A massive scandal rocked the world of science fiction and fantasy writing on Thursday, as leaked emails revealed authors were quietly disqualified from winning the prestigious Hugo Awards if their work displeased the Chinese Communist Party.
The Hugo Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious awards for science fiction and fantasy literature. They have been presented annually since 1955 by the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, a massive and loosely organized literary society. The members nominate works published the previous year in numerous categories, such as Best Novel, Best Short Story, and Best Professional Artist. The annual convention to present the awards is held in a different city every year.
The 2023 Hugo Awards were held in October in the city of Chengdu, China, whose community of sci-fi fans lobbied hard for the honor of hosting the meeting.
Soon after the finalists were announced, the sci-fi world began rumbling with questions about why certain popular authors had clearly accumulated enough votes from Worldcon members but were not listed as awards finalists. The mysteriously excluded authors included Rebecca F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao, Paul Weimer, and perhaps the biggest name on the list, The Sandman and American Gods author Neil Gaiman.
Rebecca F. Kuang is a New York Times best-selling American author whose book Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution recently won several other high-profile awards, so her fans immediately noticed its exclusion from the Hugo finalists. Kuang herself expressed bafflement that her book could win the other awards but not be considered a Hugo finalist.
Rebecca F. Kuang (Mike Coppola/Getty Images for TIME)
“I assume this was a matter of undesirability rather than ineligibility. Excluding ‘undesirable’ work is not only embarrassing for all involved parties but renders the entire process and organization illegitimate,” she said.
Kuang turned out to be correct. A deep dive by journalists Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sandford uncovered emails that showed Worldcon administrators secretly blacklisted books and authors they thought Chinese censors would dislike, confirming the fears of Worldcon members who strongly criticized the decision to hold the event in totalitarian China.
Barkley attended the con and said that despite all of the controversies, it seemed to go off fairly well — except for an inexplicable delay in posting the list of nominees and voting results. In fact, those results were not published until December, 46 days after the convention, and the full list of nominees was not released until January 20.
The Chengdu Worldcon Convention Committee refused to explain why Kuang, Gaiman, and the others did not appear on the list of nominees, but Barkley and Sandford uncovered emails confirming that political considerations kept them off the list. Even more shockingly, the journalists discovered that Worldcon administrators from the U.S. and Canada were “active participants” in the censorship.
The missing books and authors were secretly blacklisted because they discussed topics unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party, such as Taiwan, Tibet, the crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong, and the Uyghur genocide.
The award ceremony for the 2023 Hugo Awards during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention WorldCon in Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, on October 21, 2023. (Wang Xi/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Kuang’s book Babel, for instance, stars a Chinese protagonist raised in Britain who studies to become a translator in an alternate history where magic exists. Political revolution is a major element of the story. Babel was erased from the list of finalists even though it had the third-highest amount of nominations at the convention.
Xiran Jay Zhao’s book Iron Widow is a fantastic take on Chinese imperial history but with giant robots. Paul Weimer was considered problematic because he had allegedly traveled to Tibet, discussed the Hong Kong crackdown on social media, and written a positive review of a book that reinvented classical Chinese literature with LGBTQ themes. Weimer later pointed out that he had never actually been to Tibet.
No one seemed quite certain why Gaiman was blackballed, but it apparently had something to do with the Netflix TV adaptation of a particular issue of his classic comic book series The Sandman. The episode in question follows Gaiman’s affable female incarnation of Death — a very pale Goth girl in the original, a black woman in the Netflix adaptation — as she goes about her daily business of ushering people into the afterlife.
The scandal became even more infuriating because the leaked emails did not appear to show direct interference from the Chinese government. Instead, the American and European management of the convention was submissively blacklisting works and authors they feared might make the Chinese Communists angry. Some of the emails referenced previous instances of Chinese government censorship and strove to anticipate which books should be banned because they might trigger the Communist censors.
“It’s also possible self-censorship was undertaken due to fears of what might happen if certain finalists made the final ballot or due to pressure from financial interests and businesses in China not wanting to upset a major investment opportunity,” Barkley and Sanford speculated.
Weimer was incredulous when Barkley and Sanford told him about the “political research” the Hugo committee conducted before blacklisting him.
“I mean, they came up with a dossier on all of us and went through stuff from ten years ago? I mean, I honestly think that the Hugo committee are cowards,” Weimer said.
”It’s not even competent political censorship — it’s haphazard bullshit,” he scoffed.
One of the 2023 Hugo administrators, Diane Lacey, admitted to Barkley and Stanford that the censorship was crude and somewhat panicked since there was no time to go through every potentially problematic book with a fine-tooth comb. Lacey said she flagged Zhao’s science-fictionalized fable about the rise of a Chinese empress because she simply did not know how today’s Chinese Communist censors felt about that particular bit of history.
“We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China, and, to my shame, I did so,” Lacey said.
Esther MacCallum-Stewart, chair of the 2024 Worldcon to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, issued a statement on Thursday apologizing for the “damage caused to nominees, finalists, the community, and the Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards” by the Chengdu censorship scandal.
MacCallum-Steward said she shared the “deep grief and anger” of the literary community over the Chengdu scandal and promised the Glasgow event would take steps to “ensure transparency and to attempt to redress the grievous loss of trust in the administration of the Awards.”
On the same day, Hugo Award administrator Kat Jones, who wrote some of the Chengdu emails that Barkley and Sanford published, resigned from the 2024 Glasgow convention. Several other Hugo administrators have already resigned in the wake of the scandal.
