This is one of a series of posts about the 2025 World Science Fiction Society Business Meeting. They are all tagged bm2025.
The public-facing report of the WSFS Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards can be found on pages 65-68 of the 2025 Business Meeting Agenda. I was a member of the Committee and therefore I endorse the report and also the way in which it has been handled. I want to flag up a few points arising from it.
The most important point is that hundreds of votes for dozens of nominees, mostly Chinese, were discounted without explanation at an early stage of the 2023 Hugo process. The “Validation Spreadsheet”, one of the documents provided to Chris Barkley and Jason Sanford by Diane Lacey, is clearly the output of a run of the EPH algorithm (which is used to determine the finalists from the nomination votes) using a very different set of votes to those which are the basis of the officially reported statistics.
This is not news. Abigail Nussbaum spotted it almost as soon as the Sanford / Barkley report was published in February 2023 (even though Sanford and Barkley themselves largely missed it), and Chinese blogger Zionius went into the numbers in detail. But most attention in Western discourse centred on the later exclusions which had become public knowledge when the statistics were published in January, because they included some individuals who are well-known names in the West. The 22-29 nominees excluded at an earlier stage have largely been ignored.
It has been suggested that the initial exclusion of many votes was conducted by the 2023 Administrators to counter the effects of a slate. Slates, however, are not against the rules, and in any case my analysis of the works on the alleged slate and the works that were excluded by the disqualification of votes after the original EPH count of the “Validation Spreadsheet” is that there is not a huge amount of overlap between that list and the “first 29”. (I am in disagreement with Zionius on this point.)
Of the six potential finalists in 2023 whose exclusion without explanation became public in January 2024, one appears in fact to have been correctly excluded under the rules – “Color the World” by Mu Ming (Congyun Gu). It’s my personal belief that “Fongong Temple Pagoda” (尽化塔) by Hai Ya was then excluded by mistake; its English language publication date would have made it eligible, but administrators may not have been aware of that. It’s pretty clear that the other four were wrongly excluded from the ballot for other reasons.
There’s a lot more to write about this, but I think I’ll save that analysis for another occasion. Operationally, it means that the resolution passed last year to declare the “January Six” retrospectively as Hugo finalists is fundamentally flawed. One of the six, as it turns out, was correctly excluded from the 2023 ballot, though without adequate explanation. As matters stand, we’re about to declare that “Color the World” was “really” a finalist even though it should not have qualified.
But there are also another 29 nominees whose exclusion from the ballot appears to have been arbitrary and against the rules. They all deserve apologies, and they all deserve the same consideration as the “January Six”. Even if you believe that retrospectively declaring anyone to have been a Hugo finalist is desirable or possible, we just don’t have enough information to know whether all of the “first 29” would have made the ballot absent the irregular disqualification of their votes.
So the Investigation Committee has proposed in resolution D9 (page 24 of the agenda) that the following note should be attached to the official Hugo record maintained by the Formulation of Long Lists Committee: “Approximately 30 nominees were excluded from the final ballot of the 2023 Hugo Awards for reasons other than the nominating procedures prescribed in the WSFS Constitution.” It’s not clear if the number is 34 (a maximum) or 27 (a minimum), but “approximately 30” is enough to demonstrate the severity of the problem.
Speaking for myself: the proposed constitutional change E8 (page 28 of the agenda), passed in Glasgow last year and awaiting ratification in the virtual Seattle meeting this year, to allow the Business Meeting to declare unsuccessful finalists to have the status of finalists retrospectively, is a bad idea, and purports to give the Business Meeting the power to rewrite history. The 2023 Hugo process was bad and hurt many people. We have to accept that mistakes were made and that the damage can’t be undone by passing counterfactual resolutions. The ratification of E8 should be rejected.
Edited to add: I myself spoke at last year’s Business Meeting (see page 35 of the Minutes) in favour of apologising to the “January Six”. In fact, had I (and others) done the research, we would have quickly found that Chinese fans had already established that “Color the World” was correctly excluded, though without the explanation that it was due.
The Investigation Committee also proposes the following resolutions:
- C5 (page 19), that in future such committees should require a two-thirds vote to set up, and I agree with this (obviously since I signed off on it as a member of the Committee). It was a tough process and should not be entered into lightly.
- D10 (page 24), that a new committee should be set up to write a Whistleblower’s Charter, which I agree with and I hope can be merged with D6, which would create an committee to write a code of ethics.
- D11 (page 25), recommending that Worldcon Chairs should not be members of their respective Hugo administration subcommittees, which I thoroughly agree with.
- D12 (also page 25), which will be discussed when we reach the relevant part of the Business Meeting.
I hope that they all pass.
I’m not promising to do one of these posts every day, but it’s not all that long until the Preliminary Business Meeting on 4 July, so there will be more soon.
Edited to add: actually I did do a post on this every day for the next two weeks.
2025 WSFS Business meeting posts:
Mark Protection Committee Report
Investigation Committee on the 2023 Hugo Awards report
Software Committee
Hugo Administration Process Committee report
Business Meeting Study Group
C1, C2, C3, C4
C5
D1, D2, D3
D4
D5, D6
D7, D8
D9, D10, D11, D12
E1, E2
E3, E4, E5
E6
E7
E8
E9
F1, F2
F3, F4, F5, F6
F7, F8
F9, F10
F11
F12
F13
F14, F15
F16, F17, F18, F19
F20
F21
F22