Are the Hugo Awards tarnished by scandal and compromised integrity?
The 2023 Worldcon was held in Chengdu, mainland China. Members started noticing something peculiar going on with Hugo awards nominations. Some popular high profile authors failed to win even though among themselves the members figured out there should have been enough votes.
Furthermore,
Quote:[The convention] 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.
More investigation uncovered actions by the then management committee to suppress the possible nominations of certain authors and works that might discomfit the Red Chinese hosts, regardless of how many votes they got from the membership.
Pro-feedom SF/fantasy authors blacklisted from 2023 Hugo Award?
One of the authors whose nomination was squelched was Neil Gaiman, for reasons not very clear!
Interestingly, this censorship was apparently carried out
without any actual input from mainland Chinese authorities or agents, but by the managers of the convention, who apparently wanted to pre-emptively head off any displeasure on the part of their hosts!