Hugo Awards under fire over censorship accusations, and SFF writers want answers
polygon.comThe science fiction and fantasy literature community is in uproar this week after the release of the voting statistics behind the 2023 Hugo Awards, which have raised accusations that the organizing committee censored the nominees in several categories.
The Hugo Awards are the annual awards program of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS), which has been celebrating works of sci-fi and fantasy since the 1950s. The 2023 awards were announced at the WSFS’ 81st annual Worldcon event in October, held for that year in Chengdu, China. When the Chengdu Worldcon subcommittee released obligatory voting statistics on Jan. 20, the SFF literary community was quick to point out and discuss a number of newly revealed oddities.
The statistics showed that several works seemingly eligible for the 2023 awards were disqualified without explanation. Most notably, these works include R.F. Kuang’s Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence, which was widely favored for the Hugo Awards’ own Best Picture equivalent, Best Novel, after winning the 2023 Nebula and Locus awards for the same.
The lack of answers around the reason for Babel’s ineligibility, along with other unexplained details in the voting data, have left the book community angry, suspicious, and confused.
The Hugo Award winners were announced in October 2023, but the Chengdu Worldcon subcommittee didn’t release the voting statistics until late January. This was right on the dot of the 90-day window the Hugo subcommittees have to release the year’s voting data; committees typically release it within days of the ceremony. Rather than clear things up, this data raised several questions about the integrity of the 2023 Hugo Awards and Babel’s disqualification.
As the statistics show, Babel had the third-highest number of nominations of the 15 books on the longlist for Best Novel, and only five fewer than the eventual winner, T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. Yet as the nominee pool dwindled throughout the consecutive voting rounds, Babe
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