Utterly disgraceful and predictable as hell. A couple weeks ago we were conjecturing that exactly this was going on and the organizers were being evasive.
Super disappointing, yeah. I’ve worked a bit with Dave McCarty during a previous Worldcon and this sort of ham-handed self-censorhip is not what I would have expected of him. Even if something like that was more or less a foregone conclusion from the moment Chengdu won the bid, I would have at hoped that he’d at least let the local Worldcon committee bear responsibilty, rather than being a willing and proactive partner.
That said, as the report that this article is based on points out, that the premier award in SF and fantasy literature is joined at the hip with Worldcon is a bit awkward, and even when the hosting country doesn’t have repressive and omnipresent government censorship, the local mores and tastes are going to have an impact on voting. Not that it’s bad for non-American or non-Western viewpoints and fandoms to carry weight in the voting, but maybe it’d be better to separate the administration of the Hugos from that of Worldcon, and develop a vetting and voting process that can be consistently and deliberately inclusive, rather than being at the mercy of whose hosting bid wins in a given year? Seems like it would be important to resolve this sooner rather than later, given that Egypt is in the running to host in 2026 and Saudi Arabia has made perennial bids for the convention as well.
Another of the writers affected was Paul Weimer, who was excluded from the fan writer category. One of the several points raised about him in the emails is that he had previously travelled to Tibet. But Weimer said he had only been to Nepal, not Tibet. “It’s not even competent political censorship – it’s haphazard bullshit,” he said.
How I yearn for the days of competent political censorship /s
Why do we continuously cowtow to those fascists? It’s getting more and more difficult to not sound like a racist but it seems like everything coming out of that country are just lies, damn lies, fabricated lies, and rampant cheating/corruption. It’s like their national past-time is lying.
It’s not racist to dislike and distrust a government, as long as you don’t equate all people of that region or ethnicity with that government. Authoritarian governments, especially Israel, but also China, LOVE to cast dissent with their politics or cultural values as “racist” but this is ABSOLUTE bullshit and should be called out, mocked, disparaged and laughed at, NOT legitimized.
The problem is that’s kinda true of pretty much everywhere so your choices are to isolate and only get lied to by your own politicians and corporate overlords or to accept the complexity of the world and try to work on moving forward where possible.
I do agree that this entirely greed based approach from the company is wrong but honestly I prefer it to your extreme xenophobia towards them. Yes there are issues with China just like all our countries have issues, they’re not the devil though not by a long shot.
That’s really shameful and disheartening. The science fiction community tends to be exceptionally thoughtful and aware of dangerous precedents. It’s sad to see this kind of political nonsense taint the award.
Maybe don’t hold it in China again if they’re so worried about this sort of thing? They didn’t think that through did they? You think they might with, you know, science fiction often commenting on real life things through speculative analogues. They cowardly caved to just the idea of repercussions. Nothing in the article says the committee was actually under pressure from anyone to do what they did. Weak!
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