N.K. Jemisin and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge

Day 14: We Need to Fix the Hugo Awards. Not Eliminate Them.

N.K. Jemisin author photo, by Laura Hanifin 2015.

I took a few days off from my writing challenge this month, because I had some deadlines on other projects and some health issues which required rest. But a storm has broken in my professional ecosystem, and it’s related to one of the most prestigious awards in Science Fiction. And yesterday, in a moment of great frustration, an anonymous fellow fan said something which connected me suddenly and powerfully with my own Black History—and made me very very angry.

I neither know nor care to know why the Hugo awards have been such a disaster for years. Just get rid of them. All I hear is people complaining about them. No one knows or cares who has won a Hugo award in this century. They have no value.

-Anonymous SF Fan

In response, I sat down today to write this (rather long) essay about N.K. Jemisin, the Hugo Awards, and how White Power movements can manifest even in a small and seemingly forward-looking field like Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

Here goes.

Question 1: “Who is N.K. Jemisin?”

Shortest possible answer:

She is one of the giants of 21st century science fiction and fantasy. She has made history as both a speculative fiction writer and as a Black speculative writer in a relatively short span of time from 2009-present.

My personal answer:

I discovered Jemisin for myself in 2016. The year I started reading her novels, I was coming back to SFF after nearly a decade of absence, during which I read very little fiction at all. I still identified as a fan, but I had lost touch with the field and where it was headed. I was discouraged both as a reader and as a writer. I wanted to love SFF, but I felt very blocked.

I would pick up a book or an issue of a magazine that was once a favorite of mine, then put it down again without finishing. I felt bored and frustrated with the genre that I had loved so much as a child, a teen, and a young adult. It was a heartbreaking experience; I wanted to be a fan, but the stuff I had once enjoyed no longer made me happy.

I worried that I had fallen out of love or “outgrown” the field. That I was in danger of becoming One of Those People who dismisses speculative fiction as “kid stuff”-- a phase that you pass through on your way to becoming a Grown-Up Who Reads Real Literature.

Once I started reading Jemisin, my boredom and existential dread vanished, and the joy of reading rushed back in. I was in my 40’s, cynical and jaded about many things, but N.K. Jemisin was the proof that I could still love SFF. What had been missing was novelty, challenge, a real sense of discovery—brave new worlds, and the people in them.

It turned out that I didn’t need to retread the tropes, stock characters and settings of the past. And I didn’t need superficially “exotic” trappings—what I needed was to grapple with a whole perspective on the human condition that I had not encountered before. So while Blackness in general or Black Womanhood in particular or N.K. Jemisin’s very individual genius was not the only thing missing from my life before 2016, she certainly met the needs that I had at that moment. And the door she opened for me led to a joyful journey of discovery, as I engaged with a whole generation of emerging talent in the field.

In short: N.K. Jemisin gave SFF back to me when I had lost it. I have never met her and I would never presume to speak for her, but she saved science fiction for me. So I have a very personal reason for including her in my Black History Month. I would have written about her even if a Hugo Award scandal had not come up.

But now that everyone has been forced to confront racism and corruption in the context of the Hugo’s again, I have even more reason to mention her, and explain what she has accomplished to outsiders who do not attend sci-fi conventions or read the latest news in the industry.

Who Is N.K. Jemisin?, Take Two:

Nora Keita Jemisin was born in the American Midwest, the child of two grad students at the University of Iowa. She grew up in New York City and Mobile, Alabama. Like many children uprooted by parental migration, she anchored herself with fiction, spent hours in libraries, and developed the desire to tell stories of her own. Her first books were literally self-published at the age of eight, bound with cardboard and string.

She graduated from Tulane in 1994 with a degree in Psychology and took a Masters of Education from the University of Maryland soon after. She spent several years as a career counselor, but in 2002 she began to take her writing more seriously. She attended Viable Paradise, a one-week residential workshop at Martha’s Vineyard, then joined one or two critique groups for aspiring writers in the Boston area.

Jemisin acquired a literary agent in 2005, but she was not an overnight success. It took more than five years of persistence before she and her agent found a publisher for her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. In the meantime, her short story “Non-Zero Probabilities” was published in Clarkesworld Magazine in 2009, and nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards. Those nominations might have nudged Orbit Books to take a chance and bring her first book to press in 2010.

Regardless of the motives behind it, the decision to publish Jemisin was probably one of the best business decisions ever made at Orbit. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was immediately nominated for five of the top literary awards in the industry, and won the Locus Award for Best Novel in 2011. Since that time, every major Jemisin publication but one has been nominated for major awards--and she often wins them.

In the context of the Hugo, Jemisin made both Black History and Worldcon history in 2016, when she won the Best Novel Award for The Fifth Season. In so doing, she became the first Black author ever to win the Best Novel prize. But she won Best Novel again in 2017 for The Obelisk Gate, and again in 2018 for The Stone Sky—which made her the first author in history to win the Hugo for Best Novel three times in a row.

The fact that she won for all three books of a single trilogy makes the achievement even more amazing--and makes it all the more unlikely that the feat will ever be duplicated.

It’s worth noting that The Stone Sky did not just win the Hugo; it also swept the Nebula and Locus Awards, an event that represents a standing ovation from fans, professional peers, and the press. Her writing in general, and of the depth and power of the Inheritance Trilogy in particular, thus became landmarks of 21st century speculative fiction.

Since 2018 she has won more accolades, some quite rare. She won the Best Novel Award from the British Science Fiction Association for The City We Became in 2020. She received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship or “Genius Grant” the same year, and is one of only three writers of speculative fiction ever to do so—the first having been the Godmother of Postmodern SFF herself, Octavia Butler.

In 2021, Jemisin was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, and her short biography was written by political leader and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. Her books have sold millions of copies world-wide, and she has been recognized as a once-in-a-generation world class talent. But for all her achievements and laurels, Jemisin is not a singular presence in the field. Instead, she leads the pack during a Renaissance of SFF.

Jemisin is equivalent to a DaVinci or a Michelangelo. She is part of a whole generation of creators who have burst into flower over the past 20 years to publish beautiful, ground-breaking, challenging and transformative work. Their books, stories, art and essays are often nominated for the top awards in the industry, and justly so.

I say all this to provide some context to the issues that have arisen with the Hugo Awards since 2013. Because the Hugo Awards DO matter, very much, and it matters who wins them.

If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have seen so many campaigns to seize control of them, and of SFF fandom and professional spaces in general, in the name of White Power.

Part Two: Worldcon and the Hugos, 1939-present

I won’t go into a full historical account of the Hugo Awards or the World Science Fiction convention here, because it is out of scope for this essay. What you need to know, even if you are an outsider who neither reads nor cares about science fiction, is that the Hugos are one of the most important and prestigious awards in the world of SFF. And they are associated with one of the oldest and most important science fiction conventions of the calendar year, the WorldCon.

WorldCon began in 1939 as a predominantly American institution. It was, for many years, an annual convention devoted almost entirely to the exploration, promotion and celebration of works by straight White men writing in English.

There are three lists we can review to understand the overall power dynamics within the WorldCon microcosm, which in many ways represents a vertical slice of SFF fandom as a whole. The first is the list of host cities for the WorldCon, the second is the list of WorldCon Guests of Honor, and the third is the list of Hugo Award winners. All three categories represent the balance of power in different ways.

The 1939 WorldCon took place in New York City. Every year since then (barring a brief hiatus during World War II), it has shifted to another city, usually in the English-speaking world. The vast majority of host cities have been in the USA, but there have been significant forays to Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland and Australia. In the entire history of the WorldCon, it has only been held six times in places where English was not the dominant language spoken by most citizens: Heidelberg (1970), the Netherlands (1990), Japan (2007), Montreal (2009), Helsinki (2017), and Chengdu, China (2023). Only twice has the convention been held in a country that was not dominated by a White ethnic majority.

A review of the Guest of Honor List reveals the gender and racial dynamics at play in SF fandom over several decades. As an example, the only female name listed as a Guest of Honor between 1939 and 1963 was Edna Mayne Hull, who attended in 1946 alongside her husband A.E. Van Vogt. If you exclude women who attended WorldCon alongside their husbands from the count, there were only female Guests of Honor in the four decades between 1939 and 1979: Leigh Brackett, the Queen of Space Opera (1964), and Ursula K. Le Guin and Susan Wood (1975).

A few more White women were invited as Guests of Honor in the 1980’s, but it must be said that they were often being acknowledged toward the end of their lives, literally decades after they had made ground-breaking and important contributions to the field. C.L. Moore (1981) and Andre Norton (1989) had been active as creators in the 1930’s, Betty Ballantine (1989) had started her work in the 1940’s, Kate Wilhelm (1980) and Lee Hoffman (1982) had been active in the 1950’s—in all these cases, women only received the GoH accolade long after it was due.

So far as I can tell, the first Black Guest of Honor at the WorldCon was Samuel R. Delaney in 1995. Again, a pattern of delayed recognition holds--his groundbreaking science fiction was recognized by his professional peers, who vote on the Nebula Awards, as early as 1966. By my count, to this day there have been only eleven Guests of Honor in the history of the convention that were not White. Of those, at least four were Guests of Honor when the convention was being hosted in their home country: Takami Shibano, Yoshitaka Amano and Sakyo Komatsu in Japan in 2007, and more recently Liu Cixin in Chengdu (2023).

A review of Hugo Award Winners, however, reveals a more dynamic history of change. For many years, women were non-existent at the Hugos in any professional category; White women were recognized only as contributors to fanzines, often among other staff members, three times from 1939-1968.

The first significant professional award for a White woman went to Anne McCaffrey in 1968 for “Weyr Search”, which took the Hugo for Best Novella. The first Hugo awarded to a Person of Color went to Samuel R. Delaney in 1970, for a short story called “Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”. In the same year, Ursula LeGuin won the award for Best Novel with The Left Hand of Darkness, and became the first woman to do so. Throughout the 1970’s, the Hugos continued to be dominated by White male creators, but LeGuin won Best Novel twice more in 1973 and 1975.

In the 1980’s, White women were nominated more often but seldom took awards in more than one Professional category in any given year. Octavia Butler became the first Person of Color to win two Hugos that decade, and Delaney would win his second Hugo for Best Related Work (non-fiction) in 1989.

From 1990-2005, White women slowly began to compete more seriously in professional categories. Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold emerged as powerhouse fan favorites in in the late 20th century: between 1983 and the present day Willis has won at least eleven Hugos for fiction in different length categories, and Bujold has won six—including four in the category of Best Novel, which tied her with Robert Heinlein’s earlier career record.

For People of Color, victories in professional categories from 1980-2005 were harder to come by. Octavia Butler’s two wins in 1984 and 1985, Delaney’s win for Best Related Work (non-fiction) in 1989, Nalo Hopkinson being the first Woman of Color to receive the Campbell Award for Best New Author in 1999, and Ted Chiang’s win for Best Novelette in 2002 are highlights of the period.

Both in terms of wins and in terms of nominations, the tide at the Hugo Awards did not turn seriously until 2008—the first year that four important Professional categories would be won by creators who were either A) not men or B) not White. From that time onward, the uncontested dominance of the Straight White Male appears to be over. White women and People of Color have won at least three important professional categories every year from 2008 to the present.

Celebrated creators who have built their careers and worked on their craft for decades—men like Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, and John Picacio--have been recognized with repeated Hugo awards for their excellence, just as Asimov, Heinlein or Frazetta were celebrated in the past. Hard-working women like Ellen Datlow have been recognized for their leadership and achievements as Editors, just as men like John Campbell were lauded in the Golden Age.

In 2012, TEN professional Hugo Awards went to creative people who were Not White Men—seven to White women, three to People of Color. And in light of historical patterns in North America, some sort of pushback was probably inevitable at that point. White men were bound to become fed up with all this competition for money, exposure, and the adulation of the masses. They were bound to fight back.

Part Three: Hugo Controversies 2013-present

The first major pushback against the presence of White women and People of Color at the Hugos began in 2013, when a White male author named Larry Correia decided that because his novel Monster Hunter Legion was published in 2012, he was entitled to be at least nominated for a Hugo Award, if not to win it. He began complaining loudly and publicly that the Hugo Awards had become discriminatory against his demographic (Straight White Males) and insisted that all awards given to White women or People of Color were not based on merit or quality, but on “Political Correctness”.

The misogynistic White Power movement that Correia began that year was dubbed “the Sad Puppies”, short for the phrase “Sad Puppies—Think of the Children!” Their slogan was a mocking take on the creative work of White women and People of Color, which Correia dismissed as “message fic”. It was his contention that women, queers and People of Color could only win awards thanks to a Liberal conspiracy, “little cliques” of bleeding hearts who voted as a brigade to keep the White Man down.

Correia’s campaign managed to generate over a hundred nominations for Best Novel for his book, but that was not enough votes to get the book on the final ballot for the Hugo that year. He did not give up, however, and like all White Power movements in North America, the call to action spread quickly. In 2014, Correia put together a full slate of Straight White (Conservative) Male-approved candidates to be nominated in every possible Hugo category. A much more organized movement of White Power activists pushed the slate by purchasing memberships to the WorldCon to stuff the ballot box.

Every single Sad Puppy candidate made it onto the final Hugo ballot through this concerted campaign to politicize the awards…but not a single Sad Puppy candidate won. En masse, collectively, the membership of WorldCon as a whole rejected the Sad Puppies and their work, and voted instead for candidates nominated by ordinary rank-and-file fans. Six professional awards were won by White women in various categories, and two were won by People of Color that year—Best Short Story went to John Chu for “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” and Sofia Samatar took the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Determined not to give up, the Sad Puppies launched a third consecutive year of assault on the Hugos under the leadership of Correia and neo-Conservative author Brad Torgerson in 2015. Another slate of Straight White (Conservative) Male-approved candidates was assembled, to be nominated in every possible Hugo category. Meanwhile, an even more radical right-wing pundit, Vox Day, joined the fray with a call to action to SFF fans who identified not only as Straight White Male Conservatives, but as openly radical neo-Nazi/White Power activists. The followers of Vox Day dubbed themselves the Rabid Puppies, and launched a simultaneous second attack on the Hugo awards to flood the nominations and the final ballot with candidates representing SFF as White Men thought it should be.

The results of the attacks on the Hugos that year were in many ways tragic. Sad and Rabid Puppy slates flooded the nominations for the 2015 Hugos, forcing out many candidates nominated by normal WorldCon attendees—including some who faced limited windows of eligibility, as with the Campbell Award. (Sidenote: you can only win the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in the first two years of your professional life—after that the window closes, as you are no longer “new”.)

What is even more sad is that several people who were placed on these slates had not been consulted about whether they wanted to be hoisted on the shoulders of a White Power movement. They found themselves nominated for Hugo Awards in both Fan and Professional categories, an achievement on the Bucket List of any science fiction creator or fan—but rather than be used to further a White Supremacist agenda, they had to withdraw their candidacy and decline their nominations. At least seven writers, editors and fanzines bowed out of the Hugos, and author Connie Willis declined the opportunity to present the Campbell Award. As she put it:

“In my own particular case, I feel I’ve also been ordered to go along with them and act as if this were an ordinary Hugo Awards ceremony. I’ve essentially been told to engage in some light-hearted banter with the nominees, give one of them the award, and by my presence–and my silence–lend cover and credibility to winners who got the award through bullying and extortion.

Well, I won’t do it. I can’t do it. If I did, I’d be collaborating with them in their scheme.”

Walking away from the chance to win a Hugo must have been a heartbreaking decision for some. I think it demonstrates the strength and integrity of the SF community that so many people refused to take part in the Sad Puppy machinations after they were shanghaied into the mess. When Marko Kloos withdrew Lines of Departure from the Best Novel category, he made room for The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which actually won the award and made history as the first Best Novel winner to have been translated into English from another language.

“Goodnight Stars” by Annie Bellet was withdrawn from the Short Story category as well, making room for Stephen Diamond’s “A Single Samurai”—but the results in that case were even more sad. The rank and file fans who attended WorldCon in 2015 resisted powerfully when any category had no voting option other than Puppies. Faced with a Hugo ballot flooded with Conservative and outright Neo-Nazi spam candidates, WorldCon attendees collectively voted for “No Award” rather than risk the possibility that the Sad or Rabid Puppy nominees would win a Hugo.

In both Pro Editor Categories, Best Novella, Best Short Story, and Best Related Work (non-fiction), No Award was given to anyone. It was a scorched earth solution that denied White Power activists the opportunity to win fame, fortune and a lasting legacy…but it also denied that same opportunity to a lot of hard-working candidates who might otherwise have earned a legitimate win.

Fed up with the malicious slate tactics of the Puppies, a new voting system was created to try and limit the impact of Puppy Politics. The new rules were called E Pluribus Hugo, and they were approved in 2015. Although the Sad and Rabid Puppies continued their assault in 2016, the SF community was no longer shocked by their antics, and reacted with humor and focused resistance.

Seven professional categories were won by women that year, including NK Jemisin’s first historic Hugo for Best Novel and Nnedi Okorafor’s win for Best Novella. It was a triumph for SFF in many ways—two Black women dropped the hammer on White supremacy with a resounding boom.

So yes. The Hugos do matter. And yes. Some of us DO know and care who has won them…and how.

Part Four: the Hugo Controversies Vs. Race Riots, Red-lining and Other White Power Tactics

I may owe the world an apology for using the phrase “Race Riot” in connection with the Sad/Rabid Puppy campaigns. To my knowledge, no one has yet been killed or seriously injured in connection with the Hugo Awards, and that cannot be said of historical Race Riots in Canada or the USA.

I don’t mean to trivialize the loss of life, property, human rights or dignity in Race Riot events. But I feel it’s important to bring up those violent conflicts now, because the battle for the Hugo Awards in the past decade has been instigated by people with similar backgrounds and beliefs, in service to a similar agenda—to put it bluntly, we are witnessing a battle for White supremacy.

Every “Race Riot” in North America begins with an attack made by White people on the bodies, property, dignity, and human rights of racialized people. Black, Chinese, Filipino or Mexican/Chicano people have been victims, but Jewish people (like me) have also been subjected to lynching, bombings and assassinations. You can draw parallels between Race Riot attacks and those made on Indigenous people or Labor activists, as well—the bad actors in all cases share the same background and motives.

Over and over, White Power activists have formed “action committees” in response to any change in the local balance of power. They react violently to any hint that they might have to compete on an even playing field for homes, jobs, opportunities, or the rewards owed for military service. They punish their victims for taking up space in the world, and their rhetoric is always the same: they paint themselves as the true victims, and claim they are being “replaced”, “displaced”, or cast out of a Paradise that they built and that they must fight to protect. This rhetoric is deployed to justify the harm that they do—the violence it takes to keep any town, neighborhood or professional workplace “pure”.

The savagery and the destruction wreaked by White Power groups always increases if their victims prosper. The harder people work, the more respect they earn, the harder the White Power hammer will fall to try and deny them the rewards of their labor.

I would argue that the conflicts we’re seeing at WorldCon from 2013-present are the result of growth and evolution in this field. Speculative Fiction as a community, as a body of literature, and as an ideological space is expanding. There are fandoms and creative communities around the globe coming into bloom and bearing fruit.

The WorldCon is struggling to live up to its name, to become an institution that truly encompasses, embraces and represents all humankind. But in order to achieve that apotheosis, an institution that was once purely American, purely male, purely White and purely straight must evolve to incorporate and celebrate more creators, more cultural perspectives and more political systems than ever before.

Race was an issue for the 2023 WorldCon in Chengdu and the Hugo Award winners of that year in a new way. When Chengdu won the bid to host the 2023 WorldCon, a group of 70 SFF professionals, including N.K. Jemisin, signed an Open Letter in protest and asked that the acceptance of the Chengdu bid be revoked. They cited the Chinese government’s ethnic cleansing of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province as the cause, and stated that WorldCon should not give its stamp of approval to any government guilty of such obvious and blatant crimes against humanity. S.B. Divya, who was nominated for Best Novelette and Best Semi-prozine in 2023, withdrew her work from consideration for a Chengdu Hugo before the convention took place.

Guest of Honor Cixin Liu was also a controversial choice. He is employed by a Chinese company called SenseTime, which creates mass surveillance systems which are deployed against Uyghurs, Tibetans and other Turkic populations in China.

Many people were worried that the authoritarian government of China would interfere somehow with the Hugo Awards, and they were not wrong to be concerned. The Chengdu Hugo Awards Committee waited for the maximum possible period of time before they released the voting and nomination numbers for the 2023 Hugo Awards. It was immediately obvious when those numbers were released that something, somehow, had gone terribly wrong.

A week ago, one of the members of the Chengdu Hugo Committee leaked a collection of emails that were exchanged by the White members of the committee while preparing for the Hugos. A disturbing pattern of surveillance, censorship and exclusion of the Chinese members of the committee was revealed. Not only were White committee members in Canada and the USA researching and assembling dossiers on potential Hugo candidates, vetting them for possible ideological conflicts with the authoritarian government of China--they were manipulating the Hugo ballot from within, disqualifying nominees for being either offensive to China, or TOO CHINESE, without including the Chinese members of the con committee in the conversation.

One of the most important novels of the year was “disqualified” for unspecified reasons, despite having won the Nebula and Locus awards. A slate of Chinese candidates in several categories was disqualified at the nomination stage as well, leaving many candidates from the English-speaking world on the final ballot who would otherwise have been swept aside by Chinese voters.

Many people would argue that the motivation behind the misdeeds of the 2023 Hugo committee was fear of the Chinese government. They committed self-censorship because they were intimidated by the Powers That Be in China and the “red line” of authoritarian crackdowns on free speech and human rights. They bowed to China just as many tech companies and world leaders do.

But it is also clear that some of the committee’s manipulations were motivated purely by the desire to prevent creators living and working in China, and published only in the Chinese language, from sweeping some of the most important categories at the Hugo awards—particularly those of Best Novel and Best Short Story.

The tactics employed by the White committee members don’t look like a Chinese authoritarian “red line”—it looks a lot more like the red-lining tactics of American White Supremacists who are embedded at credit unions and banks. By denying People of Color access to loans, insurance, health care and other important services, White Power groups may achieve their goals in a more subtle, less violent way—but the result is still the same. They attack the communities of People of Color, and deny them equal rights and equal opportunity.

I think it speaks well of SFF as a community that the Chengdu scandal IS a scandal. I think it is an excellent thing that a whistle-blower came forward, that the emails were leaked and resignations have been tendered, that journalists within the field are reporting on the evidence and analyzing it.

I find it sad but understandable that at least one Hugo Award winner has chosen to return her award, given the knowledge that she could not have made the final ballot unless many Chinese votes were thrown out. But I do not think that all the award winners should feel obligated to follow suit; they did nothing wrong, and should not be punished for someone else’s malfeasance.

Still.

I remain deeply angry.

I find it very convenient that anyone argues we should eliminate the Hugo Awards at exactly the moment in history when marginalized people have started to win them with any regularity.

I think it is morally bankrupt to indulge in such talk, especially given that every single controversy that has arisen over the Hugo Awards can be traced DIRECTLY to one or more White men who have politicized and attempted to control the Hugo Awards in the name of misogyny, American nationalism, and/or White power.

In North America, we have a long history of neighborhoods, towns, homes and businesses being razed to the ground by people who would rather see our nations burn than evolve into an even playing field. Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies are less violent, but no less destructive than their predecessors—they were more than happy to see the Hugos burn rather than accept a world where a brilliant Black woman could win the award for Best Novel three times in a row.

For that matter, we are talking about the same assholes who would rather see all of Western Democracy burn rather than accept that a Black man or a White woman could be elected President, and lead the free world.

There’s nothing noble or rational about surrendering to them, or to the despair they try to instill.

The Future isn’t theirs to burn.