STOP THE COUNT!!!!! Sci-fi fans immolate as Chinx rig the Hugo Awards

The Hugos are a prestigious literary award for science fiction novels authored by black women. The most recent awards were hosted in Chyna. As the underlying data for this year's winners came out, people noticed a pattern of strange last-minute disqualifications, numbers that don't add up, and Chinese treachery.

Accusations of BAD FAITH fly, but nobody's allowed to be racist so they're kind of tiptoeing around actually saying anything. After sifting through mealy-mouthed threads and comments for half an hour, I think the claim is the Chinx spiked politically undesirable books? Of course American left-progressives would never do that.

So the total of any column can't exceed the number of ballots cast, yes? But yet column 9 adds up to 1652, 15 more than the 1637 ballots.

RIGGED ELECTION!

Those stats are also weird in that Babel's points remain consistent throughout. It's hard to believe literally zero votes transferred to Babel as novels dropped out.

This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.

The scoring system has already become extremely convoluted as a way to freeze out rightoid coordination, so now it's even harder to tell what was really "supposed" to happen. So let's just point and laugh.

the Hugos are an institution set up in good faith. Any institution, grown large enough, must have provisions against bad-faith actors. To not do so is immensely stupid.

BAD FAITH!!!

operating in countries with strict censorship is a dangerous game, not just to the award, but to organizers. Pushes for diversity in operations must take political reality into account. For example, I would never suggest an award of this nature be held in Sri Lanka, given that we've tortured and jailed people for writing poetry on Facebook. I don't know the Chengdu organizers, but again: this naïveté is not useful. You may never know if they were operating on personal prejudices or because someone from the govt was peeking over their shoulder.

Sounds like we could learn a lot from Sri Lanka

McCarty, a Chengdu Worldcon vice-chair and co-head of the Hugo Awards Selection Executive Division, previously gave File 770 this reason for ruling R. F. Kuang's Babel, fan writer Paul Weimer, Neil Gaiman's Sandman tv series, and second-year Astounding Award nominee Xiran Jay Zhao as “not eligible”:

After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.

Token white male hack John Scalzi chimes in:

Even the speculation of state censorship should give pause to site selection voters regarding future Worldcons. For example, there is a 2028 Worldcon proposal for Kampala, Uganda, and while the proposed Worldcon itself offers a laudable and comprehensive Code of Conduct page, Uganda is a country with some of the most severe laws in the world regarding LGBTQ+ people, including laws involving censorship.

Holy fricking shit please do it in Uganda, that's gotta be the only way some strag shit doesn't win

Babel is set in a world where the British state uses magic to extract wealth from developing countries, with particularly focus on the first Opium War. It's the initial action in what China describes as the century of humiliation. It has be suggested that the Chinese government isn't terribly keen on works which show China as weak

"Ni hao, fellow Southeast Asians of Color! I just wrote this cool sci-fi book about how the West humiliated our poor backwards country and turned us into pathetic victims--my favorite kind of people!"

"No."

I can't believe I only won two of the largest awards for my book that nobody read!

Also notable by its absence from the longlist is The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin. Now N.K. Jemisin is not just a great writer, she's also extremely popular with Hugo voters and I find it unlikely that The World We Make got fewer nominations than the more obscure A Half-Built Garden.

Critical support to President Xi for removing NK Jemisin from the Hugo longlist.

!bookworms !writecel all I'm saying is I would have won

Ann Leckie, author of the most boring gender goblin sci-fi trilogy ever written, has a question:

OK so this is all a huge mess & no mistake. But I gotta wonder. Maybe you've got some committee members who say that if you explain what happened they will be dragged off to jail & never seen again. You come up with a statement to avoid this. OK so far.

What I don't get is, why be such an butthole to folks with predictable and understandable questions? Like, you can totally stick to the script without being a condescending butt about it. Why does condescending assery seem like the way to go?

I get that the secret police were texting you creepshots of your wife's hotel window, but why didn't you consider my feelings?

As a reminder of the rdrama Rules, anti-CCP sentiment will NOT be tolerated. I hope these mayos, darkies, and Westernized Twinkie baizuo learned their lesson.