The 2023 Hugo Nomination Scandal Gets Worse

I already spent thousands of words writing about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal and frankly I don’t want to deal with this anymore at all. For starters, this is the time when we should be talking about the 2024 Hugo nominations and not still be talking about last year’s longlist. Also, I have plenty of other problems right now and really no time for more Hugo drama.

However, the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal just got a lot worse and this bombshell is so big that it requires its own post.

One of the last bigger updates to my previous Hugo post apart from “Well, the numbers make even less sense now than before” stuff was that 2023 Best Fan Writer winner Chris M. Barkley actually got hold of 2023 Hugo administrator Dave McCarty at the 2024 Capricon convention in Chicago and managed to interview him. The result was 45 minutes of Dave McCarty making excuses and saying basically nothing. There’s also a transcript here, which is just much empty blathering as the audio recording.

However, it turns out that Dave McCarty wasn’t the only member of the 2023 Hugo committee that Chris talked to at Capricon. He also talked to Diane Lacey, another member of the 2023 Hugo committee, who was a lot more forthcoming than McCarty and provided Chris with several internal e-mails from the Hugo committee as well as a spreadsheet regarding elgibility checks, which clearly show that the western members of the Hugo committee pre-emptively flagged works and individuals that might be considered politically problematic in China.

Chris and 2023 Best Fan Writer finalist Jason Sanford analysed the e-mails and compiled this report, which you can read at File 770 or at Jason’s Genre Grapevine column. Head over there and read it and then come back. There’s also some interesting discussions in the comments, including comments from Chinese fans.

The e-mails leaked by Diane Lacey may be found here and the also leaked eligibility check spreadsheet may be found here.

Basically, Diane Lacey and Kat Jones (who, for full disclosure, was Hugo admin when I won in 2022, and with whom I’ve only had positive interactions so far) were in charge of researching the eligibility of potential Hugo finalists. This is nothing new and happens every year. Basically, the Hugo team tracks the top ten or so nominees and preemptively collects contact data and checks their eligibility, e.g. was the book or story actually published in the relevant year. This is the reason why Hugo finalists are normally contacted very quickly after nominations close, because the team already has the contact data and has done preliminary checks.

This year, however, the Hugo team members who check eligibility were also asked to check whether any of the works or individuals had been critical of China or – to quote Dave McCarty – “if the work focuses on China, Taiwan, Tibet or other topics that may be an issue in China”. McCarty also made it clear in that first e-mail that it may be necessary to pull some works and individuals from the ballot, because Chinese law demands it.

So rather than resign, that’s exactly what the Hugo team did – they highlighted potential issues with various nominees. Babel by R.F. Kuang was flagged as potentially problematic, even though the person doing the flagging hadn’t read the book, but only knew it was about China. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was also flagged for containing Chinese immigrant workers, but unlike Babel was eventually allowed to make the ballot.

The fan writer (and also fanzine, though we don’t have details there) category was flagged as full potentially problematic people, since several nominees had made remarks that might be construed as critical of China or had shared news stories about China or – shock and horror – reviewed books that dealt with Chinese topics. Several people were also flagged for agreeing with Jeannette Ng’s remarks about Hongkong back in 2019. Indeed, the only potential fan writer finalist deemed safe was O.Westin, who writes Twitter microfiction. Bitter Karella’s Twitter microfiction was flagged as potentially problematic. Paul Weimer, who was eventually disqualified, was flagged as having visited Tibet and having extensively shared photos of his visit. However, Paul never visited Tibet at all, but neighbouring Nepal. Meanwhile, Best Novel winner Ursula Vernon a.k.a. T. Kingfisher actually did visit Tibet, but this apparently escaped the notice of the censors. Never mind that I don’t see why merely visiting a place would be a problem, especially since the Chinese government actually wants tourists to visit their country.

For the Astounding Award, Xiran Jay Zhao, who was eventually disqualified, Naseem Jamnia, who was allowed to remain on the ballot, and Sue Lyn Tan (who does not appear in the final nomination data) were flagged as potentially problematic. Xiran Jay Zhao and Sue Lyn Tan were flagged for having written about Chinese history and mythology, while Naseem Jamnia was flagged for being non-binary, trans and outspoken about it.

We still don’t know what the problem with that Sandman episode was and why it was disqualified. At this point, it might have been something as simple as a character eating Chinese food in the episode. Because apparently, the only way you were safe from being flagged as a potential issue was never to have mentioned China at all and not to be LGBTQ+ and outspoken about it either.

This is absolutely horrifying and even worse than we thought. I should also probably link to Ada Palmer’s great post about censorship and self-censorship again, because that’s exactly what happened here. It wasn’t that some Chinese government censor waltzed in and struck works and individuals from the Hugo ballot. No, the Hugo team preeemptively identified works and individuals that might upset some hypothetical Chinese government censor. And they also compiled dossiers about potential Hugo finalists and combed their social media feeds for potentially problematic content, which reminds me far more of the Stasi than of a Hugo committee. Camestros Felapton shares his reaction to reading a dossier compiled about himself and his work here.

Worse, the Hugo committee weren’t even very good and consistent about it. Note that Paul was flagged for having visited Tibet, when he never actually did, whereas the Hugo finalist who actually did visit Tibet was not flagged. I freely admit that I haven’t read Babel, but what I’ve read by R.F. Kuang does not strike me as overly critical of China, rather the opposite. Also note that Babel was actually published in China, so actual Chinese government censors clearly don’t view the novel as problematic. And while Xiran Jay Zhao is very outspoken politically (currently mostly about Gaza, but since I don’t follow them, I don’t know what they tweeted and tiktoked about in 2022/2023), they were not flagged for that, but for the fact that their work is based on Chinese history. Meanwhile, the self-censors completely missed that S.B. Divya has been highly critical of China (and actually declined her nomination because of this). They also missed that John Chu, S.L. Huang and Richard Man are all members of the Chinese diaspora and John Chu’s Hugo-nominated novelette is a gay superhero story.

There are a couple of other landmines in the report, namely that several Chinese language works were apparently removed for alleged slating before they even made the longlist. Note that Dave McCarty was also the Hugo administrator in 2016, i.e. one of the Puppy years, where slating very definitely took place, and yet found himself unable to remove any of the slate finalists from the ballot. And while I have no idea what We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu and the other Chinese novels which appear on the eligibility spreadsheet but not on the ballot, are about, they can’t possibly be worse than such literary gems as “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and S. Harris or “Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness, both of which Dave McCarty allowed to make the ballot in 2016.

ETA 02-16-2024: Vajra Chandrasekera points out on BlueSky that the alleged “slate” Dave McCarty was referring to was really a recommendation list by the Chinese science fiction magazine Science Fiction World and that there was nothing whatsoever problematic about it.

ETA 02-17-2024: Camestros Felapton compares the leaked validation spreadsheet to the Science Fiction World recommendation list. We’ve known about the Science Fiction World list for a while now BTW. It’s likely what boosted the Dune and Cyberpunk 2077 graphic novels, which got little buzz in the West, onto the ballot. And once again, there is nothing wrong with recommendation lists.

ETA 02-18-2024: A BlueSky user named Ricecooker has taken it upon themselves to list the Chinese titles and authors found on the validation spreadsheet, but not on the ballot.

ETA 02-18-2024: Zionius shares a detailed blogpost about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal and also compares the validation spreadsheet to the Science Fiction World recommendation list.

ETA 02-23-2024: Francesca Myman points out in a three part Facebook post that just letting the works from the Science Fiction World recommendation list make the ballot en masse would also have “resolved” Dave McCarty and pals’ perceived need to censor the Hugo finalists, because Science Fiction World, being a Chinese publication, would know what would upset the censors and what wouldn’t. Francesca Myman also notes that Science Fiction World specifically solicited recommendations for non-Chinese SFF that their readers might not be familiar with.

ETA 02-20-2024: Camestros Felapton notes that Dave McCarty simply replacing Chinese works from the Science Fiction World recommendation list with western works does not explain the nomination cliff phenomenon, especially since the number of works recommended by Science Fiction World doesn’t match the number of works on the clifftop in many categories. Camestros also notes that the only evidence we have for this alleged slate is that someone, most likely Dave McCarty, told Diane Lacey that there was a slate. And we know by now that McCarty is not even remotely trustworthy.

ETA 02-23-2024: Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones have compiled a detailed report digging into all the inconsistencies and issues with the 2023 Hugo nomination data.

ETA 02-24-2024: A Chinese science fiction fan named Prograft responds to Cam’s and Heather’s report with some background info about the Chinese works found on the validation spreadsheet and the Hugo longlist and notes that some of the Chinese Best Series nominees really seem to have been ineligible.

Apparently, Dave McCarty also always planned to release the full nomination stats as late as possible, i.e. ninety days after the Hugo winners were announced, in  order to protect that Chinese members of the Hugo team from possible reprisals. At least, that’s what he claimed.

Also note that we still don’t know why the nominations stats that were released make no sense and are riddled with obvious and less obvious errors.

ETA 02-15-2024: Camestros Felapton explains that he believes what happened is that the entire nomination data was tampered with multiple times to reach a desired outcome of a ballot with both Chinese and western works that were deemed politically inoffensive, but with headline categories like Best Novel or Best Series having only western finalists to ensure western winners and therefore international media coverage. This is as good an explanation as anything else.

ETA 02-17-2024: Camestros has analysed the validation spreadsheet and compared it to the actual ballot. He has also managed to solve the lingering mystery why In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman is listed twice on the Lodestar longlist. It’s a mistake and the second Serpent’s Wake should really be Unraveller by Frances Hardinge.

This is utterly infuriating. Everybody who has been following the Hugos and Worldcon for a while knows that there were concerns about the Chengdu Worldcon, including potential censorship issues, from the start. Since those genuine concerns were often also mixed with blatant xenophobia, they were easier to dismiss than they probably should have been. However, one thing that I and others kept pointing out that even if the Chinese members of the Hugo team might bow to political pressure (and note that I absolutely don’t blame any of them for what happened), we should have faith in the western members of the Hugo team to do what’s right, to not bow to political pressure and to refuse to have anything to do with censorship.

However, it turns out that’s exactly what they did. They happily went along with perceived political pressure (because we don’t know, if there was any actual pressure exerted on anybody) and preemptively vetted nominees for potential issues rather than resign in protest and sound the alarm. And yes, Kat Jones eventually did leave the 2023 Hugo team (and was not listed as a member on the Chengdu site) and Diana Lacey eventually sounded the alarm, but this should have happened much sooner. Meanwhile, Dave McCarty and Chengdu co-chair Ben Yalow happily went along with everything.

File 770 also shares these two statements by Kat Jones and Diane Lacey.

ETA 02-15-2024: Esther MacCallum-Stewart. chair of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, has released a statement that Kat Jones is no longer the 2024 Hugo administrator and will play no official role in the convention. They have also promised maximum transparency about withdrawls and decisions regarding ineligiblity.

ETA 02-24-2024: Nicholas Whyte announces that he is now Hugo administrator for the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow and also goes into the decisions he had to make regarding eligibility. IMO Nicholas is a great choice, simply because he is very careful to take the will of the Hugo nominators into account as far as possible, especially concerning edge cases. And yes, I disagree with a lot of the edge cases in Best Related, but that’s a problem with a category definition that’s much too lose and really needs to fixed, not with the Hugo adminstrator who’s faced with hundreds of people nominating a fanfiction archive in what was traditionally the non-fiction category.

ETA 02-16-2024: Diane Lacey has resigned from CanSmofs, the group behind the 2027 Worldcon bid for Montreal, Canada.

ETA 02-18-2024: Dave McCarty and Cheryl Morgan (who had nothing to do with this whole mess) have resigned from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee.

ETA 02-19-2024: Cheryl Morgan explains why she resigned from the Hugo Award Marketing Committee, even though she had nothing whatsoever to do with the Chengdu Worldcon. Basically, she feared reputational and legal repercussions, so the mountain of crap perpetrated by Dave McCarty and pals is now even harming people who had whatsoever to do with the whole mess.

ETA: 03-07-2024: At Salon Futura, Cheryl Morgan also addresses some of the weirder conspiracy theories surround the 2023 Hugo Awards and the Hugos in general as well as what can and can’t be done to prevent a repeat of last year’s drama in the future. Cheryl also explains why the World Science Fiction Society is organised the way it is.

ETA 02-25-2024: File 770 shares a press release by the WSFS Mark Protection Committee about actions taken in response to the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal.

ETA 03-13-2024: I didn’t think that Dave McCarty still had defenders, but apparently the Starship Fonzie podcast of the Milwaukee Science Fiction & Fantasy League indeed defends his actions.

ETA 02-16-2024: Mary Robinette Kowal, 2023 Hugo finalist for Best Novel and chair of the 2021 Worldcon in Washington DC, shares her experiences with Dave McCarty and Ben Yalow in this thread on BlueSky, which includes some troubling details about McCarty’s proprietary software to count Hugo votes (which is not the same software used by other Worldcons) and also confirms that it wasn’t the Chinese members of the Chengdu committee who refused to disinvite Sergey Lukyanenko as Guest of Honour following his horrible comments about the war in Ukraine, but Ben Yalow who believes that Guests of Honour should never be disinvited for any reason.

ETA 02-19-2024: And it gets even worse. Turns out that Dave McCarty is an abuser and sexual harasser, too, with multiple incidents and complaints going back to at least 2011 according to Meg Frank and Jesi Lipp. Honestly, why was this guy not kicked to the curb years ago and why do we even have Codes of Conduct, if we don’t enforce them?

ETA 02-23-2024: Vox Day feels the need to weigh in on the sexual harassment allegations (archive.org link). He’s also still pissed off that N.K. Jemisin has won several Hugos.

ETA 02-24-2024: Camestros Felapton notes that Larry Correia is cross that neither Cam nor anybody else is talking about him. Of course, Larry also gets cross when people he doesn’t like do write about him, since “angry” is is default state.

I have to admit that I haven’t checked very dilligently what the former puppies and hangers on have to say, because a) I have limited time and would rather use that to locate constructive commentary, b) puppy poo is not very pleasant to read and c) a lot of the former puppies are hanging out almost entirely on Facebook these days, where I don’t have an account and where it’s impossible to find anything without an account.

A cursory look at Larry Correia’s blog yields only this post by someone named Jack Wylder (archive.org link), which is the basically invective laden conspiracy theory stuff about how the Hugos have been vetting authors and excluding them based on political views for ages. Nevermind that Larry Correia and the puppies themselves disproved this with their antics, since none of the works they pushed onto the ballot were ever disqualified, unless they really weren’t eligible. And the Hugo admins during the puppy years included many of the same people who are involved in the current scandal.

ETA 03-17-2024: On BlueSky, Chris M. Barkley highlighted a Twitter post by Larry Correia, in which he called Chris and Jason Sanford “arseholes” and also went on about Chinese Communists, even though we know that the people who tampered with the Hugos weren’t Chinese Communists at all, but western SMOFs.  But then Larry Correia apparently thinks that everybody who is not a Baen author or an explicit fan of his work is an “arsehole”. He also seems to think a lot of people are Chinese Communists – at any rate I faintly recall him ranting about File 770 getting a lot of hits from China.

ETA 03-01-2024: Camestros Felapton clearly has a stronger stomach than me and has dug up an article about the 2023 Hugo controversy at the far right site The Federalist, written by Baen author and Dragon Award winners D.J. Butler.

D.J. Butler won the 2020 Dragon Award for best alternate history novel and he clearly seems to get his fiction and non-fiction writing conflated, because the article reads very much like an alternate history of the Hugo Awards and the Sad and Rabid Puppy drama. At any rate, if Butler’s version of events is true in some universe, it’s certainly not the one we’re living in.

Today wasn’t a great day for me, so I’m not really in the mood to rebut Butler’s nonsense (and that’s exactly what it is) point by point. Besides, Cam already did so. That said, until now I had always considered Butler one of the better Baen authors, who’s not a jerk and whose Indrajit & Fix sword and sorcery stories might actually be up my alley. But that Federalist article does not make me eager to read more of Butler’s work.

ETA 02-16-2024: On BlueSky, Courtney Milan shares some strategies for handling censorship requests without complying.

ETA 02-21-2024: At Medium, D.G. Valdron uses the Hugo nomination scandal as an illustration for the slippery slopes of moral compromises and how easily many people give in to perceived pressure. Valdron also claims that the Hugos are completely irrelevant, probably because D.G. Valdron doesn’t care about them. Well, I don’t particularly care about the Stanley Cup or the Superbowl or the World Series or the Grammy Awards or the Tony Awards or even the US National Book Awards either, but nonetheless I wouldn’t call them irrelevant.

ETA 03-17-2024: In his latest column for File 770, Chris M. Barkley responds to D.G. Valdron among others and basically tells Valdron where to stuff it. Whereupon Valdron shows up in the comments, complains about Chris misspelling their name and hilariously addresses Chris as “Mr. Glyer”. Valdron also wants us to know that they are very tough and have been in fights on parking lots.

Chris also reports about being suspended from the Washington Science Fiction Association Facebook group in response to his report about Dave McCarty’s shenangigans, about Larry Correia calling him an arsehole and some rando accusing Chris, a black man, of having won a Hugo because of racism.

What is more, Chris also unrecuses himself from Hugo consideration for 2025.

Finally, I also want to share this part from Chris and Jason’s report:

This report’s authors attempted to reach out to Chinese genre fans for comment, but did not receive any responses in time to include in this report.

An explanation for what might be happening came from Pablo Vazquez, a traveling genre fan and co-chair of the 12th North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Vazquez is also well known for his connections with genre fans around the world.

When Vazquez was asked if he could help connect the authors with any fans in China who might comment for this report, he said “I’m sorry. They do not want to speak to the media even anonymously.”

As Vazquez stated in a follow-up comment, “I have a lot of love for Chinese fandom and my friendships and connections there run deep. That’s a real and vibrant fandom there that is, like us, wanting very little to do with their government being involved in their fandom. They definitely don’t think it’s their government and instead think its corporate interests or, even worse, a fan/pro organization. Honestly, they seem more scared by that than anything else which saddens me to see and despite multiple attempts to get them to share their story they seem really hesitant.”

He elaborated further: “They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.”

Whether there actually was any active political pressure on the local or provincial level or not, it’s obvious that the Chinese Communist Party is clearly not happy that what was supposed to be a good-will propaganda event blew up in their faces and embarassed the country internationally. And while the Chinese government doesn’t particularly care about an SFF con in Chengdu, they clearly do care about being embarassed.

However, what’s most heartbreaking here is that the Chinese fans – who are not to blame for any of this and indeed are as angry as we are – are now at risk of losing SFF fandom as their safe space due to increased poltical attention. Because fandom is often a safe space for those who don’t quite fit into the mainstream, particularly in authoritarian countries. Not just in China, but also e.g. in Eastern Europe pre-1989. We’ve also had several cases in recent years of China cracking down on fandom spaces such as blocking AO3 or a general crackdown on celebrity fandom culture. It’s understandable that Chinese SFF fans now fear that they may be next and I really, really hope that this won’t happen.

This was supposed to be a Worldcon that would bring Chinese and western SFF fans together. But, largely due to the cowardice of several western SMOFs, it became a complete disaster that will harm not only the reputation of Worldcon and the Hugos, but may also harm Chinese SFF fandom who really don’t deserve any of this crap.

ETA 02-15-2014: John Scalzi weighs in on the Hugo scandal at Whatever and also wonders how to make sure something like this never happens again.

John Scalzi also points out that some people are always very eager to declare the Hugos dead for good this time, but that the Hugos have weathered other storms and will weather this one, too.

And indeed I saw some disturbing comments at BlueSky that not just the 2023 Hugo results cannot be trusted, but that all Hugo results shouldn’t be trusted, because most likely other politcally undesired finalists such as Palestinians or LGBTQ+ might have been removed from the ballot, too.

Which, sorry, is bullshit. For starters, there have been many LGBTQ+ Hugo finalists and winners over the years and there has been at least one Palestinian Hugo finalist.

ETA 02-28-2024: Michael J. DeLuca talks about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal at The Mossy Skull and also repeats the point about Palestinians being shut out from the Hugos. Not sure if he was the one making this claim on BlueSky or if that was someone else.

Michael J. DeLuca also makes an important point, namely that many SFF magazines use only PayPal to pay their authors, which is an issue, because PayPal does not operate in certain countries. And not just countries that are subject to economic sanctions like Russia and Belarus (and denying writers and artists from those countries publication or payment is not doing one bit to stop the war in Ukraine or topple Putin and Lukachenko), but also countries that are considered high risk for fraud or crime or terrorism. However, the difficulties of making international payments in an increasingly globalised world is an issue that goes way beyond the SFF community.

Besides, the Hugos are as transparent as an award can be. I don’t know of any other award which publishes detailed voting and nomination statistics. Indeed, the reason that the massive tampering with the 2023 Hugo ballot was discovered is because of glaring issues in the nomination statistics. If similar issues had arisen before, someone would have noticed, because we’re a community full of people who do data analysis for fun.

ETA: 03-13-2024: Camestros Felapton explains why he trusts the Hugos, namely because they are extremely transparent, so that even more subtle attempts to tamper with the nominations than what happened in 2023 would have been detected.

ETA 02-17-2024: On BlueSky, Camestros Felapton explains that he analysed the nomination data for every year going back to 2017, when EPH was introduced, and found no issues. So yes, the previous results are legit, whether you like it or not.

Finally, I also feel sorry for the 2023 Hugo finalists and winners who now feel even more unsure of themselves and their win/nomination than before.

ETA 02-18-2024: Samantha Mills, who won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Rabbit Test”, says that she can no longer consider herself a Hugo winner, because her story most likely wouldn’t have made the ballot, if many ballots hadn’t been tossed out.  I find this incredibly sad.

ETA 02-21-2024: Adrian Tchaikovsky, who won the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Series for Children of Time, has also said that he does no longer consider himself a Hugo winner either. Once again, I find this decision very sad, because these were good works and good winners.

ETA 03-10-2024: The crew of the most excellent Hugo Girl! podcast, who had initially recused themselves after their win in 2023, have unrecused themselves from the 2025 Hugo Awards onwards.

ETA 02-18-2024: Meanwhile, the usual suspects have apparently harassed Best Novel winner T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon online for not following Samantha Mills’ lead. I would say, “Can we please not do this?”, but that bunch won’t listen anyway, since harassing Hugo winners and finalists is one of the few joys they have in their sad little lives.

The closest comparison here are probably the 2015 and 2016 Hugo finalists (and to a lesser degree the 2014 and 2017 Hugo finalists). Everybody knows that many of the finalists on those ballots shouldn’t have been there and only made the ballot due to the Sad and Rabid Puppy slates. Yet those works are still listed as finalists – even eye-bleedingly terrible stuff like “Safe Space as a Rape Room” or SJWs Always Lie. And the winners are still listed as winners and to my knowledge, none of them have disavowed their win (and many of the slate finalists still call themselves Hugo finalists, too), even though there were a few who won by default due to being the only non-slate (and often the only non-terrible) finalist on the ballot that year.

IMO this is also how we should treat the 2023 Hugos. Yes, we know that many of those finalists shouldn’t have been on the ballot, but we voted based on what was there and we have some good winners. And overall, the 2023 Hugo ballot was much better than the shitshow that was 2015/2016.

ETA 02-18-2024: Wendy Xu, who was nominated for her graphic novel Mooncakes in 2020 (when Tammy Coxen was Hugo administrator), has now renounced that nomination and is ashamed to be associated with the Hugos. That’s her choice, but personally I feel that’s a complete overeaction.

Also, you won’t get that from me. I’m proud of my three Hugo nominations and of my Hugo win, all of which I won fair and square.

ETA 02-17-2024: Science fiction writer Elizabeth Bonesteel also briefly weighs in on the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal as part of a longer post about her less than ideal publishing experience and writes how sorry she feels for the authors who were Hugo finalists and even winners in 2023 and who now have that achievement tarnished through no fault of their own.

BTW, if you haven’t already, go and read Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Central Corps series. They’re very good, basically a darker Star Trek. That first book, The Cold Between, was on my Hugo ballot in 2017.

ETA 02-15-2024: The mainstream news coverage is coming a lot quicker this time around, because Amy Hawkins at the Guardian reports about the latest developments in the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal.

ETA 02-16-2024: For more mainstream coverage, BBC Radio 4 Front Row covers the Hugo nomination scandal and also offers interviews with writers Andrew Hawkins and Emma Rice.

ETA 02-16-2024: For yet more mainstream coverage, Mithil Aggarwal reports about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal at NBC News and also interviews Paul Weimer, one of the ineligibles.

ETA 02-17-2024: The mainstream coverage continues with Alexandra Alter’s very good article in the New York Times, linked here via File 770‘s gift link. Correct me, if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the New York Times reported about the puppy drama.

ETA 02-23-2024: More mainstream coverage courtesdy of Andrew Limbong at NPR, which includes interviews with Diane Lacey, Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley as well as a clip from Chris’ interview with Dave McCarty.

ETA 02-17-2024: Nardos Haile offers yet more mainstream coverage at Salon.

ETA 02-18-2024: Zoe Guy offers a detailed rundown on the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal at Vulture.

ETA 03-01-2024: Simina Mistreanu briefly discusses the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal, though her article for Associated Press focusses more on the history of SFF fandom in China and the Chengdu Worldcon in general.

ETA 02-17-2024: Lauren Irwin offers a brief summary of the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal in her article at the conservative US news site The Hill.

ETA 02-21-2024: Here is some mainstream coverage from Sweden, courtesy of Alice Hermansson at Dagens Nyheter.

ETA 02-16-2024: Sophia Stewart at Publishers Weekly mostly focusses on the statement by Esther McCallum-Stewart, chair of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, in her article about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal.

ETA 02-16-2024: Cheryl Eddy shares a summary of the latest revelations regarding the Hugo nomination scandal at io9.

ETA 02-24-2024: The Passive Voice, a blog by an IP lawyer that used to be really popular in indie writer circles, also weighs in on the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal, drawing mostly on Cheryl Eddy’s io9 article. The few comments added by the blog’s author Passive Guy show that while Passive Guy may know a lot about IP law, he knows nothing about how the Hugos and Worldcon work. The comments are full of pooping puppies and remind me why I stopped following that blog ages ago.

ETA 02-16-2024: At Boing Boing, Ruben Bolling also shares an update of the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal.

ETA 02-16-2024: At Reactor, the website formerly known as Tor.com, Vanessa Armstrong offers a summary of the latest state of the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal.

ETA 03-05-2024: Locus has expanded its original report about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal with new information.

ETA 02-23-2024: Andrea Johnson interviews Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford at the RetroRockets podcast.

ETA 02-16-2024: YouTuber Daniel Greene discusses the latest developments in the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal as well as the Cait Corrain review bombing scandal (which I didn’t cover here, so just google her name and you should find it).

ETA 02-24-2024: Daniel Greene has made a follow-up video discussing even more latest developments in the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal. Sadly, there are some puppies pooping in the comments.

ETA 02-21-2024: Here is an Italian article about the 2023 Hugo nomination scandal at the Italian genre site Fantascienza.com

ETA 02-18-2024: The 2021 Hugo winner for Best Fanzine nerds of a feather weighs in on the latest Hugo revelations.

ETA 02-16-2024: The estimable Dr. Chuck Tingle weighs in on Twitter and points out that some people said he made the Hugos illegitimate, when “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2016, courtesy of Vox Day and his obsession with dinosaur erotica, even though the admin team (and the 2016 Hugo admin was none other than Dave McCarty) did things that were so much worse. Though I only recall a few people explicitly singling out Chuck Tingle among all the Rabid Puppy finalists and hostages (and there were many, many worse works on the 2016 Hugo ballot than “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”), especially not after Chuck Tingle epically trolled the puppies. Because love is real.

ETA 02-21-2024: At her blog, 2014 Hugo winner for Best Fan Writer Abigail Nussbaum notes that the 2023 Hugo nominations scandal got even worse.

ETA 02-16-2024: At New Scientist, Emily H. Wilson briefly addresses the current scandal and then looks back at the past glories of the Hugos.

ETA 03-10-2024: Here’s a call for submissions for an upcoming issue of the Hugo winning fanzine Journey Planet looking for proposals how to prevent the shitshow that was the 2023 Hugo Awards from ever happening again and generally improve the Hugo process. For this issue, editors James Bacon and Chris Garcia will be joined by guest editor Paul Weimer, who was one of the many victims of the 2023 Hugo mess.

ETA 02-16-2024: Fandom has a way of turning lemons Hugo drama into lemonade art, so enjoy Trish E. Matson’s poem “A Vanilla Villain’s Variant Villanelle”.

ETA 03-30-2024: A certain person named Dave has been refused a membership to Levitation, the 2024 Eastercon in Telford, UK, and was escorted off the premises by security after they refused to honour this decision con committee. A second person of controversial interest was allowed to remain under certain conditions. We do not know who this person is, but we suspect their first name may be Ben.