this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Gotta say that it boosts my confidence in the Hugo Awards to see Babel NOT get nominated. This has zero to do with the author's nationality and ethnicity and everything to do with Babel being a poorly written novel (with the ending obvious a long way off) and horrific character development. It would be shameful to award a novel where all characters are stand in caricatures of their cultures of origin instead of actual individuals. It just comes across as racist in itself, promoting stereotypes, instead of merely showing the reader that racism existed.
The caveat being that writing quality isn't a reason to mark a book as "Not Eligible". So even with your critique, it seems odd that you'd have increased confidence in the awards because a government censored a book you didn't like.
It makes no sense to say a government censored it. It makes the Historical British Empire look evil. The UK is certainly not controlling the Hugos. It criticizes the Chinese CCP zero, because they are not mentioned. It shows great evils that were done TO China in the past by colonial powers, which should be a positive from the CCP perspective. The Hugos certainly have not been snubbing Chinese authors (see award winner Liu Cixin), and therefore the USA has not stopped them. I mean, Liu Cixin shows us that the revolution in China could have traumatized some people, yet it won.
EDIT to add: Now, I've just seen a post over on Reddit that actually explains what people think are going on with the Hugos this year. This post didn't explain that at all. I still can't see any logic behind this supposed censorship, but it's nice to have context. For anyone else who doesn't follow World Con Politics: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/19ctcmn/im_a_bit_surprised_by_the_relatively_subdued/
I don't even understand your rant. The committee running WorldCon each year has total control over the Hugo awards. This year the "Chengdu Worldcon Hugo committee had inserted a worrying clause indicating that local government officials could invalidate nominations for breaching the norms and standards of China."
What did that have to do with the UK or any other year's WorldCon?