The voting statistics for the 2023 Hugo Award, Lodestar Award, and Astounding Award Nominating and Final Ballot are now available. To see them, click here (PDF).
As is usual practice, the administration of the awards was delegated to the Hugo Administration subcommittee of the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon, and any inquires should be directed to them.
The Hugo Awards website does not administer the Awards. Each year’s Awards are administered by that year’s World Science Fiction Convention, which is solely responsible for the conduct of that year’s Awards. If you send questions regarding the 2023 Hugo Awards to us, we can only forward them to the current year’s Hugo Award Administrators.
Update, 1/20/2024 15:30 PST: A cut-and-paste error in the originally-posted statistics listed “Turing Food Court” twice. One of the two occurrences should have been for “Upstart.” We have updated the document. You may need to reload the page to see the corrected version of the document.
I have sent an email to the administrators but I am going to be public here, because I should be.
Why was I, among other works and people, considered ineligible, without any explanation or even being informed of that ineligiblity?
As with every other year, the individual Worldcon makes its own decisions. We can only report what we are told by each Worldcon. We don’t run the awards. WSFS rules give every Worldcon complete independence to run their own convention, subject of course to anything overriding the WSFS constitution such as local law.
Best reason I’ve heard yet never to have a WorldCon in China. “Local laws” that censor anything LGBTQ, feminist, or remotely progressive are unacceptable.
Did anyone ask the Chengdu bid committee if they’d run Hugo nominees past CCP censors? Did they answer?
> Best reason I’ve heard yet never to have a WorldCon in China.
Or at least, not while the current government variety is in place. Never say “never”.
Though I’d say the *best* reason is the fact that the Chinese government is actively committing genocide in Xinjiang, with something approaching the majority of Uighur women having been sterilized against their will and a million Uighurs in “reeducation” camps.
I’m going to point out that the vast majority of nominees are POC written, and the vast majority of books that won and got the most votes, were queer and/or written by women. In fact all the books that weren’t written by POC were written in English by white authors, I promise you that Chinese readers weren’t voting for that. The lack of diversity in the top books wasn’t from Chinese readers, but us here in the west. We literally only have ourselves to blame for that, stop being sinophobic.
Criticizing or calling-out an anti-humanitarian government currently engaged in genocidal acts against a specific group of people doesn’t make one “sinophobic”.
@The Beave No, but spreading USA-backed propaganda that has been disproven multiple times does
This is very curious. All the rules we hammered out and fought over a few years ago mean nothing? If they want to do first-past-the-post voting, that’s allowed?
If a WorldCon decides everything written by POC or LGBTQ people is ineligible, they’re allowed to do that?
If so, why did we waste all that time figuring out how the Hugos should be administered?
Imagine that for some reason a US state passed a law prohibiting any organization within that state from using anything other than first-past-the-post voting for any election of any sort. If a Worldcon were held in that state, it seems likely that the Worldcon would required to use nothing but FPTP for the Hugo Awards, Worldcon Site Selection, and any other election held at that convention, regardless of what the WSFS Constitution says.
WSFS rules only apply when they aren’t superseded by a superior authority. That’s not explicitly stated in the WSFS Constitution, but it should be obvious.
Seems like a good argument for not devolving the administration of the Hugo Awards to organizational entities beholden to local and state pressure.
I hope the organization is finally realizing how untenable that is! It seems like a pretty bad policy!
WSFS doesn’t have a central governing body or board of directors. Its rules are made by its own members, who meet annually at each Worldcon to discuss and debate changes to the society’s rules. If changes are approved by two consecutive years’ meetings, they take effect the following year unless otherwise provided.
There is no Board of Directors or central authority that manages the organization’s rules. See https://www.wsfs.org/rules-of-the-world-science-fiction-society/ for the current rules of the World Science Fiction Society.
So you’re passing the buck for silliness like Babel not being eligible but with no reason. So maybe address that. They’re your awards.
Joseph: The Hugo Awards web site does not administer the Hugo Awards. Every Worldcon runs their own Hugo Awards. There is no one single entity that runs each year’s Hugo Awards. All that we can do is report the results that were sent to us by the various Worldcon committees. Now you may not believe that this is how Worldcon and the Hugo Awards work, but it’s the truth.
It makes the award a bit pointless, don’t you think?
You might want to consider questioning future Worldcons and bids for Worldcons about how they plan to approach their own Hugo Administration. Remember, every Worldcon is a separate legal entity. Nobody has overarching authority over all Worldcons. Worldcons are sovereign once they are selected, although of course they have to obey any local laws that apply to them.
@hugos You can keep saying this until you are blue in the face, or you can accept your association with the awards (how is this even a question?) and provide some answers as is your responsibility given your privileged position in this discussion.
2024 committees should think long and hard about making all works inappropriately deemed “Ineligible” in 2023 eligible for the 2024 awards.
It won’t fix what happened in China, but something has to be done to (once again) attempt to restore the integrity and badly tarnished reputation of the Hugo Awards.
I feel it would be too confusing to bring back older works in next years voting. Instead, they should just give a Hugo to every work that was inappropriately deemed “Ineligible” in 2023. After all, apparently they have the ability to grant a Hugo to whoever they decide they want to.
Well, this year has only proven how shady and pointless the Hugo awards have become.
First off, the voting was very clearly rigged and corrupt, very clearly so, and nothing is to be done? And secondly, they have purposely excluded authors/books that are POC, LGBT+, or critical of China.
This award was once revered and able to change an author’s life, but now it’s evident that the Hugo’s have been bought, and it’s clear that they will offer themselves up again for purchase. They have lost all of their reputation and merit in a single year.
Shame on the entire organisation.
I’m going to point out that the vast majority of authors were Chinese women. While I don’t doubt that there was political reasons for Zhao and Kuang being disqualified, it wasn’t because they’re Chinese or from marginalized genders. Y’all are just being sinophobic as hell.
The Hugo Award should strive for maximum transparency at all times and make clear the criteria for any books disqualification. If its reasonable people will understand.
Is this situation is allowed to continue unexplained it will badly damage the Hugo’s reputation.
Each year’s Worldcon runs its own Hugo Awards. The administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards are not the administrators of the Hugo Awards for the following years.
No but surely you can collect the response for the decision-makers here. Y’all really need to think carefully about future awards.
There’s clearly a reason why no one is coming forward with an explanation about what happened. They are hoping it just blows over, and everyone down the line, including this website, is throwing their hands up in the air claiming there is nothing they can do.
There isn’t any point in elevating organizations and efforts as fishy as this. Why give more power and influence to a corrupted entity that will not address the situation and plan solutions when bad things happen?
If the WSFS wants to maintain the status & prestige the Hugo Awards have, they should really consider tweaking how the process works.
I’ve yet to see any info on why certain authors were deemed ineligible and excluded. It looks like they were targeted due to past criticism of the Chinese gov and/or themes in their work that are deemed “undesirable” by the party.
Why were the awards held in a country that lacks a right to freedom of speech and expression? Why is the committee not pushing the worldcon for more information on why works were excluded? Why did the Hugos not consider that the CCP might intervene and muck around with the process? Are there rules in place to prevent the Hugos from being held by a worldcon in a country where these freedoms aren’t present?
This isn’t just an issue for writers critical of the CCP – there are many countries where themes like LGBTQ+, freedom of speech, rebellion, etc. are illegal or very dangerous.
I hope to see these things:
1. A detailed explanation of why these works were excluded
2. A plan for preventing awards from being held in places that, by law or custom, may exclude or influence the results
3. A plan to ensure the excluded works are considered at the next awards (either as straight candidates or retro-hugo eligible)
Boo to censorship! Shame on the organization. Transparency or else.