These events keep getting held in places like China and Saudi Arabia, where the organizers know they are going to have to make major concessions to those governments, because the organizers care far more about money than they do the event. At least that's my theory.

It's a better argument to not trust the awards admin with anything from now in, given that they did that independently and removed a ton of Chinese authors from the ballots.

Fwiw, this is not a case of China stepping in and censoring anything about the awards. Rather, it's a case of the Hugo administration in the West self-censoring their nominees because they feared China might step in if they didn't get ahead of the curve.

Of course, that doesn't really change the situation, but we shouldnt get the story twisted here. The blame falls on the administrators who were so afraid of a threat that they imagined that they caved to non-existent demands, rather than the Chinese (at least for direct fault, since you could argue the Chinese government's policies indirectly led to this situation and I wouldn't fight you on that).

China didn't have anything to do with it. They censored books that were already translated and selling in china, and Chinese authors.

I mean, that depends.

There was a campaign from 2013 to 2017 by rightwingers to game the Hugos by buying non-attending memberships to worldcon and nominating works they deemed to be sufficiently non-woke. Thing is, there's one nominee they couldn't game: "none of these."

So most of the time where the only nominees were gamed, membership voted that there was to be no award in that category that year. The exceptions were authors that likely would have been nominated anyway due to name recognition, like Neil Gaiman.

The award can maintain its integrity despite the committee's lack thereof if Worldcon members vote for no award to be given in the categories leadership fucked with.

Hocus pocus, Hugo's a joke to us

No awards should if they're connected to industry insiders.

I'm legitimately flabbergasted every single year by the sheer number of people who think shit like the Oscars or the Emmy's mean anything given the degree of bullshit that goes on behind the scenes, and some of it out in the open.

They're industry circle jerks for marketing and giving favors to friends. It's insane we give them any credit at all. But if the Game Awards have proven anything, it's that the only thing you need to make an award show "legitimate" is a lot of money to market it enough year after year.

They say China's and American's capitalism with beastly grin is to blame

Tankies can justify anything

I'd agree. Redshirts and Three Body Problem was my Rubicon moment when the Hugos became irrelevant.

I could also tell there's no way these were actually the best of the best sci-fi from the last 10 years.

This is about the same timeframe since they changed their voting rules to put an end to an evil right wing white supremacist campaign that felt exactly that way. When said campaign actually got their picks nominated, every award they were nominated for went to no award.

The Hugos are a bit different in that voting for the shortlist and the awards is open to anybody who is a WSFS member and attended Worldcon (either digitally or in-person), and that includes a significant chunk of fandom and not just authors and industry folk. In some ways that gives them a bit more credibility than other industry awards because (in theory) there isn't that sort of payola you're suggesting in the background. On the other hand that opens them up to manipulation via slate voting campaigns a la Sad/Rabid Puppies, and the more prosaic case of an author with a big fan following winning with a middling entry just on the strength of popularity and name recognition (see Redshirts in 2013, or Nettle and Bone last year). That's been a problem in the past, but this level of blatant censorship and manipulation is new, and it's good that it's attracted the sort of attention and condemnation that it should.

Back when SF and fantasy fiction were more niche interests this maybe wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the genre has moved mainstream in a huge way in the last decade or two and the Hugos get significant media attention outside of fandom. Winning the Hugo can bring attention and prestige, and make for a significant sales bump for authors in a genre that still doesn't really sell enough to pay an author's bills in most cases. Authors in particular need the Hugos to be on the level, or it hurts their ability to get noticed in the larger publishing industry and make a career out of their passion.

There was about a billion in production contracts signed during the Worldcon in China, money talks. The organizers didn't want to disrupt this by being principled, so they didn't.

I don't recall any overt tones. I think it is so highly awarded because it isn't anti-CCP, though I don't remember ever feeling like it took any time away saying it was good, either.

You can tell the book is written from within China. It has some different perspectives to what you’d normally find in a “western” book, but not in a propaganda way. Worth the read

I'd say that it's substantially about the cultural revolution and imo gives it an overall negative treatment that happens to align with the present transition away from hardcore Maoism in China. Cultures are not so monolithic as to be functions of their local propaganda. Much like, say, the US is producing a lot of good science fiction despite having an unhealthy love of capitalism.

Every Chinese person will be cautious about some topics but the book is fine.

That webpage immediately tried to fingerprint me via DRM...