I have now been appointed Hugo Administrator for Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for our Futures, double-hatted with the role of Division Head for WSFS. (If the website hasn’t already been updated, it will be soon.) This is my comment on recent events, and my own commitment to future action.
I was not involved with organising the Chengdu Worldcon in any way, though it was a close call. Shortly before the Chengdu bid won the Site Selection vote in 2021, I was invited to become one of the Co-chairs of the convention if the bid won. (I have no idea if Ben Yalow was already on board at that stage.) I declined on the grounds that I really did not have time, but agreed to become a senior adviser, and was listed as such on their org chart presented in DC.
However, I was dismayed by Chengdu Worldcon’s choice of fascist writer Sergei Lukanyenko as a guest of honour, and by a general lack of communication. By summer 2022 I had heard very little from Chengdu Worldcon and it had become clear that they were not very interested in my advice, so I resigned as an advisor and heard no more from them for several months.
In March 2023, rather to my surprise, I was invited to come to Chengdu as a guest of the convention, with no strings attached. I attended Chengdu Worldcon in October and generally enjoyed myself a lot. I was however aware of the undercurrents of dissatisfaction within Chinese fandom about the way that the convention was being run and with how some Chinese fans were being treated by the organisers.
I left Chengdu grateful for the hospitality that had been shown me, inspired by the conversations I had had and by the energy of Chinese fans, but also conscious of the gaps between cultures and political systems. I had had a very good time, but a number of Chinese attendees did not. I am conscious of my privilege.
Then came the publication of the Hugo nomination statistics on 20 January. Every year since at least 2013, before EPH was introduced, I have published an analysis of the votes in each category. It took me very little time on this occasion to conclude that – quite apart from the unexplained disqualifications – the published 2023 numbers cannot possibly be an accurate reflection of the nominating votes cast. I concluded that there was nothing that I could usefully say (and said so).
Others (notably Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones) have put more effort into trying to work out what happened than I have been able to do; but fundamentally the numbers are simply not credible. And no justification has been given for many of the disqualifications. I felt, and feel, sickened and betrayed. I know nothing more about what happened than is in the public domain, and that is bad enough. My cheerful memories of an international celebration of science fiction are now irretrievably tarnished. I feel particularly sorry for all of the finalists and nominees for the 2023 Hugos, and for those Chinese fans who sincerely put their energy into the Chengdu Worldcon.
I am also a member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee and the Worldcon Intellectual Property board, to which I was elected by the 2022 WSFS Business Meeting. I participated in the January 2024 meeting at which Dave McCarty, Ben Yalow and others were censured for events at and subsequent to the Chengdu Worldcon. I make, and will make, no further comment on those discussions.
I was the Hugo administrator in 2017 and 2019, and part of the teams for 2020, 2021 (for a while) and 2022. My record is clear. We were criticised for allowing contested nominees to appear on the final ballot, including Hidden Figures in 2017, Archive of Our Own in 2019, Jeannette Ng’s speech in 2020, the “George R.R. Martin…” blog post in 2021 and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki in 2022. I stand by those decisions. (Two of those contested nominees went on to win.)
Some nominees are ineligible under the rules. I do not like to unilaterally disqualify anyone. Sometimes a nominee will themselves flag up uncertainty about their eligibility to administrators. If preliminary research indicates that there is a problem with eligibility in a particular case, I prefer to engage in dialogue with the relevant creator to get the full picture. This is not always possible, but it is my ideal.
Sometimes a book has been published in the wrong year (in my experience, one each in 2019 and 2022). Sometimes we have to juggle between entire TV series and individual episodes which were nominated in different categories (twice in 2020, also in 2021 and 2022); and only two episodes of any one TV series are allowed on the ballot, so if more than two have the numbers, they need to be trimmed down (2017). The same goes for authors (2019).
Sometimes artists do not have an appropriate body of work for the years and categories they had been nominated in (four in 2017, one each in 2021 and 2022). Editors turned out to be ineligible in 2020 (one) and 2022 (four). A Semiprozine nominee in 2017 was not eligible. An Astounding nominee in 2020 had been published too early to qualify. Again, I stand by all of those decisions. I helped administer the Retro Hugos in 2019 (for 1944) and less enthusiastically in 2020 (for 1945), and they bring a whole extra dimension of hassle.
The Glasgow 2024 team and I have committed to publishing, along with the final Hugo ballot, the potential nominees who were ineligible or who declined nomination, and the grounds for any ineligibility decision; and along with the final results of voting, the full statistics as mandated by the constitution and in addition a detailed log of our decisions interpreting the rules. My then team did this in 2017, and we can and will do it again in 2024. Kathryn Duval, who was my deputy in 2017, is my deputy again this year (in a slightly different role) and the entire team is committed to transparency. We are considering some additional steps as well.
There are a lot of discussions going on right now about the future governance of the Hugo Awards, of WSFS and of Worldcon. I am personally concentrating my energy on running a better process in 2024, and won’t have time to engage much in those debates. I do however think that the Hugos are fundamentally Worldcon’s award, and removing them from Worldcon will mean that they are no longer the Hugos. But that is enough for now.