R F Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Neil Gaiman were ruled ineligible for the 2023 Hugo Awards in 2023 despite receiving enough nominations.
Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: “Until now, one of the things that’s always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process… This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don’t damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years.”
It’s like the Hugo’s are trying their hardest to become irrelevant
Yeah, because we westerners are more important than the billion Chinese when you want to make money.
What in the world is going on in this thread
I’d say it’s actually pretty explicable
Feel free to enlighten those of us who are out of the loop.
All three authors have criticised the CCP in the past. The awards were held in Chengdu, land ot pandas , spicy food , and snowflake leadership. Two of the authors are from international Chinese diaspora . The snowflakes running the country are incredibly sensitive to what ethnic han Chinese outside China - especially in public spheres - say about them. They threw Gaiman in for good measure ( atleast theyre consistent which is kind of surprising). This is just another small measure of softpower being exerted. Any author with reliance on that market is either self censoring or prepared to not have access to it. So clearly its what Hugo did in order to leave in one piece. Mustve been some interesting conversations go on.
What would you explicate it with, though? an explication of sorts? something else?
100% plicable.
Gee I wonder what the reasoning for leaving Gaiman out of the title was…
I’d be very interested in hearing a hypothesis from you that explains all of the data rather than less than half of it.
I’d be very in hearing you make sense?
Sorry, let me rephrase that and see if it’s more easily parsed:
What is it you think is going on here, and how does your explanation explain these three authors’ situation?
Thanks.
If I knew, I wouldn’t be wondering.
Ah. If that’s the case, you might want to work on your own phrasing. There’s a strong implication in your initial statement that you have a hypothesis, but you wanted to be coy with it, so I attempted to draw you out. I was hoping it was something interesting.
Yea that’s what I thought as well, that guy knows more than they say
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I don’t like Neil Gaiman, I find his writing a bit repetitive and his personality is a little grating. But are these other two authors any good? I’m always looking for new science fiction authors to get into, and quite liked Cixin Liu if these have been translated from Mandarin.
R F Kuang is American and Xiran Jay Zhao is Canadian. They write in English.
Oh, if they were good I’d probably have heard of them then?
There was a time you’d never heard of any of your favourite writers. But then you did and you enjoyed them. If you’d dismissed them with a “how good could they be if I’ve never heard of them?” you’d never have discovered them. Don’t be a twit.
I’m not being a twit, I’m being obnoxious on the internet to amuse myself while I have a virus. I imagine I will check out both of the authors mentioned.
…that is being a twit.
Yeah… in my defence, my throat is very sore.
There is such a massive amount of content now that there are many, many excellent authors and creators that you have never heard of
you are in the process of hearing of them now
Yes, I’ll accept that analysis.
Well, that’s certainly a reaction.
They are young and new, they mostly write fantasy and scifi, I have never read their works but have heard of their name in recommendations and booklists.
I’ve read all of R.F. Kuang’s books and they are all in my top 10 favorite books ever. Check out The Poppy War series.
I really like Xiran. Kinda smacks you over the head with the message of the book but really fun to read with a great setting and twists.
I’ve tried a couple of things from R F Kuang. If you like super generic fantasy tropes with an East Asian feel, you’ll probably enjoy their stuff. I haven’t finished any full series because there just wasn’t anything to hook me. I think major authors like Raymond Feist and Terry Brookes also suffer from the generic argument albeit with a European setting so YMMV.
