. The winners, respectfully, haven’t been through anything? No one is blaming them for what happened. And what about Kuang, and Zhao, and Gaiman and Weimer (and an unknown number of others)? Have they been through enough, or do they not count?
Let’s be clear: Whatever the merits of the work, they are not winners. If they choose to give back the award, no one is taking something away from them. If Barbie won the best Oscar because Oppenheimer was taken off the nominee list and hundreds of academy votes were tossed out, it would rightfully not be viewed as a winner.
I use that analogy because I actually thought Barbie was the better film to Oppenheimer – but this is not about the merit of the work, it’s about a hopelessly corrupt and compromised process.
Interestingly enough, in totalitarian states, it’s not uncommon for regimes to hand out bogus, mickey mouse awards – no one takes those seriously…
Well, for starters, Vernon has yet to actually receive her award, since the people who send them out are jazz hands the Hugo committee!
Talk to her in a few months, maybe it’ll have shown up by then. Although at the rate things are going, maybe Vernon will just take a sledgehammer to the bloody thing and fill that spot in the trophy case with Legos instead.
@patrick
When you take away the awards that they won, that’s punishing them for things they had no part in. (There’s also no way to do it without it going through the entire rule-making process, which means it wouldn’t happen until 2027. Think about it. THINK..
@PJ Evans – so, taking away an award that Kuang would have won, for something she had no part in, is okay, though? Why is Vernon’s right to the award stronger than Kuang’s, for example?
Regarding the entire rule-making process; it’s rather redundant as I’m not proposing to take anything away from anyone; I think it’s incumbent on the authors to demonstrate solidarity with their colleagues and take a principled stand.
In addition you will forgive my skepticism around rules – the precious Roberts Rules didn’t restrain McCarty et al’s extra-curricular peregrinations.
A few years ago at the Oscars they accidently read out the wrong Best Picture winner on stage , La La Land instead of Moonlight which actually won. It was obviously a big whiplash, but correcting the mistake had nothing to do with punishing La La Land.
I think as more details come out it’s looking to a lot of people that the announced winners simply aren’t the winners. They’re not a product of the voting process any more than they would be if someone mixed up the envelops. So it’s not surprising that people are questioning why they should still be treated as winners.
This is rightfully hard on the people who “won”. It’s another bit of trauma caused by the people who ran the awards so fraudulently.
@patrick “would have won”
“Might” have won, surely?
One could redo the balloting, starting with the preliminary voting.
So, how far back do we go? Do we invalidate every Hugo awarded where McCarty was the administrator? I mean, people don’t go from hero to villain in one easy step, so it’s quite possible that other results were fudged over the years. Credible nominees never turning up on the long list, ballots tossed, other shenanigans, all possible.
I mean, if someone turns up a decade old email from McCarty bragging about how he totally rigged a Hugo I suspect there’s going to be talk about if it’s still valid.
Actually, if we go by the rankings in the leaked spreadsheet, it looks pretty likely that neither of us would have won, since there were four Chinese front-runners that got removed. Going down the ballot, no English language works would have even made the ballot in Short Story or Series. I guess this is supposedly the removed “slate?”
Unless Dave speaks the language, I truly don’t know if we can say he’s the sole reason for that bit, but I’m damn sure it couldn’t have happened without his cheery complicity.
Indeed, Red Wombat. I was just using that as an example. I want to stress, again, I’m not impugning the quality of Vernon’s work – or the work of any of the other “winners”.
There’s also this, from Diane Lacey:
There is a discussion in The 2023 Hugo Awards thread on the impact of that decision, including this from @zionius:
Yep, you read that right. None of the initial shortlist top five best novels got through to the final shortlist. And instead of 12 of the 15 slots in the fiction categories going to work from Chinese writers, only two did.
So, if we’re going to address what should happen or what’s invalid, maybe we start there.
Patrick, you might want to scroll over Red Wombat’s icon.
@Jon It’s fine, he’s not the first.
I really don’t have the trophy though, so whatever grand gesture people have decided I should make, they’re just going to have to wait.
Apologies, Ms Vernon, your use of third person confused me!
I don’t really expect a grand gesture, and I don’t want to use you as the sole example – it’s unknowable how many categories have been compromised and to what extent.
Any of the winners could say, “I’m disappointed to learn about the way votes and nominations were handled in the 2023 Hugo Awards. Consequently, I have requested that my award is, if possible, allocated to the author who received the most votes.”
I’m just bemused that no one has done it, or even alluded to it yet. I do not mean to single you out, and apologies if it feels that way. I don’t think your win is any more or less valid than any of the others, and I don’t think that just because it’s the most popular and well-known category that there should be different expectations.
As a more general sidenote, Chris Barkley mentioned his trip to China and expenses were paid for. I would be interested to know if all nominees were offered this subsidy; if not, what the inclusion criteria were, and if this has been standard practice at Worldcons in previous years.
patrick: Only the Chengdu Worldcon committee knows precisely who and how many people were offered a subsidized trip to the Worldcon. Nobody here can answer your question in any detail. Based on what I saw in social media, there seems to have been a concerted effort to invite Hugo finalists. How many other subsidies they were prepared to fund we don’t know — and we don’t know how many people received the offer, except that because some people couldn’t go or didn’t want to go that probably meant that a wider group was contacted.
The custom over the years has been that only guests of honor (and their partner, if they have one) get their way paid to the Worldcon. Of course, whether this custom has always been strictly observed seems unlikely, when various Special Guests and so on are added. And sometimes somebody else gets some help on the Q.T., under the rubric that “deals are always made”.
On top of that, beginning a few years ago, some Worldcons have crowdfunded money to help some Hugo nominees, or marginalized fans, or others, afford to attend the convention. This is understood to be outside the regular Worldcon budget.
Therefore, as you see, the answer is clear as is the summer sun.
Good lord, Mike. For committees that are so gung ho about using Roberts Rules they seem remarkably lightweight when it comes to other, contemporaneous, areas of governance! What a mess, eh?
@ Mike Glyer
Thanks for the clarification and the Henry V quote.
@Patrick
The 2023 Hugo winners are as much victims of this fraud as the excluded artists. I see no need for the former to make the penance you call for. Their public expressions of pain and outrage are quite enough for me. Knowing what their feelings must be, I don’t even require public expressions. Among other things, 2023 Hugo winner Chris Barkley’s own work in exposing the fraud seems far more selfless and valuable than smashing up his rocket.
RedWombat: Talk to her in a few months, maybe it’ll have shown up by then. Although at the rate things are going, maybe Vernon will just take a sledgehammer to the bloody thing and fill that spot in the trophy case with Legos instead.
From the sound of it, the Chengdu Hugo Trophy Bases are only slightly less fragile than the 1989 bases, which were apparently dropping planets all over the place.
I like the idea of a Lego Panda with a Hugo Rocket.
@patrick,
Except there’s absolutely no way to know who that might have been. Apparently hundreds (or a thousand?) of “slates” were removed, against all Hugo nomination tradition and expectation, so we don’t even know who would have been on the ballot. And even taking the ballot-as-it-stood, since the votes were destroyed there’s no way to run E Pluribus Hugo on the ballots; we cannot know who would have won in the absence of the illegal censorship because position on individual ballots matter greatly in the tabulation process.
All of the winners were worthy; hell, Nettle and Bone was my top pick for novel last year. If any of the other nominated works had won, well, they were all worthy, too. It’s not just a platitude to say it’s an honor to be nominated; every single fiction work on the ballot (I can’t speak to the other categories as I don’t vote in them so I don’t monitor them closely) was absolutely deserving of its place on the ballot and if it had won, absolutely deserving of a rocket. But we’ll never know about the discarded nominations that could have been on the ballot. We’ll never know how the works on the ballot-as-we-saw-it would stand up against the ballot-as-it-should-have-been. Absent a time machine, it is literally impossible to know.
And that makes me incandescently angry … but it does not make me want to take rockets away from people who accepted them in good faith. There will ALWAYS be an asterisk next to this year of Hugos. That’s enough.
Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised is a manual for deliberative assemblies. It is not a manual for running awards, or for that matter, for running a Worldcon committee. I wonder how those people complaining about how awful RONR is would run meetings of people with multiple conflicting opinions while balancing the rights of individuals, minorities (particularly strong minorities of at least one-third of the participants), majorities (yes, majorities have rights as well, including the right to not have their time wasted), absentees, and the assembly as a whole.
If your proposed rule book amounts to “Do whatever I say because I’m right,” I suggest that you might want to reconsider your answer.
Also, those people demanding CHANGE ALL RULES IMMEDIATELY EFFECTIVE TEN YEARS AGO might want to consider how they intend to invent a time machine.
Since the removals happened at the nomination level without completely going over the process again, it’s impossible to say who could have won. The current winners may have won even if other people had stayed on the ballot.
Kevin:
If you are here and willing to answer a question or any other expert can answer, can the buisnessmeating remove a member of the MPC, or is that beyond our power?
Yeah, we went over this on Bluesky a month ago. Saying that does absolutely fuck-all. There is no mechanism to re-allocate an award. I can stand on the rooftops and yell “SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD HAVE WON!” I can give my trophy to them, I can dedicate my life to telling people they were robbed—but they still don’t get to put “Hugo Winner” on their book and the record will not be changed. I can’t fix that.
You asked why there aren’t more calls for winners to give back their awards, especially me? Because it’s a completely empty gesture, and we all know it. We do not have the power to make this right. We don’t even know who would have gotten the most votes. Hell, we don’t even have an address we can angrily mail the trophy back to, since the Chengdu committee is dissolved.
Believe me, I am not over here going “wow, look at my award that I TOTALLY EARNED FAIRLY.” I doubt any of the winners are proud of our award anymore. Frankly, I want to fill McCarty’s socks with legos.
You figure out how to actually DO something, I suspect we’ll be lining up to do it, but until then, there is only so many times and platforms where the winners can say “This sucks, I hate it, and I wish there had been a fair contest.”
Echoing Red Wombat,
I don’t think presuring the winners is apropriated. They are not at fault for this mess. We have enough to do with actually guilty people and fixing the award.
We also don’t know what would have won, you can’t say to one of the winners that they would have shurly lost.
It is exspecially frustrating in cases, where the winners know those who were disqualified. It sucks, but we can do better than presure the inocent to do an empty gesture.
Mm ..IMO all of the 2023 Chengdu Hugo winners should be left alone (and there are many comments above re that view). However, re (i) future Worldcons (and especially their proposed venues) and re (ii) Administration of any future Hugo Awards, I regret to say that sad, important lessons need to be learnt here, by everyone in our wonderful, and increasingly world-wide, SF community. And I anticipate, at the 2024/Glasgow Business Meeting, re both (i) and (ii) above, a mega-spate of amendments. These will be both regarding changes to our existing WSFS regulations and probably, new rules also brought in.. (Shades of the “puppies” issue some little time ago.) Such actions will attempt to bring back the (currently tarnished) honour of the WSFS Awards.. with best wishes.
There’s at least a couple categories where none of the works on the shortlist would have been there without McCarty’s shenanigans.
I think the people who have been presented with the awards should do whatever feels appropriate to themselves. But I suspect that as the fraud gets more and more apparent I think fandom at large is unlikely to view them as appropriately awarded. Which is a insult directly caused by the Hugo administration
Hugo committees are free to arrange their internal workings in whatever way they wish.
Whether or not they use Roberts Rules for internal meetings is irrelevant; in most cases they do not, and in any case Roberts has zilch to do with how the convention is run or how the committee or staff make decisions.
It’s the Business Meeting that is run according to Roberts, not the Worldcon committee. I realize these things are apt to be unclear to those not long familiar with how Worldcons work.
No, one can’t. There’s no provision in the WSFS Constitution to do anything like that.
https://www.wsfs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/WSFS-Constitution-as-of-October-23_2023B.pdf
Because the ballots of the so-called “slate” votes were completely discarded, we cannot, and will never, know who ought to have won.
This is basically a Humpty-Dumpty situation. We are looking at the mass of eggshells and yolk, and going “Well, crap”.
The w question is really how do we avoid the next Humpty-Dumpty situation coming down the pike. I mean, they’re aren’t even any rules to prevent McCarthy from being appointed as Conrunner again
[This post is my personal opinion, not that of any group of which I ever have been or currently am a member or officer. I am not part of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting team. I do not have any role in the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting other than as an ordinary attendee.]
StefanB on February 16, 2024 at 6:25 am said:
There is nothing explicit about this in the WSFS Constitution, but that does not mean that this is impossible, assuming that the Business Meeting is being conducted under the default parliamentary authority, which is the current edition of Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised. Note that under the WSFS Constitution, Worldcon committees may impose their own rules on the meeting as long as it doesn’t violate the WSFS Constitution or the Standing Rules.
In my opinion — and it’s only my opinion, as I’m not in a position of authority this year, so please don’t assume that every word I say is somehow Holy Writ — there are two types of MPC member, and there are thus different rules that apply:
Appointees of Worldcons and NASFiCs: The authority for Worldcons and NASFiCs to appoint members to the MPC comes directly from the constitution. Indeed, it is common for those appointees to be temporarily replaced with other appointees in order for there to be a representative from that convention present at a meeting. (Elected members cannot designate substitutes or proxies.) I therefore conclude that, in my opinion, the Business Meeting does not have the authority to remove a Worldcon/NASFiC appointee.
Elected Members: Members are elected by the Business Meeting for a three-year term. There are nine elected members, so in any given year, there are six members who are in the middle of their terms and three whose terms expire that year. If an elected member’s term expires at the current Worldcon, an attempt to remove that person would be moot, of course. The meeting can obviously elect someone else if they so desire, and that only needs a majority. So in my opinion, the Business Meeting could remove any of the six members who are in the middle of their terms by a two-thirds vote, that being what is needed for the motion to Rescind Something Previously Adopted. In my opinion, the Meeting would be voting to rescind a previous election that happened in one of the previous two years.
Nobody has ever attempted to recall an elected MPC member. There is no precedent for this. I do not know how the leadership of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting would rule on a motion to Rescind a previous election. I do not in any way claim to speak for the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting, and if anyone claims that I am doing so, I will be very angry about it. My opinions are my own, and despite what some people may think, I sometimes lose votes and have my opinions overturned when I am presiding over the meeting.
[Once again, this post is my personal opinion, not that of any group of which I ever have been or currently am a member or officer. I am not part of the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting team. I do not have any role in the 2024 WSFS Business Meeting other than as an ordinary attendee.]
It’s way messier than that. People voted on a list of finalists. We have good reason to doubt that list of finalists represented what people nominated but a bunch of people cast votes on it in good faith. Assuming the final vote was legit (which…given everything might not be true but there has nothing specific to say it wasn’t) then the people who won, genuinely won out of that set finalists.
So who should have won? There is no way of even making a guess.
Either way of the list of people who might rightly be blamed for this mess, the 2023 winners of the Hugos aren’t on it. All they did is take part in good faith and only learned about all this at the same time as everybody else* (and THEY had their backgrounds checked as well).
I’ve nothing but sympathy for the 2023 winners. They got caught up in something and what should have been a wonderful experience has turned into something awful and they have had their names and reputations attached to a scandal that they had no part in.
*[OK technically Chris Barkley found out a little bit before hand because he was the one doing the detective work but the point still stands]