Hugo Nominations

Hugo nomination data is out and there is controversy. Evidence, even, of rigging on the part of the organizers. I'm not going to get into the numbers, but here is a good breakdown, which also includes other links to further discussion at the bottom. (I will particularly point out Jason Sanford's Genre Grapevine post, which shows no hesitation in calling out the shenanigans.)

This is the latest in a long line of controversy surrounding the Chengdu Worldcon, and it highlights a significant flaw in the organizing process as a whole: Worldcon insists that it has no central organization and every Worldcon is a separate organization that is merely licensing the trademark. There are provisions for keeping the chain of succession intact if one of these fails entirely, but Worldcon has no control whatsoever, it's all in the hands of the voters.

Which means, among other things, that any dictatorship government with a sufficiency of money and organization can send in enough ballots to get the Worldcon. There was some concern about this in the voting stage, that there were a number of ballots that were fake, but speculations along these lines were put down to racism on the part of people who didn't want to have it in China. In fact, most objections to the Chengdu Worldcon were put down to racism despite... everything about the Chinese government. Sometimes not wanting to have it in a country that hasn't got civil rights is about not wanting to have it in a country that hasn't got civil rights! (I mean... I would also have objected to having it in Poland before their most recent election.)

The problem was, the attempts at preventing it by necessity involved an attempt at subverting the Worldcon rules and engaging in backroom dealing that was very much not in the spirit of the thing, because WSFS refuses to grow up and admit that they are responsible for the damn con and change the bylaws to work in the modern world. Kevin Standlee is particularly disingenuous about it-- not that that's anything new for him; he's been disingenuous for as long as I've been following Worldcon politics--by casting himself as the noble one who sounded the alarm and attempted to stop it by leading that charge to subvert the rules... which entirely ignores the fact that he's been one of the leading voices insisting that WSFS is not and can never be responsible for the con and has actively worked to prevent rules from changing to prevent something like this from happening before the only way to stop it was underhanded shenanigans that absolutely did not have any place in Worldcon. He did everything possible to prevent discussion of how to change things until it became unmistakable that change was necessary, and then he tried to break those rules he so worships, and now he hails himself as a heroic Cassandra.

The thing is, I do believe he is accurately stating the way the con works. It's just that I don't take that as absolving WSFS of responsibility.

I take it as a sign it's time to change the governing documents of the WSFS. For the WSFS to stand up and admit they are responsible for the name, for the buck to stop there, for the Business Meeting to pass a rule creating a permanent Hugo administration committee and some sort of guardrails on site selection to prevent the con from going to a country with a dictatorship. At least, they do if they want any of us younger fans to take them seriously.

Then again, we all saw during the AO3 Hugo how much they care about having the younger fans take them seriously, so I don't hold out much hope.

(And if you're about to rant at me about how I should get involved then, I have my own con to deal with-- much noise was made this year about Arisia needing the younger generation to stand up and get involved; I have every intention of involving myself with that as soon as I've settled in at the new day job.)