81st World Science Fiction Convention
The 81st World Science Fiction Convention, also known as 2023 Chengdu Worldcon, was held on 18–22 October 2023 in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. The co-chairs were Chen Shi, Ben Yalow, and Hongwei He.
Some fans and authors criticized choosing a Chinese city, citing human rights in China; about 100 authors wrote an open letter asking for the convention to be moved to another place. After the convention, some American websites commented that a number of Hugo Award ballots were rejected, and that the administrators excluded some nominees from the awards process for political reasons.
Participants
Guests of honor
- Cixin Liu
- Sergey Lukianenko
- Robert J. Sawyer
Awards
The winners were:
| Category | Winner | Notes |
| Best Novel | Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher | |
| Best Novella | Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire | |
| Best Novelette | "The Space-Time Painter", by Hai Ya | |
| Best Short Story | "Rabbit Test", by Samantha Mills | The author disavowed the win due to the ballot controversy. |
| Best Series | Children of Time series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky | The author disavowed the win due to the ballot controversy. |
| Best Graphic Story | Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, Krzysztof Ostrowski | |
| Best Related Work | Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins | |
| Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form | Everything Everywhere All at Once, written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Sheinert | |
| Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form | The Expanse: "Babylon’s Ashes", written by Daniel Abraham, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, directed by Breck Eisner | |
| Best Professional Editor, Short Form | Neil Clarke | |
| Best Professional Editor, Long Form | Lindsey Hall | |
| Best Professional Artist | Enzhe Zhao | |
| Best Semiprozine | Uncanny Magazine | |
| Best Fanzine | Zero Gravity Newspaper, by RiverFlow and Ling Shizhen | |
| Best Fancast | Hugo, Girl!, by Haley Zapal, Amy Salley, Lori Anderson, and Kevin Anderson | |
| Best Fan Writer | Chris M. Barkley | |
| Best Fan Artist | Richard Man | |
| Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book | Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor | Not a Hugo Award; presented by the World Science Fiction Society |
| Astounding Award for Best New Writer | Travis Baldree | Not a Hugo Award; presented by Dell Magazines |
Site selection
The following committees announced bids for hosting the convention:- Chengdu 2023
- Memphis in 2023
- Nice 2023
- Winnipeg in 2023
Controversies
Site controversy
In an article on the Esquire magazine, Jason Sanford, a three-time Hugo finalist, said that “There were concerns that a couple thousand people from China purchased memberships that year to vote for Chengdu. It was unusual, but it was done under the rules.”More than 100 authors, including Hugo winners and Uyghur writers, signed an open letter in March 2022 calling for the hosting to be reconsidered due to ongoing human rights violations in the Uyghur region. The choice of location was criticized due to the possible effects of the Chinese government's censorship regime and the exclusion of authors publicly critical of human rights in China.
Hugo controversy
The voting statistics for the Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award, and Astounding Award were published on January 20, 2024, much later than usual. Questions quickly arose amongst authors surrounding several works that had been marked as ineligible without justification, such as author Xiran Jay Zhao, The Sandman episode 6, "The Sound of Her Wings", and Babel by R. F. Kuang, which had been favored to win. Further scrutiny has been leveled towards possible inconsistencies or anomalies in the statistics themselves.Commenters on the Facebook page where the statistics were released asked Dave McCarty, a veteran of the awards committee, to explain why the four works were found ineligible. He said that he could not share exactly why but pointed them to the organization's constitution and rules. When commenters were unable to find a rule or constitutional provision that sufficed, the exchanges grew heated, with McCarty sometimes questioning or disparaging the intellectual capacity of his interlocutors, behavior he later apologized for. Emails leaked by Hugo committee member Diane Lacey, acting as a whistleblower indicated that these works had been excluded due to self-censorship by the Hugo Award administrators in order to appease the Chinese government, which has a strict censorship regime. Additionally, an unknown number of nomination ballots from Chinese voters were rejected because the award administrators considered them to be too similar to a recommendations list published by Science Fiction World, and thus equivalent to a slate. Locus wrote that this occurred even though "there is no provision in the WSFS constitution to remove slates from the ballot".
Based on complaints about the 2023 Hugo award process and official statements made about those complaints, Worldcon Intellectual Property, the non-profit organization that holds the service marks for the World Science Fiction Society, censured McCarty and two individuals who presided over the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon. WIP also reprimanded the chair of the WIP board of directors. Both the director of WIP and chair of the WIP board of directors resigned.
In February 2024, as a result of the controversy, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, chair of the 2024 Worldcon, to be held in Glasgow, announced the following commitments for the 2024 Hugo Awards: the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists will be published no later than April 2024; the full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately following the awards ceremony on 11 August 2024; and immediately following the awards ceremony on 11 August 2024, the Hugo administration subcommittee will publish a log explaining any decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution.