Statement on the 2023 Hugo Awards
Following the Chengdu Hugo Awards, we believed in good faith that we were the legitimate winners of the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Fancast. We subsequently announced Hugo, Girl’s permanent recusal from the Best Fancast category. We were honored and delighted by the win, and we wanted to make room for others to experience the same.
However, with each recent revelation about the administration of the Hugo Awards, we have become increasingly uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as legitimate winners. Viewing the nomination and voting data that others have meticulously combed through, analyzed, and presented in a thorough and digestible way, it initially seemed that Fancast was one of the less obviously suspicious categories. It did not appear that any of our Fancast co-finalists or entries on the long list had been mysteriously disqualified, as was the case in several other categories. That being said, Fancast is not free from strange numbers.
We became even more dubious once we learned that the Hugo Administrators had investigated and disqualified potential finalists* on the basis of assumed politics, queer and trans identity, and an imaginary trip to Tibet. We ourselves likely should have been disqualified under the same criteria. It does not escape our notice that as four white people, we may have been scrutinized less closely.
Finally, once we learned that the Hugo Administrators had unilaterally eliminated scores of Chinese ballots for supposed “slate voting,”† it became undeniable that the 2023 Hugo Awards resulted from a stunning intersection of malfeasance and incompetence.‡ It feels impossible to rely on the nomination and voting data, regardless of whether or not there was identifiable tampering in our category. As such, we no longer consider the results trustworthy, and we are not comfortable identifying ourselves as Hugo Award winners.
A Hugo Award is an achievement of a lifetime. It's a sad fact that when (or if) the 2023 Hugo statues finally arrive, every time we look at them, we'll be reminded of the shameful behavior of the administrators and the unfairness that resulted from it.
We remain deeply honored by the support of our listeners and everyone who nominated and voted for us. It is and was an honor to be on the ballot in 2022 and 2023 alongside other talented, hardworking creators. As we said in our Hugo acceptance speech, when we began the podcast, we never expected to become part of such a vibrant, kind, and supportive community. It is precisely that sense of shared community and trust that requires us to disavow the 2023 win.
For the foregoing reasons, we have decided to withdraw our recusal from Hugo eligibility, effective in 2025. We hope to have a future opportunity to participate in a fair, transparent Hugo Awards process, if voters decide to honor us again with a place on the ballot.
Sincerely,
Lori, Kevin, Amy, and Haley
* Leaked email correspondence between the 2023 Hugo Administrators; finalist spreadsheet compiled and annotated by the 2023 Hugo Administrators. Both of these documents were leaked by 2023 Hugo Administrator Diane Lacey, who provided them to Jason Sanford and Chris Barkley. Sanford and Barkley made these documents publicly available in their extensive report, linked below under Further Reading. Diane Lacey’s apology letter is available on File 770.
† Importantly, “slate” voting is not prohibited by the WSFS Constitution. The current e pluribus Hugo (EPH) voting system was designed to counterbalance slate voting, as a response to the Puppy years. It is also important to note that the WSFS could have banned slate voting (we make this observation without judgment as to whether they should or shouldn’t have done so), but they chose instead to implement EPH. Therefore, there was absolutely no basis to discard 2023 votes on the suspicion that they were part of a “slate.” Furthermore, it appears that those votes were in fact not part of a “slate,” but were instead the result of a recommendation list promoted by popular Chinese magazine Science Fiction World, in effort to get Chinese participants excited about and engaged with the Hugo Awards. Simply put, Western Hugo Administrators discarded the votes of sincere, earnest Chinese fans who only hoped to highlight their nation’s literature in an international forum. While nothing can truly rectify this situation, we hope at minimum that those Worldcon members whose votes were wrongfully discarded will receive a full refund of their membership fees.
‡ Thank you to zionius, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Yilin Wang for their work highlighting, explaining, and translating the information needed for us to understand and process the extent of what happened.