People outside the Science Fiction world are probably entirely unaware of the current controversy engulfing the SF world. However, I think both the scandal and more to the point, the reactions to it, say quite a lot about a real lack of awareness of currents of imperialism and global soft power. “Soft power” is a term that refers to cultural forms of dominance and influence in the world system, as opposed to military-political “hard power”.
I need to (very briefly) outline what happened, at least as I understand at. I am not going to personalize this because, outside of the SF communities, the personal aspects are not really the point. The most prestigious SF award in the anglophone SF world are those given by the paying members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention (or WorldCon). These are called the Hugo Awards, after Golden Age SF writer and editor, Hugo Gernsbach. Now, despite the name of WorldCon, in its origins and in its membership, WorldCon is predominantly American and anglophone. There are many other anglophone SF awards, American and otherwise, and there are many other non-anglophone awards. But both because of American imperial dominance, particularly in the field of science and technology, and the because America has historically been the largest core constituency of SF, certainly in the anglophone world, the Hugos retain a prestige out of all proportion to their actual representation of the SF world. They are my least favourite SF awards and the best comparison is the way that the Oscars still dominate popular perceptions of the film world, except that these “Oscars” are voted for by (self-selected) “ordinary fans” not by a (selected) Academy.
WorldCon moves around. Basically, fan communities in a particular city and country bid for it and increasingly it has moved outside the USA. For the 2023 WorldCon, for the first time, a Chinese city, Chengdu, was selected to host the event.
What you also need to understand about the Hugos is that while the voting may be “open” and conducted by fans, the organization of the voting, the counting and all the behind-the-scenes activity is done by “volunteers” who in many cases have retained the position by turning up and knowing how things work better than anyone else, in other words by a self-perpetuating and exclusionary system of inside knowledge.
Of course, the sinophone and Chinese SF fan community is an almost entirely different cultural-linguistic group from the anglophone American SF fan community with relatively little overlap. Add to this the difficulties and dilemmas, real and imagined, of a largely ignorant foreign volunteer-run conference in an authoritarian county, and the scene was set for a shitshow.
The conference itself went relatively smoothly at the time, but how much a shitshow it really was is only now being revealed. The nomination and voting statistics are supposed to be released relatively soon after the conference, but it was not until the last minute of the allowable time that they appeared, and not only were many of the figure dubious to the point of being impossible, several big names had been excluded from some categories, of particular note being Chinese-American authors. No reason was given for their exlcusion and inquiries to the organizers were met with a combination of obduracy, rudeness and lies.
Now, we have even more information and it seemed that even more was going on behind the scenes. Not only did the organizers know exactly why those excluded were treated this way, but many others were excluded of whom we had no previous knowledge. These latter works and people were exclusively sinophone, and the reasoning was that the largest Chinese SF magazine had published a guide to the Hugo Awards including lists of suggestions for each category. The organizers decided that this constituted a “slate” designed to influence voting en masse, and therefore excluded most of the works promoted this way.
And the anglophone works excluded? Well, yes, of course it was done because the works contained themes or politics that could be offensive to the Chinese government, or people who had made statements that could also be interpreted that way (pro-Taiwan, pro-Tibet etc.).
However, what also seems clear is that none of this was done because of any direct pressure from any level of Chinese government, but what seems to have been anticipatory conformity by the organizers: they assessed both works and people for what might possibly cause problems in China; they decided that Chinese fans voting constituted a “slate.” And in doing so they managed to offend everyone.
My thoughts about this diverge markedly from most of the anglophone criticism I have seen, right or left, mostly because almost all of the critics are basing their criticism on very domestic American political assumptions about what is going on and what is at stake. So let me set these thoughts out clearly:
- The Hugo Awards are fundamentally anglophone and American and have always been this way.
- The awards would be better if this limitation was accepted – especially by anglophones & Americans.
- The problem is that American imperialism and soft power projection is basically accepted by Americans of most mainstream political persuasions. They don’t see the problem and then are surprised when contradictions emerge.
- Of course, if you try to bodge the anglophone / American SF world together with another global language / power-based SF community, there are going to be problems. And sure, the solution arrived at by the organizers (secret ballot-rigging and pre-emptive self-censorship) was the worst one.
- However, contrary to what well-meaning liberal American SF critics seem to think: it simply isn’t the case that you could have just had a free and happy democratic vote comparing the best Anglophone and Sinophone SF.
- This is for so many reasons. Mostly it’s not about authoritarianism versus democracy, but simply because the vast majority of both communities cannot actually read and understand the works produced by the other, and particularly not from the anglophone side.
- The situation is incredibly unbalanced: if you look a statistics on global translation, there are vanishingly few Chinese to English translated fictional works of any kind, and SF is a small subset of this. There are a lot more english language works translated in Chinese but it’s still a very small proportion of the total.
- And let’s look at power here. China is not an oppressed nation. It’s one of the three global power centres of the C21st (USA / China / EU). You can’t use American racial categories to judge global politics and international relations. China in the world is not the equivalent of Chinese- or Asian-Americans in the USA.
- So this is not about “racism” in the American sense; it’s about how naive and idealized notions of a single global SF community that is in material reality no such thing, butt up against the limits of liberal cultural imperialism and global soft power in a tripolar world.
- So: stop trying to make the Hugo Awards global. Keep them American and anglophone, not because of racism and nationalism, but precisely to acknowledge the cultural imperialism that inevitably is involved with projects to make things global when they are manifestly not so.
ubisurv 