Genre Grapevine on the Hugo Awards’ “not eligible” problem

Note: My regular Genre Grapevine will be out later this week. In addition, this column is available free to the public. If you like my writings on genre issues, consider backing my Patreon.

The winners of the 2023 Hugo, Astounding, and Lodestar Awards were announced in late October 2023, just over 90 days ago. That 90 days mark is important because the constitution of the World Science Fiction Society, which runs Worldcon, NASFiC and the Hugos, specifies that 90 days after Worldcon the “complete numerical vote totals” for the Hugo Awards must be released to the public.

Normally the voting and nominations statistics are released the same night the Hugo Awards are announced. That’s generally been the pattern as long as I’ve followed the awards. Occasionally it took a few extra days because of minor issues or because volunteers were simply exhausted.

That’s not what happened with the Chengdu Worldcon, which waited 91 days to release the complete Hugo Award voting stats.

For the last three months people in the SF/F genre have been wondering what was going on with this delay. Now we know why it took so long – serious shenanigans were at play. In short, the Hugo Award stats revealed that a number of writers and works were kept off the award’s final ballot for no valid reason.

One of the biggest shockers was that Rebecca F. Kuang’s acclaimed fantasy novel Babel, which won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, was left off the final ballot despite earning 810 nomination votes, enough to place it third on the list of nominated novels. The top six novels were supposed to make the final ballot, but instead Babel was deemed "not eligible."

Babel is one of the best SF/F novels of the last few years and also a major commercial success, selling over 350,000 copies. I personally loved Babel and nominated the novel in this category, as did 809 other people. The novel was absolutely eligible for the Hugos, being both a genre novel and published in August 2022, well within the year being considered.

When the novel didn’t make the shortlist, many people wondered if Kuang had removed it from consideration. But this evidently didn’t happen because other works listed in the Hugo Awards nomination stats indicate those works were removed because the author or creator "declined nomination," such as Becky Chambers in the novella category, S.B. Divya in the novelette category, and the people behind the film Prey.

The only reason I can think that Kuang’s novel was deemed not eligible was censorship, with someone worried what she would say in her victory speech about the Chinese government if she won, or outraged over what she has previously written about in her fiction. That said, as of today Kuang hasn’t commented on all this, so this is merely speculation on my part.

One person who has spoken out is Paul Weimer, who was also labeled “not eligible” in the Best Fan Writer category for no reason. Weimer has been a finalist in this category three previous times and received enough nominations to place third on the list. On Bluesky, Weimer said he didn’t decline, adding in a separate post “Um, this is the first time I heard I was ineligible, so this is coming as a nasty surprise.”

Weimer goes into more detail on all this in a public Patreon post.

A third person ruled not eligible was Xiran Jay Zhao, in this case for the Astounding Award. Zhao was a finalist in that same category the year before. As reported by File770, “it should be impossible for a first-year-of-eligibility Astounding Award finalist to be ineligible the following year unless either they already won the award or the original Hugo committee (Chicon 8) erred in their eligibility determination.”

Finally, an episode of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was also ruled ineligible.

Each year’s Worldcon essentially runs the Hugo Awards within the rules laid out in the WSFS constitution. This has led some people like Kevin Standlee, who is heavily involved in Worldcon work, to say the fault rests with those who voted for Worldcon to be held in China.

In a post titled “Elections Have Consequences,” Standlee said:

“Worldcons have to obey the laws of the place in which they are held, no matter what their governing documents say. An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing. When it comes to local law, this could end up applying anywhere.”

Standlee then asks people to imagine a Worldcon held in Florida where, he writes, given “legislation passed by Florida, it would not surprise me if such a hypothetical Florida Worldcon's Hugo Administration Subcommittee would disqualify any work with LGBTQ+ content.”

I strongly disagree with this view. Yes, it is obvious that the nomination process was manipulated to some degree or another. And yes again, the suspicion is that this was done because either the Chinese government wanted it done, or some people were worried how the Chinese government would react if certain authors were award finalists.

But to act like the WSFS had no role in this is disingenuous at best and absolutely wrong at worst. The vote Chengdu won to host the Worldcon was held based on the rules laid out in the WSFS constitution. Over the years numerous people have proposed modifying the rules to either make it so a permanent committee runs the Hugo Awards instead of each Worldcon, or changing the rules so this type of manipulation can't happen.

Those proposed changes were repeatedly rejected by those involved in the WSFS.

When it became evident that Chengdu was going to win under the rules in place at the time, an attempt was made to change the rules after the fact so the site selection administrator could reject Chendu’s bid. I reported on this issue back in 2021 (see halfway down this report). While many people raised legitimate concerns about something like this happening, simply changing the rules after the fact would have been very damaging to both Worldcon, the Hugos, and relationships between fans in the United States and fans elsewhere in the world.

But that doesn’t mean we should ignore what has happened.

It's obvious the Chinese government didn't want certain people to win, or some people assumed that’s what the government wanted. But there were also Americans Worldcon volunteers involved in all this too. File 770 asked Dave McCarty, who was the Chengdu Worldcon vice-chair and co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division, what was the reason for declaring some people and works not eligible.

McCarty’s response: “After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.”

Yeah, that's not a true answer.

Cheryl Morgan, who is heavily involved in Worldcon work and is not happy about all this, raised an interesting point about the release of the statistics. As she said, it would have been very easy to totally manipulate the statistics so no one would ever notice what happened. Instead, what was released is “a set of nomination statistics that makes it very clear that shenanigans have taken place. Maybe we should be thinking about why they did that.”

This is an interesting point. That said, I’m not sure if the stats were released to bring attention to what happened. Perhaps so. Or perhaps enough time has passed that some of the people involved are no longer worried about the larger SF/F genre knowing what happened.

Either way, this news should outrage everyone who cares about the Hugo Awards. In addition, perhaps this will finally cause people to change the WSFS constitution so there’s more centralized oversight of the SF/F genre’s biggest awards and so something like this never happens again.

Sadly, based on the Hugo Award stats being delayed so long, it's obvious people were aware these revelations would be controversial. There was plenty of time to create answers to the questions now being raised.

That didn't happen. As a result, I predict we will never get definitive answers on why these particular writers were deemed not eligible.