(1) KUANG ON BABEL’S HUGO INELIGIBILITY. Rebecca F. Kuang decided that saying nothing isn’t an option. “Rebecca F. Kuang: ‘statement’” at Bluesky.
(2) ANOTHER WAY TO RUN A RAILROAD. Answering some writers’ renewed cry that the Hugo Awards be taken away from the Worldcon, Cheryl Morgan has drafted a proposal. It’s explained in “Decoupling the Hugos” at Cheryl’s Mewsings. Morgan’s draft can be downloaded at “Independent-Hugo-Administration.pdf”.
In amongst all of the discussion as to what to do about the Chengdu Hugo issue has been one suggestion that can actually be implemented, albeit over a number of years. That is decoupling Hugo Award Administration from the host Worldcon, so that the laws of the host country cannot interfere with the voting process….
… WSFS already has an organization called the Mark Protection Committee (MPC), which is responsible for maintaining the service marks that WSFS owns (in particular “Hugo Award” and the logo). I suggest renaming this the Independent Hugo Award Administration Committee (IHAAC) and giving it, rather than Worldcon, the job of administering the voting process. The IHAAC would recruit experienced administrators in much the same way that Worldcon does, but there would be a lot more consistency from year to year.
Worldcon would still have the option of staging a Hugo Award ceremony, and creating a distinctive trophy base, but equally it could decline to do that and pass the job back to the IHAAC.
Kevin [Standlee] and I cannot take this proposal forward ourselves. Kevin is a member of the MPC, and I effectively work for them in maintaining the WSFS websites, so we both have a vested interest. Our involvement could easily be portrayed as a power grab. But we are happy to provide help and advice to anyone who does want to take this forward at Glasgow….
(3) DON’T MAKE CHANGES THAT TAKE VOLUNTEERS FOR GRANTED. Abigail Nussbaum has a remarkably insightful post about the current crisis: “The 2023 Hugo Awards: Now With an Asterisk” at Asking the Wrong Questions.
… Even taking this most charitable view of events, however, there comes a point where honest mistakes corrupt a result too thoroughly to be distinguishable from malice, and that’s before we even get into those three still-unexplained ineligibility rulings. Unless Chengdu steps forward with more information, there is, unfortunately, no avoiding the conclusion that the 2023 Hugo results are irreparably tainted.
On the matter of those three disqualifications, the assumption that many people are making—and which, again, seems like the most plausible conclusion until and unless Chengdu starts answering questions—is that all three were struck off for political reasons. This might mean outright government interference, or someone on the Hugo team complying in advance, or an independent but politically-motivated actor among the award’s administrators striking off work they don’t approve of. This may also explain the silence from the Hugo team, who may fear reprisals towards themselves or their teammates. At this point it is possible that we will never know the whole story of what happened to the 2023 Hugo Awards. Which means the important question before us is how to move forward.
That question is complicated by the erratic, increasingly rickety superstructure of the Hugos and the Worldcon as a whole. Put simply, there is no Worldcon organization. Each convention is its own corporate entity charged with holding the convention and administering the Hugos, and bound only by the WSFS constitution. Said constitution is discussed and amended in the annual Business Meeting, a sclerotic, multi-day affair administered under rules that seem designed to baffle new participants and slow change to a creeping pace. What this means, among other things, is that there is no actual oversight over any individual Worldcon’s behavior, and no mechanism to claw back either the convention or the Hugos if it appears that they are being mismanaged.
It’s not at all surprising that the reaction of many people upon learning these facts, and especially in the present context, is to immediately leap to the conclusion that this entire system should be scrapped and replaced with a centralized authority. This, I think, is to ignore some very basic facts: the Worldcon is a fully volunteer-run organization. The free labor that goes into administering it, and the Hugos specifically, probably runs to tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars in value. The idea that one can simply erect a super-organization under those same conditions is hard to imagine….
(4) LECKIE ON THE HUGOS. If you happen to be on Bluesky, Ann Leckie has a thread with a lively discussion. It begins:
(5) MORE CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA RESPONSES. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Some more anonymized online reactions to social media posts about the Hugo nomination report, some of which are based on coverage of the continued Anglosphere reactions, such as John Scalzi’s blog post about Babel.
English translations are all via Google Translate unless otherwise indicated, with minor edits or commentary in square parentheses. Some of the smileys haven’t come through, so bear in mind that some of these should be read in a sarcastic tone.
怎么感觉雨果奖次次都有瓜
Why does it feel like the Hugo’s have a melon every time? [Note: “melon” is Chinese slang – maybe “drama” is a reasonable translation in this context? Also, this translation is via DeepL; Google Translate comes up with a less literal result, but which I think is incorrect]
2023这次应该是“中国雨果奖”吧。
This time in 2023 it should be the “China Hugo Award”. 
雨果奖到底怎么了
What happened to the Hugo Awards?
看到这新闻心里没有一丝波澜，甚至觉的这事发生在这里太正常辣，出现正面新闻才令人惊讶呢。外国人对真实的种花家还是了解太少
When I saw this news, I didn’t feel any emotion at all. I even thought it was too normal for this to happen here. It was surprising to see positive news. Foreigners still know too little about real flower growers [Note: “flower growers” = China]
太可惜了
What a pity
然而巴别塔还在国内出中译了，就很神奇 很迷惑
However, [Tower of] Babel has been translated into Chinese in China, which is amazing and confusing
到底为什么呀怎么感觉这么大的事情国内平台都没几个声？？
Why on earth do you feel that there are not many domestic platforms talking about such a big thing? ?
因为雨果奖怎么样并不算大事，国内的雨果奖获奖作品能给媒体带来多少收入才是大事
[replying to previous comment] Because it’s not a big deal how the Hugo Award is, but how much income the domestic Hugo Award-winning works can bring to the media is a big deal
真实了，我记得之前国内作者获得雨果奖的时候大小媒体都在采访
[A further reply] It’s real. I remember when a domestic author won the Hugo Award, all the media were interviewing him.
我推测并不是CN康的审查而是主办方自身某种私心（虽然我不知道具体是什么动机），要知道《巴别塔》本身有一种强烈的“早产的列宁主义”的意味，在这边不要太正确。当然，我坚决拥护斯卡尔齐老师对办会章程的建议！
I speculate that it is not CN Kang’s censorship but some selfish motives of the organizer (although I don’t know the specific motivation). You must know that “[Tower of] Babel” itself has a strong sense of “premature Leninism”. Don’t be too correct. Of course, I firmly support Mr. Scalzi’s suggestion on the rules of the conference! [I’m not sure what “CN康” is, Wikipedia says “CN” is “virgin”, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense in this context.]
????所以呢？在其他地方举办世界科幻大会没有按国外的审美标准就是存在疑问及不适合的？
????So what? Is it questionable and inappropriate to hold the World Science Fiction Convention elsewhere if it does not follow foreign aesthetic standards?
毕竟是有关国家信誉的大事，别只写获奖不写争议吧咱就说
After all, it is a major matter related to the credibility of the country. Don’t just write about the awards and not the controversies. Let’s just say [This comment cced in half-a-dozen news organizations, some of which are ones that I recognize from earlier coverage of the con, I think some of which was linked in prior Scrolls]
《巴别塔》批判殖民主义，还以英国为背景，咋不猜是英国通过某些手段干预了提名[smiley]
“[Tower of] Babel” criticizes colonialism and is set in the United Kingdom. Why don’t you guess that the United Kingdom interfered with the nomination through certain means [smiley]
去年看的巴别塔，前不久看的Yellowface，Rebecca F. Kuang就是很灵秀啊，23年雨果奖怎么搞的评委最清楚啦
I [read] [Tower of] Babel last year and Yellowface not long ago. Rebecca F. Kuang is so smart. The judges of the [2023] Hugo Awards know best
《巴别塔》明明是歌颂中国人民反殖民主义的努力的啊，被雨果奖错过太可惜了
“[Tower of] Babel” obviously praises the Chinese people’s anti-colonial efforts. It would be a pity to miss out on the Hugo Award.
这，别人也倒罢了，她不是参与过联名抵制成都科幻大会吗？现在觉得自己被除名还应该给个具体原因了？
[Re. Xiran Jay Zhao] This is just for others. Didn’t [they] participate in a joint boycott of the Chengdu Science Fiction Conference? Now you feel like you should [be given] a specific reason for being removed?
赵希然，写武则天开机甲的那个华裔女科幻作家。她说唐代是中国的荡妇时代。
Zhao Xiran, the Chinese science fiction writer who wrote about Wu Zetian’s mecha. [They] said that the Tang Dynasty was the era of sluts in China. [referring to this Tweet]
Kuang特别棒 熬夜读完了1/4的巴别塔
Kuang is awesome. I stayed up late and read 1/4 of Tower of Babel.
(6) MAP CANNON. Yesterday’s China roundup by Ersatz Culture included the term “map cannon”, for which made an approximate English translation. Thanks to Gareth Jelley for finding a Baidu Encylopedia article that explains it in detail.
The map cannon originally refers to a map attack type weapon in the “Super Robot Wars” series. It first appeared in the “Second Super Robot Wars” in the Magic Machine God’s Sebastian , and was later used to refer to some mass destruction weapons. weapons or magic. On the Internet, the extended meaning of “map cannon” is the act of verbally attacking a certain group. On the Internet, it often refers to geographical attackers , or the behavior of a few people is used to deny the behavior of a certain group.
Since in many anime works, the map cannon exists as a weapon with great power and large area of destruction, so in some forums (such as NGA), the map cannon is extended to large-scale indiscriminate deletion of posts, banning IDs, and punishing users. Behaviors such as this also often refer to some moderators who often delete and ban people on a large scale and indiscriminately.
It can also express prejudice against certain things. There is often a label that summarizes the whole based on the characteristics of the part. Prejudice against different groups of people will always exist. However, there are also some “facialization” who are willing to be accepted by others – if they think they are at the top of the discrimination chain. The rise of the Internet has redefined the standards of “us” and “them” for the first time.
(7) COMIC RELIEF KERFUFFLE. Doctor Who fandom blew up yesterday. The first one got almost 300K views. The second is one of the more entertaining replies.
(8) YOUR SF TAXONOMY. Horst Smokowski lists “All the Types of Science Fiction”: at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. There are fifty of them. The first three are:
1. Check this place out, it’s dope
2. Technology solves problems ???? (future good)
3. Technology creates problems ???? (future bad)
(9) EXTREME SUFFRAGE. Looking for more sff awards you can vote for? (Oh, you glutton for punishment!) Rocket Stack Rank has a roundup here: “SF/F Ballots For Stories From 2023”.
Here are links to ballots for various SF/F awards, 5 that are open to all, and 4 that are open to members of a convention or association. Highlighted awards are currently open for voting.
The magazine-specific awards come with a longlist link to all stories published by each magazine, with blurbs to help you remember the ones you’ve read and scores to guide further reading….
(10) FREE READ. Marie Brennan’s “Embers Burning in the Night” is a free-to-read story at Sunday Morning Transport, offered to encourage new subscriptions.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
Born January 22, 1970 — Alex Ross, 54. So Alex Ross, eh? A fantastic, in all senses of that word, comic book illustrator and writer whose first work with comic book writer Kurt Busiek, the four-issue The Marvels for, er, Marvel Comics would been a highlight of anyone else’s career.
Not Ross though. Another four-issue run, Kingdom Come, this time for DC, under their Elseworlds imprint, told of an aleternate DC universe that might have happened. One of my favorite DC stories. It was written by Mark Waid and him.
Yes, he can do pulp as he illustrated the John Layman written series, Red Sonja/Claw: the Unconquered Devil’s Hands, that was co-published with Dynamite Entertainment where Red Sonja and Claw, a cursed warrior I had never heard of before this, had a series of adventures that showed Red Sonja’s assets very well.
He’s just not interested in the costumed superheroes. Over at his website, you’ll find the prints he’s done for the Universal Monsters – Dracula, Wolf Man and so forth, they’re all there. The prints look fantastic bad they can be yours if your pocket change is deep.
Here’s my favorite piece of art by him.
(12) COMICS SECTION.
- Frazz is for editors.
- Last Kiss breaks the fourth wall.
- Annie mentions science fiction, and also might be a reference to this B.C. strip.
(13) THE SGT. MAJOR’S MARSCON REPORT. [Item by Dann.] Mike Burke is a retired US Marine Corps Sergeant Major. Mike operated under the nom de plume (or perhaps nom de guerre) of “America’s Sergeant Major” for several years. He has led Marines in peace and in war. Since his retirement, he has written fiction and nonfiction for the US Naval Institute. The USNI is a non-profit organization with the purpose of providing an “independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.”
Sgt. Maj. Burke has started writing on Substack as Spearman Burke and is a self-professed “noob” at the profession of writing.
He recently attended Marscon in Norfolk, VA and has a report from the con. He was able to meet Ben Yalow, David Weber, Kacey Ezell, and a few other notable authors. One of Kacey’s stories was what inspired Mike to pursue his next career as a genre author. He scored a contract to submit a short story for an anthology at the con.
(14) CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. AP News says “Reformed mobster who stole Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from ‘Oz’ wanted one last score”. Now they’re about to drop the big house on him.
The aging reformed mobster who has admitted stealing a pair of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore in “The Wizard of Oz” gave into the temptation of “one last score” after an old mob associate led him to believe the famous shoes must be adorned with real jewels to justify their $1 million insured value.
Terry Jon Martin’s defense attorney finally revealed the 76-year-old’s motive for the 2005 theft from the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, in a new memo filed ahead of his Jan. 29 sentencing in Duluth, Minnesota.
The FBI recovered the shoes in 2018 when someone else tried to claim an insurance reward on them, but Martin wasn’t charged with stealing them until last year….
(15) ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE UPDATE. Jim Nemeth of the Robert Bloch Official Website announced a major update.
At the (fantastic) suggestion and immense help of Mr. David J Schow (DJS) we now have a new Gallery page, showing just about every/all sides of our beloved Bob.
(16) THE REMNANT OF HUMANITY IS COMING HOME. Friends of Fred Lerner will be excited to hear that his book In Memoriam will be released by Fantastic Books And Gray Rabbit Publications on July 2.
David Bernstein is a 17-year-old member of the Remnant of Terra, the descendants of the 2,000 people who survived the Cataclysm that destroyed human life on Earth. For two centuries the Remnant has lived among the Wyneri, who rescued the few survivors and brought them to their world. Although the Wyneri are physically and psychologically very similar to Terrans, the two species interact only when they must. The Remnant earn their keep among their alien hosts, but otherwise remain apart, devoting themselves to preserving the cultural heritage of Terra.
David, however, is fascinated with the Wyneri and their culture, an interest shared by none of his contemporaries. Attending a Wyneri performance he meets a Wyneri girl his own age, and he and Harari strike up a taboo friendship.
While David learns about his Terran heritage, he feels very much alone in trying to also learn about the history of the Terran-Wyneri relationship. Violent Wyneri xenophobia drives David to intensify his studies, and to dig into the mysteries surrounding the Cataclysm, the rescue, and the ensuing two centuries of cover-ups. He begins to suspect a long-lived cabal that has spent the years working in secret, preparing for a return to Earth.
Harari’s murder crystallizes David’s need to explore the Terran-Wyneri history. Her posthumous message proving that the Cataclysm was caused by rogue Wyneri military personnel leads David to the Remnant’s leaders, who confirm it as genuine. Their conclusion? The time has come for Terrans to separate from the Wyneri. They enlist David’s help to persuade the Remnant to return to Earth, and to encourage the Wyneri to help them.
(17) RED PLANET WINGS. “Nasa plans to fly giant solar-powered Mars plane to look for water on Red Planet” reports The Independent.
Nasa has received its first set of funding to develop a giant airplane that could fly high in the planet’s atmosphere and look for signs of water on the Red Planet.
The solar-powered vehicle, called Mars Aerial and Ground Intelligent Explorer or Maggie, is expected to fly in the Martian atmosphere with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability similar to Nasa’s pioneering Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
With fully charged batteries, the Mars airplane could fly at an altitude of 1,000m for about 180km with its total range over a year on Mars expected to be over 16,000 km, the space agency said earlier this month.
Using the aircraft, Nasa hopes to conduct three studies on the Red Planet’s atmosphere and geophysical features, including the hunt for water, research on the origin of the planet’s weak magnetic field as well as tracing the elusive source of methane signals on Mars….
(18) HIDDEN HISTORY. Constellation comes to Apple TV+ on February 21.
“Constellation” stars Noomi Rapace as Jo — an astronaut who returns to Earth after a disaster in space — only to discover that key pieces of her life seem to be missing. The action-packed space adventure is an exploration of the dark edges of human psychology, and one woman’s desperate quest to expose the truth about the hidden history of space travel and recover all that she has lost.
(19) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Isaac Arthurs has just had his monthly sci-fi weekend and asks who would win: robot or alien?
We often worry that humanity might be attacked by Aliens or AI, but which is worse and which would win in a battle between them?
[Thanks to Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Andrew (not Werdna), Gareth Jelley, Dann, Rich Lynch, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jim Henley.]
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@Kevin Standlee
The fact that the existing process can be so difficult to accurately implement is, in my mind, and argument for getting professionals involved who can review the process, and possibly modify it so it isn’t so susceptible to these types of errors. They might suggest, for example, that the hosting convention host a web page with canonical titles of eligible works, as supplied by eligible creators.
@Kevin Standlee
“At the moment, Hugo Administration (not the ceremony) is all but a rounding error in most Worldcon budgets.”
Hugo Administration is the raison d’etre for the Worldcon. If Worldcon needs to spend more to get it right, then they need to spend more.
@Kevin Standlee
No, it isn’t. The root cause is a hidebound, stubbornly 20th century organization that has been fine with its old man shouting at clouds approach to something a lot of us love but cannot penetrate to let in any light and air.
Picking WSFS up and shaking it is impossible with the institutional and institutionalized gatekeeping that you are a part of. You can blame Chengdu if you like for this debacle, but not many people are going to agree. Instead, it’s the ridiculous structure that has zero accountability, resists change like its life depends on it, and throws up its hands and waits to water down all but the least far reaching proposed changes to fend off whatever the latest assault throws up.
Was an attempt at censorship inevitable in Chengdu? Of course. Did the concom have to go along with it? Was Dave McCarty required to be a dismissive ass? Is the stonewalling a Chengdu specific issue?
In case you’re wondering, the response to all of that is no.
Instead, see above about the structural lack of accountability. Nothing stops shenanigans except the goodwill of the participants, wherever they’re located. So, please, move on from your very unconvincing But China defense.
Last night Intellectual Property Lawyer Mike Dunford, who specialises in Fandom related disputes, hosted a livestream discussion with Trademark Attorney, and former Hugo Administrator, Will Frank. The focus of the discussion was not the Hugo Awards, but the Marks Protection Committee, and it’s current Chair.
You can watch a VOD of the stream which will be available for the next six days.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2041831211
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, the stream was not legal advice, I am not giving or transmitting legal advice.
The general conclusion was that it appears the MPC may have accidentally abandoned the Hugo Award mark through divorcing it from any ability to secure “Goodwill” of that mark.
Essentially, the only value a Trademark has under US law is the ability for people to look at the Trademark and say “Yes, this is a product or service that has a known quality I can expect enforced by the people who own this Trademark”. For instance, you go to McDonalds you know what you are expecting. If McDonalds instead allowed random shops of all kinds to call themselves a McDonalds, and McDonalds said “While we grant them a trademark licence, they are nothing to do with us, and we can’t enforce any standards on them”, then McDonalds would lose their trademark.
The current chair of the MPC has made multiple public statement that “While we grant individual Worldcons a trademark licence, they are nothing to do with us, and we can’t enforce any standards on them”
This may be construed as Trademark Abandonment.
(There was also some touching on how the way the WSFS pays no Taxes, yet has sums of money transferred across international borders, is cause for concern if those transfers ever get big enough for regulators to take notice…)
“Besides, right now a significant chunk of the administration cannot be reasonably outsources to some random accounting firm: the institutional knowledge involved in normalizing the nominations.”
‘Professionals couldn’t do as good a job as us plucky amateurs’ is not a very convincing argument.
Aaron Pound: Skepticism is definitely called for. When somebody’s nominating ballot has an entry that doesn’t match anything the Hugo Administrator ever heard of, but it does kinda resemble a title some other people have nominated, the Administrator may help the voter along by assuming that is what they meant. What third-party accountant couldn’t do that much?
To make it a rigorous process you’d have to contact the voter and check the guess with them. Never heard of that happening.
@Mike Glyer
“To make it a rigorous process you’d have to contact the voter and check the guess with them.”
Or, if the voter designates something not recognizable, you could do like political elections do, and disregard the vote.
Which isn’t the worst solution in the world.
@Mike Glyer
We did try that in ’84, with the final ballots. Most of those we contacted didn’t respond.
Thoughts:
1) The “You’re not holding me accountable, I’m holding me accountable.” line sums up the problem with the whole system.
2) The trademarks of Hugo and Worldcon are our best enforcement tools for much of what ails us.
3) I have always wondered why the use of the “Hugo Award Winner / Nominee” on a book cover doesn’t follow the Oscar model. Fine print specifically listing the category (Actor/Actress/Director/Best Boy. Winner or Nominee, etc and who the award is trade marked by). I can’t see any downside. And boy howdy are there upsides.
4) The WSFS needs to use the trademark to keep ConComs coloring within the lines.
The winning bid must agree (by whatever legal means is appropriate and binding) to the following;
Submission to the WSFS (well, a committee) progress reports of critical items at times throughout the life of the Con.
Failure to miss “x” number of reports results the trademark being yanked, and legal action to enforce the trademark.**
Also, it would be helpful if there are strings to initial disbursement of pass along funds. Although a convention that has a negative balance may not request assistance after the pulling of the trademark.***
Ya’ll are welcomed to argue what events would need to be reported. I wouldn’t want to deprive nitpicking fandom their joy.
** Yes, this means creation of a full time WSFS Committee. At the very least it will create a whole new set of problems we can all fight over.
*** This is probably not possible. But it doesn’t hurt to suggest it. Consider it a second gift to the nitpickers.
Vote normalization is something that happens in every election ever. That sort of scrutineering is completely normal. If it was really decided that Hugo nominations were too esoteric, it wouldn’t be hard to build in a fan-feedback step where they publish a raw list and let fandom crowd-source identifying duplicates.
As far as road-blocks go, any accounting or auditing firm would be mostly confused that their potential clients viewed it as a big deal.
Following some of the lawyers who have been disaster-touring this, apparently the completely unincorporated structure of the WSFS raises some significant doubt as to the functional ability to follow though on any legal enforcement. They not only don’t have a budget, they legally can’t have a budget. And any oversight or control over pass-along funds raises even more questions.
If the WSFS/MPC doesn’t already have a meeting booked with a specialist Corporate/IP lawyer, they need to. Apparently the only lawyer directly associated with the MPC doesn’t specialize in that
Two Hugo-ballot-related thoughts:
1) Explaining ranked-choice voting to a small number of people (the hypothetical professionals running or auditing the election) isn’t that difficult. I’d start by looking at elections for political office that work that way, such as Australia, Maine, and Minneapolis. The E Pluribus Hugo system for the nominations would be more complicated to audit, because this is the stage that needs normalization and because it’s less intuitive than either ranked choice or “put an x next to your favorite.” but “more compliated” doesn’t mean impossible, it means it would take longer and thus cost more if people are being paid to do it.
2) Normalization doesn’t happen in all or even most elections. Typically, voters are using ballots with names of candidates, and you either fill in an oval for one candidate, or write numbers for ranked choice voting, or an X next to one name. Then the ballot counting is something like “we have 178 votes for Red, 130 for Green, 12 for Blue, and 18 write-ins.” You only need to figure out whether “John Smith,” “Johnny Smith” and “Jom Sith” are the same person if the total of those votes would change the result, which is uncommon.
Normalization is still a good idea, but it’s much less urgent than if everyone had to write in a candidate’s name. In a lot of places, a candidate gets on the ballot by paying a filing fee (and we hope they can spell their own name), handing in petitions signed by registered voters, or both. If you hand me a petition and say “please sign to nominate Ayanna Pressley,” it doesn’t matter whether I can spell her name, as long as I can spell mine.
Sigh.
Random thoughts…
1) the tax issue is a red-herring which I think some of the lawyers on Bluesky walked back on when they realized that a seated Worldcon doesn’t just throw the money over a wall and walk away, it is accounted for and reported to the correct authorities until it’s gone, or until debts are cleared
2) To speak to Kevin’s point – unless we are prepared to handle the increased costs of 3rd party administration – and the problems Jay and others point out – then we really are not valuing the awards the way the wider world values them which leads to serious problems moving forward about whether or not we really care for the mark etc…
3) A significant part of the problem in my mind is, I think, a tendency of Worldcon fans, i.e., those of us who like the convention, to think of it as a convention that has an awards ceremony – whereas, in reality, it is now an Award ceremony which has a convention rather haphazardly bolted on to the side
4) the growing horror I felt reading some of the legal comments about Trademarks and Liability on Bluesky has left me feeling slightly concerned about running any worldcon at all in the current situation should somebody take issue with the process by which the Hugo Awards were run and who ran them – there wasn’t a clear answer about liability protections in that scenario, and that is terrifying – you do not want to lose your liability protection
5) the business meeting is now too important to have tied by itself to the worldcon and it needs to be able to meet and convene virtually when necessary – something ironically one of the protagonists in this drama made deliberately harder to get done in Chengdu and was, until recently, being their usual tactful self about the concept on Facebook
I think there are several clear things that have to be done, and I honestly don’t know if they’re enough at this stage.
a) the WSFS has to be incorporated into a formal entity for it and the protection of worldcons who license the Hugo Awards
b) we need some serious legal insight into that structure and the constitution thereof and what we need to do to operate it
c) the WSFS needs to have its own mechanisms to raise and manage money to protect the Hugo Awards
d) an external body, perhaps with a knowledgeable interface manager, needs to run the count and the operation of the Awards
There are some proposals starting to emerge to do this that have to be dealt with in Glasgow and then ratified with whatever tidying up is needed in Seattle to pass to LA; otherwise, I think we’re done this decade.
Random titles that occurred to me in conversation tonight:
“A Fist Full of Typos”
“For a Few Spell-Checks More”
Ranked (or Alternative) Voting explained:
Cheryl Morgan’s latest post comes to a very depressing conclusion:
@Lis Riba
She’s just figuring that out? Enforcement is, AFAIK, always at the level of the convention.
(Most years this works fine. This year, no. It’s not like it happens every year, or even every four or five.)
(2) Another way to run a railroad.
Decoupling Hugo Award Administration from the host Worldcon, so that the laws of the host country cannot interfere with the voting process….
This is an interesting proposal, especially as it is relevant with regards to other Worldcon issues. It has recently been pointed out to me by someone with experience in WSFS governance that WSFS has no real power to stop a Worldcon from doing its own thing.
For example, Worldcons should according to the constitution and rules send copies of publications to supporting members and that, as was clarified at the Helsinki business meeting there should be physical paper copies if supporters wish it.
However, it has come to my attention (and not just mine) that Glasgow 2024 will only provide PDFs to non-attending supporters and, if that was bad enough, non-attending Attending registrants and Glasgow’s super-friends (who at the bid, pre-site selection stage were offered a paper supplement which subsequently they rolled back on).
It would seem that it is not just with Hugo issues that the Worldcon is decoupling from the wishes of Worldcon fans as expressed at WSFS business meetings.
As if this were not enough, and it should be, since then we have had CoVID. In what is effectively (all but name) Glasgow’s CoVID policy putative attenders should stay away if they test positive before travel to Glasgow. Fair enough, but then such souls who will have already forked out membership (and travel and accommodation) will get nothing. It would be a nice gesture in these post-CoVID times if they got the full contents of their registration package. But, hey, let’s not bother with nice gestures let alone the will of fans expressed at business meetings.
Two of us were sufficiently concerned that it was the subject of this season’s SF² Concatenation’s editorial that Worldcons are becoming unfannish.
Some might argue that this is too trivial a point. To them I’d venture that if you cannot get the small things right, then what chance bigger matters?
https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-1-22-24-encounter-at-fargo/
(3) Each convention is its own corporate entity charged with holding the convention and administering the Hugos, and bound only by the WSFS constitution.
Sadly not even that, Glasgow’s publication policy is not “bound” by the WSFS constitution and the clarified at the Helsinki business meeting there should be physical paper copies of the souvenir booklet. if supporters wish it.
This failing Glasgow is even applying to those no shows with attending memberships.
As I pointed out in a comment above, as if this were not enough, and it should be, since then we have had CoVID. In what is effectively (all but name) Glasgow’s CoVID policy putative attenders should stay away if they test positive before travel to Glasgow. Fair enough, but then such souls who will have already forked out membership (and travel and accommodation) will get nothing. It would be a nice gesture in these post-CoVID times if they got the full contents of their registration package. But, hey, let’s not bother with nice gestures let alone the will of fans expressed at business meetings.
There is no actual oversight over any individual Worldcon’s behaviour, and no mechanism to claw back either the convention or the Hugos if it appears that they are being mismanaged.
So true.
More on this here
http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~24.html#editorial
Going to seperate this comment into two branches:
1) I don’t think bsky commenters walked back the tax issues, so much as said “The current size of the transfers is too small for enforcement to bother taking notice of them, at the moment.”
2) My current view is that the wording “1.7.1: There shall be a Mark Protection Committee of WSFS, which shall be responsible for registration and protection of the marks used by or under the authority of WSFS.” delegates all powers of protection of the marks to the marks committee. This includes protection of the “goodwill”. This means that Marks Committee is entitled to enforce terms on any individual Worldcon and revoke any individual Worldcon for cause, otherwise they can’t enforce the Trademark at all. So there’s no reason what so ever for the claims that the MPC can’t do something, they clearly can, they choose not to.
@Bill says
Who do you think is going to create a canonical list of all novels, novellas, novelettes, short stories, movies, TV shows, related works (which could be anything), editors and etc for all the other categories for every country on earth? All of which could be eligible for the Hugos if published/created in a single year. Who would have put “Jeannette Ng’s Hugo Acceptance Speech” on such a list?
It’s a ridiculous proposal on its face. And if you only create a subset of “likely to be nominated” works, then you are biasing the results.
In 2020 “This Is How You Lose the Time War” by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone received 469 nominations. There were IIRC, somewhere between 150 and 200 different ways people submitted that work and those authors on their ballots. That was the most extreme example, but there is LOTS of ambiguity that people outside the community would not be well equipped to manage. Canonicalization can take hundreds of hours. There may be a role for auditors in the process, but you absolutely do no want to pay standard labor rates for anyone to do this work.
Re taxes – many/most non-US Worldcons have a legal presence in the US, because they bring in a lot of their income in the US and have need to spend it in the US. So pass-along funds from a US Worldcon to a non-US ones usually pass from 501c3 to 501c3 without ever leaving the country.
Tammy Coxen: Assuming for the sake of discussion there was going to be a canonical list of Hugo-eligible work, it wouldn’t have to be the herculean labor you fear. The BSFA and CSFFA already create award eligibility lists by crowdsourcing them. The Hugos could ask WSFS members who they want considered, and vet that smaller population of items for a longlist from which finalists are voted.
And there are already a large number of writers who compile and announce their award eligibility lists every year. They’d only need to submit the same info to the Hugo longlist creator. Or get a helpful WSFS member to do it.
@Tammy Coxen
“Who do you think is going to create a canonical list . . . ”
My off-the-cuff proposal says who — the hosting convention, with input from the creators. If this had been done in the case you mention, the convention could have prepared in late 2019 the web page for release in January; El-Mohtar and Gladstone could have advised the convention at the end of the year that “our novella is best referred to as ‘This is How You Lose the Time War’, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone”; and the convention would have loaded it into the web page under the category “Novella” with that title. The convention would publicize the list, asking nominators and voters to refer to works with the canonical listed names. It would all be advisory only. And yes, it is incrementally more work for the hosting convention, but it would also reduce the number of misnamed nominations and votes, thus reducing the work of canonicalization. I think, on net, it would reduce total work. But I could be wrong.
“. . . you are biasing the results.” That remains to be seen. But if Hugo administrators have to make many decisions about cleaning up titles and such, and they get some wrong, then their biases are present in the existing system. At least, with a Canonical Title Web Page, the biases are public and can be corrected on the fly by adding other works as submitted by creators who care enough to participate. The Oscars and many other big awards deal with “For Your Consideration” campaigns, which almost certainly bring biases, but the integrity of the awards doesn’t seem to be affected.
I’ve never been involved in counting Hugo votes, so I don’t know how big of a problem it is. I get the impression that it is not an existential threat to the long-term stability of the awards, like some of the current conversation may be about, but is more of a “pain in the ass”-level problem for a few people who do the work of counting and tabulating. This should inform how much work goes into fixing it. It does seem that, given the example you used, even when 30 – 40% of the votes were expressed in non-canonical terms, the work still won.
(and after hitting “send”, I see that Mike has addressed the issue with real knowledge instead of my speculation. I appreciate it, Mike.)
If all you are doing is creating a reference list for people, most people aren’t going to use it, so you are still going to get “This is how we win the time war,” “this is how we lose the time war,” “Lose the Time War” and any number of other variations. The only way to mandate a particular spelling would be to create a drop-down list of works, and that would absolutely bias voters and not be a comprehensive list of everything people might want to nominate. Some of the categories have very long tails.
We put a lot of effort into canonicalization, and have specialized tools to do so, to make sure that all of those works get counted the same way – that’s why it’s time consuming. The number of times that there has been a ballot-influencing mistake in canonicalization by the admin can be counted on one hand I think – there’s the one Kevin mentioned, and then another one in more recent years. But sometimes it requires real effort and content knowledge to ensure, which is why I say it’s not realistic to outsource it to someone without content knowledge.
2023 will have been an exceptionally difficult year for canonicalization because of nominations for the same work potentially coming in different languages.
Every time I’ve been involved in the Hugo Awards process we have been very meticulous about not doing anything that might show preference to any particular works. Publishing a necessarily incomplete list would definitely do that. And the time required to create and maintain such a list using the methods you and Mike suggest would probably make up for any time saved in canonicalization.
Now, AI tools could probably help a lot with canonicalization, but I don’t think fandom’s ready for that yet!
What this argument seems really to be about is whether non-fan professionals could figure out that an assortment of not-quite-the same ballot entries should be counted toward the same nominee. Of course they could.
I do not find the argument that “a firm of professional auditors can’t possibly understand how to normalize votes; only we, the slans- er, I mean we, the fans, can possibly understand the complexities of how to spell the same thing four or five different ways!” particularly convincing.
Jinx! You owe me a soda!
Mine are not especially good examples. I wish I could remember the more recent one that happened, where it was more complex, like the same worked published under two different names in two different places, so that it really did require some insider knowledge to figure it out, which is how it got missed.
In any case, even when it’s not that difficult – which it often isn’t, I quite enjoy canonicalizing, actually – it is time consuming, which is my bigger point. You don’t want to pay an auditing firm to do hours of what is essentially grunt work. But (as I’ve also said already) there may well be value in having there be some kind of auditing role, without having to pay them to do the whole thing.
Best Series may be a good source of examples where it’s not obvious without some knowledge of the works in question whether two names correspond to the same series.
Take the 2022 ballot as an example. It included The World of the White Rat, while https://file770.com/best-series-hugo-eligible-series-from-2021/ listed the same series under a very different name, “Anuket City (Clocktaur Wars/Swordheart/Saint of Steel)”. The 2022 longlist also included a separate entry for The Saint of Steel – because while different names for the same series should be combined, nominations for subset series don’t get combined with those for the larger series, and The Saint of Steel is a proper subset of The World of the White Rat.
When the nominating ballot asks for an example of a work from the series first published in the relevant year, that might help combine different names for the same series (sometimes the nominating ballot asks for that, but from memory 2023 didn’t) – though it won’t by itself say whether the two series names are the same series or just overlapping / subset series, and a series can have multiple qualifying works published in the same year.
Tammy – We are getting lost in the weeds here. My original point was that bringing in professionals offers the possibility of bringing in professional practices. I used as an off-the-cuff example the process of canonicalization. You say that non-SF people can’t do this, and it’s fun anyway — so maybe an existing process that has demonstrably had problems should be kept. Fine.
But there are other processes that pros can bring best practices to. What are they? I dunno. That’s the issue. A small, insular group with no background in auditing, etc. shouldn’t be expected to automatically know the best way to conduct the Hugo election. “But they’ve been doing it for 70 years!” someone says. Maybe they’ve been doing it wrong for 70 years.
If we could identify them and fix all of the issues here, then obviously it doesn’t make sense to pay someone else to do it. But I suggest that recent events show that the existing community is not good at identifying and fixing problems before the fact.
This notion that the way we have always done things is not only the best way it’s the only way so we need to do things the way we’ve always done them is the go-to defense of organizations full of gatekeeping and preciosity.
Is it really impossible to imagine a three step process of professionals tabulating nominations, subject experts looking at an alphabetical list and fixing the errors, and then sending everything back to the professionals?
while it may be too far in the weeds for this discussion, the wrongful disqualification example that led me to look up the WSFS constitution (in one of these threads) was Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut of Mars” (ref)
Assuming the next Business Meeting will have some proposed amendments related to disqualifications, I’d like to see a rule that if a person or work has enough votes to make the final ballots, Hugo admins should contact them before disqualifying outright, in case there are mitigating factors the committee should know before deciding.
@Lis Riba: Thank you – I was trying to remember that example.
Don’t call it a comeback!
(Thank you, Mike!(
(3) Each convention is its own corporate entity charged with holding the convention and administering the Hugos, and bound only by the WSFS constitution.
Sadly not even that, Glasgow’s publication policy is not “bound” by the WSFS constitution and the clarified at the Helsinki business meeting there should be physical paper copies of the souvenir booklet. if supporters wish it.
This failing Glasgow is even applying to those no shows with attending memberships.
As I pointed out in a comment elsewhere on File770, as if this were not enough, and it should be, since then we have had CoVID. In what is effectively (all but name) Glasgow’s CoVID policy putative attenders should stay away if they test positive before travel to Glasgow. Fair enough, but then such souls who will have already forked out membership (and travel and accommodation) will get nothing. It would be a nice gesture in these post-CoVID times if they got the full contents of their registration package. But, hey, let’s not bother with nice gestures let alone the will of fans expressed at business meetings.
There is no actual oversight over any individual Worldcon’s behaviour, and no mechanism to claw back either the convention or the Hugos if it appears that they are being mismanaged.
So true.
More on this here
http://www.concatenation.org/news/news1~24.html#editorial
Ok the Google Translate of the comments in 5) are absolutely horrendous. I’m a diaspora Chinese person who is moderately fluent and I’m gonna do my best to translate and localize these posts. I’m only sometimes on Chinese social media so it’s also possible that I won’t know some of the slang, but the machine translation is so poor and confusing that anything I write will probably be more understandable. More fluent people, please chime in if I make any errors!
“?Why does it feel like the Hugos have drama every single time? (Original translation was pretty good on this).”
“The 2023 [Hugos] should be called “China’s Hugo Award.” ?”
“What exactly is going on with the Hugos?”
“Seeing this news didn’t even perturb/surprise me at all; this kind of thing is way too common/normal here. It’s to the point that seeing the news actually reflecting reality is what truly surprises people. People from outside the country still know way too little about the reality of living in China.” [The MTL of this one was especially egregious.]
“It’s such a pity.” [No idea what the context for this is.]
“Evidently, the Chinese translation of Babel came out in China; truly miraculous and puzzling.?” (Sarcasm.)
“Why exactly did this happen? Why does it feel like domestic platforms are barely making any noise about such a huge thing??”
[I will take for granted that this comment was a reply to the previous one since I did not see the original post] “That’s because the Hugo awards aren’t actually a big deal. It’s only how much income the news media can get by covering Chinese Hugo-winning works that is the big deal.?”
(In case my translation isn’t clear, the commenter is saying that the media only cares about making money off Hugo-coverage, not about the awards themselves.)
[A further reply] “That’s so true. I still remember how much coverage there was from media outlets big and small the last time a [mainland] Chinese work won a Hugo.”
“I suspect that this isn’t actually censorship by China, but rather the event organizers’ doing it [not including Babel] for some selfish reasons of their own (although I don’t know what their true motives are). It should be said that Babel has a kind of “early Lenninist” feel which isn’t very permitted/tolerated over here [in mainland China]. Of course, I firmly support Mr. Scalzi’s suggestions regarding the convention management’s rules/bylaws!”
[CN is China.]
“????So what? Is it so unacceptable to question why the World Sci-fi Convention is being held to difference standards when it’s held in places other than China?” [I’m a bit unsure of this translation, so someone please correct me if I’m wrong.]
“All in all, this is a big deal related to the country’s reputation; don’t just write about the award winners without writing about the controversies, just sayin’.”
“Babel criticizes colonialism and is set in England, so why don’t we also speculate on how England meddled with the nominations[smiley]”
?????????????Yellowface?Rebecca F. Kuang???????23???????????????
“I read Babel last year and recently read Yellowface. Rebecca F. Kuang[‘s writing] is very clever and elegant. The committee judges are the ones who truly understand what happened with the 2023 Hugos.”
“Babel clearly extols the Chinese people’s anti-colonial efforts. It’s such a pity that it was passed over by the Hugos.”
[Re. Xiran Jay Zhao] “Other people already debunked this. Didn’t [they] participate in a joint boycott of the Chengdu Sci-Fi conference? And now they still want to be given a concrete reason for why they were cut from the list?”
“Zhao Xiran, the Chinese diaspora sci-fi writer who wrote about Wu Zetian piloting a mecha. [They] said that the Tang dynasty was China’s slutty dynasty.”
“Kuang is awesome/great. I stayed up all night reading through 1/4 of Babel.”
Panda: The comments (unlike the posts themselves) do not support Chinese characters. (I think the reason is known, but I’ve had so many other battles with customer service I forgot about this problem.)
Just the same, I think people can match up your translations with the original text. And besides, for those of us who don’t read Chinese, we’re only reading the translations anyway, so matching up isn’t an issue for us.
You can use Unicode characters in comments as long as you enter them as HTML entities. Unless you have mechanical aid, though, that is incredibly painful.
Patrick Morris Miller: If you would be willing to post a comment including some Unicode / HTML Chinese characters, then we can go from there.
It would be silly of me to go first and recap what workarounds we’ve tried unsuccessfully in the past if you can actually do it.
I copied a bit of text from above and pasted it into this HTML entity encoder/decoder. That produced some text that looks like this
&\#x600E;&\#x4E48;&\#x611F;&\#x89C9;&\#x96E8;&\#x679C;&\#x5956;&\#x6B21;&\#x6B21;&\#x90FD;&\#x6709;&\#x74DC;When I copy that and paste it into the File 770 input box it displays like this
怎么感觉雨果奖次次都有瓜
I have no idea if this is correct and had to install some fonts on my Linux desktop before any of this looked right in any browser; on my iPad they’ve always looked like, well, Chinese. And as we have discovered before, entities only seem to work reliably in the comments, not on the main pages.