The Chengdu Worldcon’s “Hugo X Academy”

A January 3 entry on the Chengdu Worldcon’s Chinese-language website describes plans to educate Chengdu Worldcon members about participating in the Hugo Awards voting process. The (computer-translated) headline reads: “World Science Fiction Convention update: The main venue is taking shape, and Hugo Award nominations are about to open – the 81st World Science Fiction Convention in 2023”.

…This is the first time that the World Science Fiction Convention has set foot on Chinese soil, considering that many Chinese fantasy fans are not familiar with the membership “gameplay”, the conference will specially launch the “Hugo X Academy” series of original interview programs to explain the nomination rules, popularize the voting process, and promote the rights and interests of members. In addition, science fiction celebrities, well-known bloggers and artists, directors, actors, etc. will be invited to share excellent examples….

Chinese science fiction in translation has made the ballot several times at Worldcons in other countries over the past few years. It’s reasonable to expect it to do very well in its original language in its home country. However, history shows that a push to educate prospective Hugo voters is a wise investment.

It will be remembered that nearly 900 Japanese members of Nippon 2007 were eligible to nominate works for the Hugos: more than enough to shape the ballot to their liking. But in 2007 not one single work written in Japanese, in translation from Japanese, published in Japan, or by a Japanese creator, made the ballot. And that despite in most fiction categories only a trivial number of votes being needed to become a finalist that year. (The tail-end Best Short Story finalist got there with 16 votes).

The 2007 Hugo nomination results were so contrary to what people hoped for from a Japanese Worldcon, and so contradicted their experience of non-U.S. Worldcons (see, for example, how the 2005 Hugo ballot was dominated by U.K. writers), to this day no one has been able to explain it, except to speculate about why Japanese members might have excluded themselves.

Therefore, the Chengdu Worldcon’s efforts to familiarize members with the award and their right to vote for it will help build a good foundation for the event.

35 thoughts on “The Chengdu Worldcon’s “Hugo X Academy”

  1. Pingback: AMAZING NEWS FROM FANDOM: January 15, 2023 - Amazing Stories

  2. I should be a supporting member because of site selection voting, but I have not received any emails or communication from Chengdu. Has anyone here gotten anything from them? Shouldn’t nominations be opening soon? I’ve seen no Progress Reports or even a “Hi, want to upgrade your membership?” email….

  3. Yeah. They claim not to have any record of my voting in site selection.. So I’ve got to go dig through my records and hope I still have the paper slip. At least they finally responded to my three months of emailing them.

  4. Can’t join because their credit card app isn’t working and I have no idea what Wechat and Alipay are and I have no plan to use either.

  5. I checked and I am a member so my voting thing went in OK but I also have never received any notices from the Chengdu convention.

    I guess if a bunch of works that have not been translated into English (I would be willing to struggle in German) get nominated then so be it. I enjoy Chinese movies and hope that if any are nominated that the subtitled versions are available on a streaming service.

  6. Okay, if Chengdu Worldcon is so anxious for Chinese fans to participate in the Hugo nominating process, why are they selling attendence tickets without WSFS membership benefits? Do they understand that nominating and voting for the Hugos is a WSFS privilege?

  7. Adrienne Foster: The Chengdu Worldcon already has a couple of thousand WSFS members from China — the ones who voted for them in site selection. They already have a large base they can appeal to as potential Hugo voters.

    However, after years and years of hearing business meeting regulars emphasize that people are Worldcon members, the rules have been modified to make it easy to sell admission tickets without membership privileges and without having to apply the price points required for what are now called WSFS memberships. Oh brave new Worldcon.

  8. I’d like to be able to purchase a supporting membership and nominate and vote for the Hugos. Been doing it for years. At the moment I don’t see any simple or acceptable way to do this. I’m hoping it’ll become available before things become too much more advanced. I’m disappointed and a little surprised that things are where they are, but I hope that organisers will be able to get back in track to give everyone a good WorldCon experience.

  9. Mike Glyer

    The Chengdu Worldcon already has a couple of thousand WSFS members from China — the ones who voted for them in site selection. They already have a large base they can appeal to as potential Hugo voters.

    However, after years and years of hearing business meeting regulars emphasize that people are Worldcon members, the rules have been modified to make it easy to sell admission tickets without membership privileges and without having to apply the price points required for what are now called WSFS memberships. Oh brave new Worldcon.

    As I understand it, the voting block from China was suspect. The people counting those votes said few of them had a snail mail address and many were coming from the same e-mail address. So, do they all have voting privileges?

    This is the type of thing that happens when people don’t understand the community they’re inserting themselves. Whatever complaints there were about Nippon 2007, I believe they had a better grasp on things.

  10. As I understand it, the voting block from China was suspect. The people counting those votes said few of them had a snail mail address and many were coming from the same e-mail address. So, do they all have voting privileges?

    Of course they all have voting privileges. In the first place, none of those votes were disqualified, although an attempt to do so was encouraged by passage of a resolution by the DisCon III business meeting. In the second place, all the ones associated with site selection ballots were counted. (Some hundreds of tokens were also purchased for which no related vote was cast.) In the third place, the Chengdu Worldcon announced that all site selection voters as well as the non-voting token buyers are all deemed attending WSFS members. And in the fourth place, why would the Chengdu Worldcon committee — which gets to make that call — disallow its own supporters from exercising their membership rights?

  11. I’m glad I read this post; thanks, @Mike Glyer, for the information!

    I tried the orange Login button on the English language home page. I got a token via e-mail and signed in. It was a bit confusing at first, putting me on the Purchase History tab, which said I had none. 😉 But the Worldcon Rights tab listed everyting I expected. Whew!

    (I don’t see voting information there or on the English language Hugo Awards page yet, but presumably that’ll show up when voting opens.)

    @cathy: Good luck getting that resolved! ;-(

  12. I’ve checked to see if there’s a membership associated with my email address, and there is, but I see no way to verify (or add) my name, address, etc. to my record. Anyone know how to do this?

  13. @Kendall, thanks for the links; using them I’ve confirmed that my site selection a few years ago did indeed get me a membership. (A full attending membership, apparently. Huh.)

    I’m still concerned at the lack of communication, but I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

  14. I, too, have been waiting and wondering whether email communication will be forthcoming from Chengdu. I voted in site selection so I definitely have membership and plan to vote in the Hugos this year (assuming any nominees are in a language I can read), but it’s been crickets so far. Typically we’d be right around the corner from nominations season.

  15. After three weeks of trying I was finally able to log into the Chengdu website and confirm that I indeed have a membership due to voting in site selection in 2021. However, I haven’t had any communications by e-mail from Chengdu yet and my polite e-mails to them were like screaming into a black hole.

    That said, I’m happy that they are planning to educate their Chinese members about how Hugo nominations and voting works, because it is something of a learning curve and while western first-time Hugo voters usually know someone who can explain to them how it works, many of the Chinese members probably don’t know.

    I also don’t mind if Chinese works, whether available in translation or not, make the ballot, because in fact I have been expecting that. However, if a work is not available in either German or English, I will leave it off my ballot, because I have no way of evaluating it.

  16. @Bob Roehm: I don’t see any place for viewing/updating contact information either.

    @Cassy B.: Glad to help!

    @Cora Buhlert: I’ll also leave off works I can’t understand (language barrier) or find. I generally do this anyway if I don’t have time for, have zero/negative interest in, or simply can’t get something (e.g., some or many Dramatic Presentations!). So this seems fair.

  17. I’ve tried to pay, but I get, quote: “error occurred while create order to payment system” when I submit my credit card information. It seems like we need to transfer fees, but I don’t know who I am supposed to transfer money to or where.

    Has anyone managed to resolve this? I’m baffled.

    Also, if we had a Chicon membership, that gives us nominating privileges, correct? If so, I have a bit more time to figure out how to register.

  18. Exactly what happened to me. I tried emailing someone supposedly in charge of membership but no one replied.

  19. I checked and I have full membership and voting privileges, apparently from my site selection vote at DisCon. So, that’s good for me, but clearly there’s still an infrastructure to be worked out.

  20. The people counting those votes said … many were coming from the same e-mail address.

    Standlee said many of them were from runs of identical email addresses longer than the size of a family unit.

    There are obvious reasons this could be organic.

    For example, it was reported (on File770 by a reader watching Chinese language forums and the Chengdu livestream) that students were pooling their resources. Several would contribute whatever they could afford so that one voted in site selection. There are thousands of universities in China, dozens in Chengdu.

    Discon took only Visa or Mastercard, which most Chinese, but particularly students, have no access to. They’d have to transfer funds to someone who did have those cards in order to pay. (Discon itself announced they had encouraged a “workaround” for the Chinese payment problem, though they didn’t specify that this was it.)

    Kevin knows the actual numbers. If a cabal of three tried to steal the vote with 200 fake registrations each, Kevin would have told us.

    That those paying for multiple memberships could simply have created fake emails, but saw no reason to, itself argues against Kevin’s fear-mongering.

    By the way, put it on the other foot. Say ten Filers, or local fans in your area, want voting memberships, and the international card system isn’t working by January 31. Wouldn’t you be tempted to paypal to one fan who sends the $500 by a single wire transfer? You’d defray your US bank’s exorbitant transfer fee.

  21. It seems like we need to transfer fees, but I don’t know who I am supposed to transfer money to or where.

    The detailed transfer instructions appear after you fill out the registation page.

  22. I suspect there won’t be time to arrange “official” translations for anywhere near everything.

    However, while I don’t know how the Chinese authors or publishers will feel about them, an explosion of fan translations into English and other languages (or into Chinese) is going to be inevitable.

    (I just checked in with ChatGPT and it was ready to do the heavy lifting, but recommended having an editor check its work carefully.)

    Again, not an endorsement. It’s here whether we are ready or not.

  23. The detailed transfer instructions appear after you fill out the registation page.

    I did. They didn’t.

    But it sounds like you got them, so could you please post them in the open so we can all use them?

  24. I don’t know if I can post a screenshot in a comment here but log in, add a package to your shopping cart, then go through the payment steps. Or if you did that already, look under Purchase History then see if you can click through to the bank info (a Chengdu bank branch with account and SWIFT numbers and instructions what to do). Screenshot or copy it – after you click OK the window disappears.

    When I wrote them they answered very quickly and said to use this email for questions:

    [email protected]

    They also said if you’re not in a rush, wait to see if they can fix the credit card problem.

    Chinese New Year starts in a few days, so I imagine their staff might take 7-10 days off.

  25. Cassy B. on January 16, 2023 at 5:35 am said:

    @Kendall, thanks for the links; using them I’ve confirmed that my site selection a few years ago did indeed get me a membership. (A full attending membership, apparently. Huh.)

    Chengdu isn’t charging what is now called an “attending supplement.” Everyone who voted got a WSFS membership, and anyone with a WSFS membership has attendance rights. Or to put it another way, the attending supplement for the 2023 Worldcon is $0.

  26. I suspect there won’t be time to arrange “official” translations for anywhere near everything.

    However, while I don’t know how the Chinese authors or publishers will feel about them, an explosion of fan translations into English and other languages (or into Chinese) is going to be inevitable.

    Unless the whole ballot is made of up these kinds of translations, we’d then be in a position to compare professional and fully edited works with rushed, probably unedited translations by translators of unknown credentials or experience. It still wouldn’t feel like a level playing field to assess award-worthiness, so I’m likely to still leave such works off my ballot. (I might still try reading them, and I’m sure whatever gets nominated will get an official translation at some point in the near future, if not in time for voting)

  27. @Brian Z
    I wish a machine translation on no Hugo finalist, because machine translations are often bad and error-riddled. Yes, the results are readable and understandable now, which is a step up, but we’re talking about Hugo finalists there and those can be judged about as well from a machine translation as from a synopsis or review, i.e. not at all.

    Fan translations are another thing and even if they’re not professional (and not legal either), there at least was a human being with enthusiasm for the work involved. However, translating takes time and while short stories might be doable, I don’t see fan translations of novels let alone series happening, unless the work in question has very enthusiastic fans and multiple fans split a book among them, which carries it own share of issues.

  28. Although a fair amount of Chinese SF seems to be very much of the Clarke/Asimov school where if the style doesn’t come through very effectively in translation… it won’t matter much.

    A pity since I’ve noticed AI still can’t joke or pun to save its life but is getting surprisingly good at “in the style of”. Try asking ChatGPT to give its opinion on something in the style of Harlan Ellison.

  29. I’ve been wondering if the Chengdu Worldcon problems might be related to last summer’s heat wave, which hit Sichuan very hard. There were a few reports in July of heat-related deaths, but after that … nothing, though the heat & drought continued until the end of August.

    So, how many deaths weren’t reported? Probably not order-of-magnitude 1 million, that would have been too hard to suppress … probably. 100,000? I think 10,000 would be a lowball guess–that’s fewer than in France in the heatwave of 2003.

    Aside from deaths, there’s a real question of whether the con can be held if last year’s weather recurs, given how much it disrupted power, travel, etc.

  30. Don’t know, but it could be part of the reason they just rescheduled the whole con to late October.

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