2023!

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 1 Jan, 2023

3 comments

Onward into the future! And to start 2023 off on an up note, while I would be more than happy to be a finalist for almost every speculative fiction award this year, please don’t nominate me for a Hugo in 2023.

Chengdu won the WorldCon. The rival bids could have done better jobs of campaigning but they didn’t. People could have voted for the rival bid (as I did), but they didn’t, at least in sufficient numbers. The fact is Chengdu won the 2023 Worldcon fair and square.

Having won, they have gone on make extremely dubious choices for their Guests of Honour. Sergey Lukianenko an avid supporter of the ongoing Russian effort to obliterate Ukraine and Ukrainians, while Liu Cixin supports the Xinjiang internment camps. It’s their WorldCon, and they can do what they like but I am not going to supply implied support by standing for or accepting Hugo nominations connected to this WorldCon.

Given that in the year since they won, Chengdu has not yet managed to set up essential elements of a WorldCon, this may all be academic. Nevertheless: to paraphrase William Tecumseh Sherman, I won’t run if nominated and won’t accept if I win.

Comments

Tim

From Lukyanenko's Wikipedia page:

On 28 February 2022, Lukyanenko was the leading signatory of a public letter with a few other authors supporting Russian military invasion of Ukraine launched four days earlier. The letter makes allegations of NATO's "secret plans to destroy Russia", Western countries' "embracement of Nazis", calls the 2014 Crimean status referendum legitimate and "free", and claims Russia's invasion aimed at "bringing peace in Europe".

On 3 September 2022, at Chicon 8, the World Science Fiction Society passed a resolution condemning Lukyanenko's pro-invasion views and asking that he be disinvited as Guest of Honor at the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu.

In late October 2022, Lukyanenko appeared as a guest on the RT show of Anton Krasovsky when Krasovsky mocked rapes of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers and called for Ukrainian children to be drowned or burned alive and the rest of the country shot. "Whoever says that Moscow occupied them, you drown them in a river with a strong undercurrent [...] shove them into huts and burn them up." When asked how Russia could annex Ukraine when this would mean incorporating many people who did not wish to live under Russian rule, Krasovsky suggested: "So we shoot them."

Gary McGath

Thank you for making this decision and saying so.

It could be fun if some works with strong anti-authoritarian themes, like Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio or any of the episodes of Andor, were nominated.

John Dallman

Well said, sir.