What’s Up with the Hugo Awards This Year, and Thoughts on F&SF Awards

This year Worldcon, run by the World Science Fiction Society, held its annual convention in Chengdu, China. Soon afterwards the results of the Hugo Awards, a set of awards for fantasy and science fiction writing whose ceremony is held at WorldCon, were released (in part) and rumblings began in fandom (including readers, writers, editors, and publishers) over the fact that a number of works seemed to have been dropped from the ballot without their authors being notified or any sort of public statement and that the numbers were…odd in a way that suggested tampering.

I am not going into the math of it. If you want something along those lines, you should check out the blog of Camestros Felapton, who has thought about the numbers and their implications much more than I have. Suffice it to say that by the time when the “long list” or full set of data came out — a release whose long delay seems to be an attempted cover-up — it was apparent things had gone severely awry. People and works had been declared ineligible without any reason provided or notification. And mystifyingly enough, some of them were works already being published in China, so presumably ones that would have been pre-vetted by any censor system.

And when people asked about what was going on, Dave McCarthy, the administrator in charge of it…