Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Hugos & Facebook

One of the things that bothered me with the delay in the stats was that Dave McCarty’s Facebook page was the only place to get answers about what was going on. I don’t know Dave and aside from the question of Hugo2023 statistics, I’ve not had social media interactions with him. However, I am aware he has a reputation of being abrasive. Even so, it is not good for a single person to be the only point of social media pressure. I did not want reasonable questions about the delay in the stats to shift from “reasonable” to “harassment”.

Of course “stats are late” now pales in comparison to “WTFing F is going on with these stats?”. There is a set of angry people now looking for answers. The hugoteam email address appears not to be working for many people, Chengdu Worldcon social media hasn’t updated for a long time and wasn’t responsive to queries when it was active, so THE ONLY POINT OF CONTACT is now Dave McCarty’s personal Facebook page. That worries me and also it is the only place where more info is coming from.

So future Worldcon people – don’t use your personal Facebook page to communicate about the convention beyond sharing links to an official page. It is a terrible idea both in terms of effective coms and in terms of personal mental health if things go awry.

Having said that, where else to turn than Dave McCarty’s flippin Facebook page.

Neil Gaiman is asking pointed questions:

“Is there anyone who could actually explain WHY Sandman episode 6 was ineligible? I don’t recall any politics in the episode. It was “SF or Fantasy” and had not been previously released.”

https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=913074043327928

Dave answers

“It was a judgment call on my part whether to list both the same way or note that per the WSFS constitution, only one could be considered. I thought it more appropriate to do it the way it appears. The only statement from the administration team that I can share is the one that I already have, after we reviewed the constitution and the rules we must follow, we determined the work was not eligible.”

I can’t make niether head nor tail of that.

Likewise Paulhas asked

“Why was I declared Ineligible for Best Fan Writer, Dave?. HOW could I possibly been rendered Ineligible? I’m owned an explanation !”

https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=711159750797099

In a later comment, Paul points out that if the issue was some official objection to him personally then he has a right to know in the event that he visits China in the future. Paul’s case is a particular minefield as the Chengdu Worldcon ruled him personally ineligible and in a category with very, very loose eligibility criteria. I’m not saying it is legally defamatory (particularly in China) but if I was in the situation Chengdu Worldcon is in I’d want legal advice.

Dave answers Paul ina weird way

“Given the phrasing of the request, I could just not email you to answer the question…but I am unaware of any reason the government of China would be using my team’s rulings for a literary award to control their actions.”

https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=1386727165546462&reply_comment_id=321990483522714

A comment was made by Gray Anderson after the evasive answers about the eligibility rulings:

“You know, I have a better approach to this:
My interpretation of your broken loop comments is that you are telegraphing that you received marching orders from someone in the Chinese government or political apparatus, or from some set of rules to which none of us are privy and which you are unwilling to make us privy to, at some level, compelling a slew of irregular disqualifications which cannot be justified under the WSFS Constitution itself, or any other generally available WSFS documents.
I dare you to deny it.”

https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=7091661744250595&reply_comment_id=927372405814284

Dave gives a lengthy response:

“That I will categorically deny.

Nobody has ordered me to do anything. Nobody is changing decisions I have made. Folks can ask Helen how well I take orders and if she thinks I would have stayed on if such were happening.

There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner. I got to meet the mayor and the vice mayor and there were a couple dinners with the vice mayor, the Worldcon team, and local dignitaries where the conversation was purely on our love of the literature and everyone’s excitement to hold the event. The government wasn’t involved in things beyond the local government liking the prestige of holding the event and doing things to support us like helping us connect with key sponsors and supporting those sponsors and us (demonstrated ably by the speed with which the site was put up and the gigantic fleet of buses for getting around that was even bigger than the “ridiculously large request” that Ben made for same).

I’ve done this job four times now and assisted a few more times. The rules I followed this time are the same as the rules I followed the others….and the same as every Hugo administrator ever has followed.

Yes, I am particular about the answer, but the answer is true and accurate and I am certain there are people that didn’t work on Chengdu that understand the answer and can attest to the fact that it is true and accurate. That’s where my responsibility ends on this matter.”

https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=7091661744250595&reply_comment_id=927372405814284

While I do not believe the central government in China had any interest in the Hugo Awards and I was sceptical local government would concern itself with the Hugo nominations specifically, I am surprised (based on my own experience in China) that officials did not involve itself in ensuring that the Worldcon event in general did not breach social-political norms. There is an obvious danger in presenting modern China as dystopian 1984-like state enforcing social conformity but you can overcompensate in the other direction. It wasn’t absurd or Sinophobic to speculate whether local government took an interest in the Worldcon politically prior to the recent strangeness and now…well, we are running a bit thin on explanations.

This is so weird.

camestrosfelapton

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103 responses to “Hugos & Facebook”

  2. There is no doubt that Dave McCarty is being evasive and disingenuous. I don’t see any reason to think that he is outright lying, but nothing he says can be taken at face value.

    I can only conclude that the real reasons for the disqualifications are very, very bad.

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  3. There was no communication between the Hugo administration team and the Chinese government in any official manner.

    I think he thinks he’s being rather clever and sly here, with “in any official manner” doing a lot of heavy lifting.

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    • Yes, but I still don’t believe it. This Worldcon wasn’t a huge event by Chinese standards but it was still an event in which a subculture of people gathered and shared ideas – that involves a degree of supervision not in some shadowy way because ensuring a degree of social cohesion is not something government agencies in China are ashamed of or embarrassed by and can (not without some merit) point to the way things are going in the west and say “look, see”.

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        • Who’s “they” in this scenario? This sort of interference wouldn’t need to come from particularly on-high, or even coordinated. Just some local official who took an interest.

          Absent a more highly placed patron, who’s going to push back on that? There’d be bigger worries about the issue rapidly become about refusing to submit to political direction rather than if the initial orders were appropriate

          This sort of low level petty bureaucracy also defeats desires for consistency. Why was Babel alowed to be published in China in the first place? Some minor bureaucrat decided it fell on the right side of the line. Why would Kuang be disqualified later? A different minor bureaucrat decided he fell on the wrong side of the line.

          For authoritarian systems the uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. Compliance is the point, not consistency

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    • That was EXACTLY what I was coming here to say.

      Much like “nice place you got here, hope nothing happens to it” isn’t an OFFICIAL FORMAL request to pay protection to the local mob/gang boss, but we all know it is one.

      If an official had made it known, however subtly, that, say, they weren’t at all keen on RF Kuang — say a quiet word after one of those dinners — it would do the trick just as much as some guy in a Mao suit stomping up to the conrunners with a writ.

      Paul REALLY deserves an explanation — as you say, is he persona non grata with the country of China, or just with Dave-n-pals?

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      • This, ultimately, is what is meant by “the rule of law”.It is possible to run an authoritarian regime through the rule of law, where the authoritarians are bound by the law. But also, the authoritarians can change the law; they just have to do so formally and officially and be open about what they are doing. Censorship with formally-appointed censors who produce a formal Index of Permitted Books and any new book goes to the censor and then they make a formal decision.

        But most authoritarian regimes don’t operate like that; all the ones I can think of are the handful of remaining absolute monarchies, and even they are getting increasingly embarrassed to say they operate like that (they still do operate like that, but they pretend otherwise).

        The pre-Revolutionary French monarchy wasn’t in the least embarrassed to say this about itself. The Catholic Church had an Index of Prohibited Books. But even Saudi Arabia gets a bit embarrassed to have official lists of what people are and aren’t allowed to read / watch.

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  4. OK, that leaves me with only one theory left:

    Yes we all thought Babel was published in 2022,but actually it is the artifact of a time continuum paradox, and any mention of this fact by the Hugo Admin team will be outlawed in 2037, as helpfully explained to Dave by the World Science Fiction Temporal Agency

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  5. I picked the wrong time to write this post as the comments were more active than I realised. It is very much like arguing with some being of Faerie. I’m not getting clearer answers from Dave than others (you’d think Gaiman would be the expert with quizzing mythological beings) but occasionally I get the odd nugget.

    For example, I asked why the stock answer he was giving on disqualifications was the only answer he could give and he replied:

    “because that is the statement the Hugo administration team agreed to after long and considered deliberation.” https://www.facebook.com/grand.universal.dave/posts/pfbid0hGrsGBfQdKJ1AeJ9rvQBZHnm6sMN477qekuseGViBUBvkgmkgNLtfWXCFJqyboNHl?comment_id=913074043327928&reply_comment_id=800132728512372

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  6. If we are going to try to parse the non-answers McCarty gives, I notice he says two things with slightly different implications:

    When he talks about “the constitution and the rules we must follow“, he suggests there are rules other than the constitution involved, rules which cannot be named – which seems to support the “Chinese censorship” theory.

    But then he says “The rules I followed this time are the same as the rules I followed the other[ three times he was Hugo admin] ….and the same as every Hugo administrator ever has followed.” – which kind of rules out Chinese censorship as the mysterious “rules” other than the constitution.

    Of course this only matters if we assume that he is trying to be clever and give some kind of coded messages, and is not just being bullheaded and obnoxious.

    (I’m sure he feels really important now, with so many people talking about him, and discussing and trying to interpret his sayings as if he’s some sort of oracle.)

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    • “The rules I followed this time are the same as the rules I followed the other[ three times he was Hugo admin] ….and the same as every Hugo administrator ever has followed.”

      Yeah, this is the bit I’m going to flat-out call a lie.

      If the rules under which certain works were disqualified were one of the the some rules he and every other Hugo administrator had ever followed ever, then he should have no trouble explicating. What rules, Dave? WHAT rules? Why be so evasive? If it’s just one of the rules that have always governed the Hugos and which Hugo admins have always followed, why not just QUOTE THE DAMN RULE?

      Because it’s not. Because he’s lying.

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    • It strikes me that this answer is simple. If the ‘rules’ Dave followed beyond the Constitution are ones he’s used every time, then shouldn’t other Hugo committee leaders know what those rules are? Maybe ask Nicolas Whyte or John Lorenz, or anybody else who’s done the job?

      I don’t know. This whole thing is really weird.

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    • “the rules we must follow” are the ones that rendered the unexplained DQs. The rules he and previous admins always follow are only the wsfs constition rules. And those give us the explained ineligibilities.

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  7. Now I’m no expert in the administration of literary awards but I think a good rule of thumb is ‘Don’t act like an officious arse when responding to legitimate queries.’

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  8. Was reading his responses. Dave is really destroying his credibility here, and utterly destroying any confidence that any of the award totals can be trusted. This is so very ugly, and he’s actively making it worse for some reason?

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  9. Dave McCarty’s responses there are giving me flashbacks to Jeremy Paxman interviewing Michael Howard…. For the benefit of those who aren’t wearily obsessed with UK politics: Howard, a Conservative minister at the time, had been in a spat with a senior civil servant, where the possibility of him over-ruling said civil servant had come up. Interviewer Jeremy Paxman, after estabilishing that the civil servant had not, in fact, been over-ruled, asked Howard, “Did you threaten to over-rule him?” He asked this question seventeen times in succession, receiving no straight answer every time.

    Faced with this display of relentless evasion, the viewing public just had to form their own opinions of what had happened. In my case, at least, my opinions were 1) Howard had certainly done something he didn’t want to own up to, and 2) I would not trust Michael Howard as far as I could throw a double-decker bus. I will leave drawing a parallel with McCarty’s statements as an exercise for the alert student.

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  10. So I fell afoul of a rule, but I can’t know what that rule actually is? I mean, about the only looser category than Best Fan Writer is Best Related Work. How did I make myself ineligible? HOW?

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  11. This is indeed very strange. This Dave person seems to regard requests for information — understandably angry requests but still requests — as a personal attack on him and his skills as an administrator of the Hugos this year and is declaring his reputation sterling, which does not answer the requests for information about what happened.

    If Dave has, after the gang of authorities met about it, been told to not yet answer any requests for information because an official Hugo response/answers will be out in a bit, then that’s what he should say. Authors/creators who were disqualified as ineligible have a right, per usual Hugo procedures, to ask why they were disqualified and get an answer. If the answer is that the official answer is coming later, say that. It won’t make the people requesting information happy but it is a temporary answer that promises answers later.

    But what it sounds like is going on is that there is a dispute going on between Dave and others involved in administering the Hugo votes this year, a dispute presumably involving the disqualifications and maybe how Dave handled things, given his level of disgruntlement. And he’s been told to not start spewing his side of the story until the inner dispute is hashed out.

    But if that’s the case, then those people should put out an announcement that there is a dispute going on and that they will provide information about this dispute shortly. If Dave is going to war with other Hugo/WorldCon folk, it would be helpful if someone would let everyone know.

    Somebody made a big mess. I again do not think it has anything to do with the Chinese government, much as I hate them. This sounds more like a convention people conflict.

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  12. Did you screencap everything? Because I’ve discovered some of the exchanges, particularly most of the Neil Gaiman ones, seem to have disappeared.

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    • I retract my previous statement. They’re all still there — somebody sent me a link to them that worked.

      They really did disappear from the Facebook screen I was reading, is all I can say. Probably a cache problem, or who knows.

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      • Facebook infamously has tons of transitory problems where stuff disappears or gets reordered in confusing ways, and it’s very common for it to look that way for some people and not others at the same time. From my limited knowledge of how very large distributed systems like this work, I’d say the reasons often boil down to 1. variations on “these 10 updates got propagated to these 100 regional data centers in different sequence, and it took a while for the intermediate states to become consistent with each other” (not really a “cache problem” in the sense of the cache in your browser, but sort of conceptually related), and 2. Facebook trying out a code change partially before deploying it everywhere, but being very sloppy about it because their management culture doesn’t care about reliability in the short term.

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  13. I don’t claim to have the slightest clue as to what most of McCarty’s statements mean, but I honestly do think there is a plausible way to parse the bit about Sandman that you said you couldn’t make heads nor tails of.

    Gaiman had asked “Is there anyone who could actually explain WHY Sandman episode 6 was ineligible?”– but then he added in a 2nd comment, “And if Sandman 6 was ineligible then why didn’t that reinstate Sandman as a whole series, given that it was ineligible as there were too many votes for individual episodes.”

    McCarty replied, “It was a judgment call on my part whether to list both the same way or note that per the WSFS constitution, only one could be considered. I thought it more appropriate to do it the way it appears.” It looks to me like he was answering Gaiman’s 2nd comment, while evading the 1st. “Both” refers to the episode versus the series. It looks to me like he’s reasserting that they were both ineligible for different reasons: the episode for reasons he refuses to state, the series for the same reason previously stated (individual episodes got more votes). He is interpreting the rules to mean that there’s no such thing as “reinstate” as Gaiman suggests– that <i>first</i> you decide whether you should consider the series or the episodes, and <i>then</i> having decided that it must be the episodes, you strike out any that are deemed ineligible (because _____) and only count the votes for whatever other ones you didn’t strike out. I’m not claiming that is a reasonable reading of the rules, but I think that that’s what he is rather poorly trying to say, and that the “judgment call” he refers to is just the decision to simply say “ineligible” for both the series and the episode (“list both the same way”) rather than spelling out the rest of the rationale.

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  14. I have an idea which would account, at least, for the disqualification of Babel and the subsequent stonewalling.

    We know Babel is an original work of speculative fiction published in 2022, so if it’s really ineligible, there must be some other reason behind it. I note that one Related Work was ineligible because one of its authors was on the Hugo subcommittee… but R.F. Kuang isn’t on any committee or subcommittee…. or is she?

    See, if Kuang is secretly linked to the Hugo subcommittee in some way, the link would explain the disqualification, and the secrecy would explain the tight-lippedness. But what might be the nature of the link? It takes only a moment’s (highly suspect) thought to arrive at the hypothesis: Dave McCarty is actually R.F. Kuang in drag.

    Obviously, Kuang is never going to own up to being Dave McCarty, because… well, at this point, who would?

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  15. As I’ve read the Facebook thread, R.E.M.’s Exhuming McCarthy has been looped in my head but as Ineligible McCarty. Someone better than me needs to write that filk though.

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  16. I mean, how much of an asshole do you have to be to both disqualify Beloved Author Neil Gaiman TWICE, and then insult and anger Chill About Awards Dude Neil Gaiman for a legit question?

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  19. Tammy Coxen in a public FB post:

    “A couple thoughts on the current Hugo kerfuffle.

    1. For anyone wanting the admin team (remember there are both Chinese and American administrators, which actually really matters here) to give a specific reason – the fact that no reason was given on the statistics should be evidence to you that no reason can be given. If they were willing to say “we censored these works” then the nomination statistics would have listed “censored” rather than “not eligible” as the reason.

    2. None of this matters, because the Worldcon will almost certainly be defunct within 10 years. And would have been regardless of this controversy. There are almost no viable bids for future years, and a serious lack of Worldcon running energy. This is part of a broader trend that’s affecting many fan-run science fiction conventions, and while those can eke along with the same 10 people doing the same jobs, sometimes for years, the work it takes to run a Worldcon makes that impossible. And that work just keeps getting harder.”

    https://www.facebook.com/tammy.coxen/posts/pfbid02UmNqFshVsp9Pyv1j6DpZ5iHoFrYsb8JCHWYuAuCRHTJcbHonGtd4FD26c3fds1K4l

    I screencapped: https://bsky.app/profile/soonleenz.bsky.social/post/3kjmvwqu5vo26

    It will take a long time & a lot of effort for the Hugo Awards to recover from this, assuming it is recoverable.

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    • None of this matters, because the Worldcon will almost certainly be defunct within 10 years. And would have been regardless of this controversy.
      Tammy Coxen

      I think this is a really bad argument.

      Yes, it’s possible that Worldcon as we know it will be defunct in 10 years. That doesn’t mean that “none of this matters”, though. It matters for people who were unfairly robbed of a finalist spot, and for people who got a finalist spot and now wonders “did I get in because someone else was unfairly robbed?” It matters for everyone who participated in the award in all the years Dave McCarty was administrator – since we now have to wonder if there were irregularities then, too, only noone noticed. It matters for everyone who cares about the Hugo today.

      And the doom she predicts for Worldcon does not necessarily apply to the Hugo. It’s entirely possible to imagine the Hugo Award continuing in a somewhat different setting even if noone holds Worldcon as we know it today. That means the continued prestige and reputation of the Hugo Award matters regardless of the eventual fate of Worldcon.

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      • You said it. The Hugos are really what’s important to me. Having a Worldcon to hold a ceremony is just a nice to have addition. Hearing people say they question whether they will bother voting in the Hugos anymore because of this is what really concerns me.

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        • The WorldCon doesn’t just “hold a ceremony” for the Hugos. The WorldCon is the Hugos. The Hugos are decided by WorldCon attendees, the ones who go to the hosting con. It is about the works THEY want to honor, not the rest of us. No WorldCon, no Hugos. At a certain point, to ensure a decent voting pool and get more folk interested, WorldCon decided to throw open voting on the Hugos to those willing to pay a fee as well as those who paid to attend WorldCon or had done so the year before. There are up sides (involves more younger & disabled folk) and down sides (Puppies/voting slate attempts) to that decision but collectively the attendees who have voting rights about WorldCon have decided to do that for — and only for — the Hugos.

          But just because you can vote without being a WorldCon member/attendee for some cash doesn’t mean that the Hugos aren’t the WorldCon’s award for its members to decide what to do with. If the WorldCon attendees/voting members and the small band of administrators decide to end the Hugos tomorrow, that’s their right. Indeed, WorldCon remaining and the Hugos being gone is a more likely scenario than WorldCon itself disappearing. And at any time, they could also vote to get rid of non-attendee voting for the Hugos as well. The Hugos would still survive as long as a small percentage of folks attending WorldCon or attending the previous year voted on them.

          But will they be worth anything? They weren’t worth anything before until people decided they were worth something because they decided that WORLDCON was worth something and that its attendee fans had good judgement in picking finalists and winners for their awards. And they have been worth something to attendees of WorldCon because they are part of WorldCon. Right now there is a controversy over how votes were handled by this guy Dave & others — that doesn’t invalidate the worth of the Hugos themselves unless you decide that the people of WorldCon, whose award it is, are not people whose opinions you value anymore. Which seems a bit unfair to Hugo voters who are already possibly having their votes thrown out by this guy Dave.

          I recently watched Meg 2, which is an utterly ridiculous sequel movie that we all watch for its excess silliness, to see Jonathan Stratham attack a giant CGI shark. But before that, they put him and his step-daughter character in also ridiculous mouse trap situations. And he focuses her and others by saying, “we work one problem at a time, we deal with this thing first.” Which, for all us anxiety-riddled folk in the world is a very good reminder. The Hugos have a particular problem right now and apparently part of that problem is called Dave and that is the problem that needs to be worked on now before you get to all the other problems. Paul, Neil and others deserve answers, the current Hugo committee has to be dealt with. And then the people who make up WorldCon can decide what they will or won’t do with their awards, the Hugos, just like they did when the Puppies invaded.

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            • So you know that the point of WSFS is to hold WorldCon, not the Hugo Awards. The Hugos exist because of people, the people who make up & attend WorldCon and its dozens of conventions that hold WorldCon each year it’s been held. They don’t do it just to hold an award ceremony for the Hugos. There are just a lot of attempts to divorce the Hugos from WorldCon, which is another way of discounting the people who attend WorldCon & their Hugo votes.

              If the people who ran Chengdu messed up — and it seems likely that this was partly the case — then that’s something that has to be looked at for the future and the current Hugo results. It might be an anomaly of holding it for the first time in China with a new con or it might be part of a bigger problem. But either way, nothing invalidates the people of WorldCon’s conventions or the Hugo Awards as the set of awards decided on by the people of WorldCon.

              I know that doom and gloom are very normal for the SFFH world, but I don’t get why every time that the Hugos has a problem, or there’s a major change, people are going, “That’s it, it’s over for the Hugos! Throw WorldCon out!” They did that before the Puppies & it’s even weirder now.

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              • So you know that the point of WSFS is to hold WorldCon, not the Hugo Awards.

                The point of WSFS is both. Worldcon is our convention and the Hugos are our award. There are Worldcon attendees who don’t participate in the Hugos. There are WSFS members who don’t attend (or don’t always) attend Worldcon. (Like 2-time Hugo Award finalist Camestros Felapton!)

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          • The problem is that this worldcon’s Hugos are not worth anything due to the mystery and drama surrounding the apparent ineligibility of certain works and people that were, in fact, 100% eligible, with no reasonable explanation given as to why this particular committee decides they were not eligible. It’s a pretty big problem that an extremely popular novel was disqualified for “reasons” and we don’t know why, given that it has won multiple awards already. This to me is a far bigger asterisk year than anything the Puppies pulled off because now the problems are coming from inside the house and they’re trying to cover up either incompetence or something worse.

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      • I would argue that this damages the Hugo more than the Sad Puppies did. With the Puppies, the problem was a group of WSFS members slate voting to fix the finalists. With this, it is a betrayal of the trust conferred onto the Hugo Admin (and Hugo team) to administer the Hugo Awards with integrity.

        (It is clear that the world is changing & Worldcon has to change with the times, so I would expect that a Worldcon in ten years to look very different.)

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  20. Looks like I picked the wrong year to join Worldcon and vote for the Hugo’s …!

    (with Apols to the Glasgow team who I am sure will do a brilliant job. Or at least not burn the place down …)

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  21. One of the more poignant comments on McCarty’s FB post:

    Dude this looks so bad omg

    Tammy Coxen may be a pessimist, but she’s not wrong. Younger fans do things differently. They consume media in forms other than print. They meet F2F (if & when) in smaller groups with a tighter focus. Maybe they do Comic-Con, if they have the time & money.

    And there it is. Which under-30 has much of either? Commenters on Coxen’s post bemoaned the lack of volunteers willing to give of themselves & their expertise to pull off a successful WorldCon-level event — which includes satisfying event-goers’ “impossibly high” expectations.

    Maybe a person puts their hand up do it for the egoboo (I’m told I’m old-fashioned for using that word).

    I concur with nearly all of Christopher Hatton’s comment on McCarty’s post. Lacking detailed explanations for the irregularities in the Noms doc, one’s imagination runs wild and starts inventing shit. Maybe it isn’t too outrageous to imagine a regional-level actor with deep pockets, out to seduce a likely apparatchik in the opposing camp. Wine ‘em, dine ‘em, give ‘em trinkets. Flatter them outrageously. Massage their great big ego. Catch them in a wee peccadillo or two. Let ‘em cop all the flak, leave ’em waving in the wind.

    Or not! I could be wrong about all of that.

    Meanwhile on Reddit: Not what I’d call a youth-y vibe, but cynical as all-get-out. Could anyone have expected a different outcome; Hugos are so passé; nearly as useless as the Goodreads awards; stick a fork in ‘em and call ‘em done. A few interesting recommendations to add to the as-yet-unread stack, however.

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    • “Lacking detailed explanations for the irregularities in the Noms doc, one’s imagination runs wild and starts inventing shit.” A common point in business management classes: keeping silent about problems will only panic your staff into assuming the worst and looking for the exit.

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  22. So once again, it’s looking like one person abused some power, possibly in part due to his ineptitude in dealing with the delicate situation of working with Chinese conrunners who were new to the whole thing.

    I’m not going to make predictions about what will happen to WorldCon and the Hugo Awards in the future as no one can actually know. And again, contentious business meetings is a WorldCon thing so it’s not a sweep under the rug sort of event. But I will say one thing about the Puppy-style denouncements that the con and the Hugos will soon die and because none of the young folk care, like or can afford them: That’s been said about WorldCon and the Hugos every decade since the 1940’s.

    In fact, it’s been said about all SFFH conventions, especially the print centered ones — none of the conventions were expected to still exist, including multi-media cons. And of course, it’s been said about SFFH fiction in general, especially for unclear reasons science fiction. Written fiction — supposed to be gone. (The Ghostbusters’ joke that “print is dead” still makes me laugh.) E-books were at least supposed to have destroyed bound print books by now, you may have noticed.

    And the reasons are always the “youts,” who are somehow fundamentally different, an alien species. Because they sometimes consume and create using new tools and in different ways & forms, because they embrace technology advancements of their time, they quite clearly will have no interest in anything older, the older people say. Never mind that teens’ preferred form of a YA book is a bound print hardcover or trade paperback. Or that the millenials resurrected vinyl records & figured out how to give it cool new types of speakers. (My kid wants a new record player & speakers for her bday, as well as Beyonce’s latest album on vinyl. Stuff is expensive.)

    So yes, there’s a mess-up, not WorldCon’s first. Yes, the people who run WorldCon and the Hugos are old, as they are for most conventions — and as they were in the 1950’s, 1960’s, etc. And yet, somehow new old people appear to replace them. WorldCon and the Hugos may die off for many reasons; and saying the same thing over and over again about young people each generation may sometimes end up correct — a stopped clock is still right twice a day (clock faces were also supposed to be gone by now.) But WorldCon has inexplicably survived a lot of predictions of its on-coming death. Many of the conventions that have hosted WorldCon are also remarkably still around (though some have passed on or been reinvented.)

    Will WorldCon still be around up to when we’ve made the planet uninhabitable for ourselves and humanity collapses? Maybe, maybe not. But I doubt it will be the young folk who do it in if it goes.

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    • “E-books were at least supposed to have destroyed bound print books by now, you may have noticed.”

      They were also going to be dirt cheap — just pennies per book! Of course, some are that cheap, but not usually the ones I want to buy.

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    • There are definitely younger people interested in the Hugos. That’s why we’ve seen some (heavily resisted) changes in categories. And just changes in the type of things nominated for categories. Like YouTube channels for fancast and microblogging for fan writer.

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  23. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Given it is not officially available in China, and contains elements like butt plug fights & lesbian characters, I was surprised it was not disqualified when the finalists were announced last year. It seems strange: if certain works were ruled ineligible for ‘political’ reasons, why was EEAAO kept?

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    • I think because its authors were not likely to show up and give a speech. Spontaneous remarks, like at an awards ceremony, give censors nightmares.

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