81st World Science Fiction Convention

The 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held on 18–22 October 2023 in Chengdu, China. The choice of location was the subject of some controversy as it seemed that many of the votes cast for Chengdu at the 79th World Science Fiction Convention had the same handwriting and used the same mailing address. A hundred authors signed an open letter to the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) asking it to revoke the bid in protest of the ongoing persecution of Uyghurs in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang.

The Hugo Awards presented at the convention became the subject of further controversy in the months following the convention. Statistics about the voting, normally released the night of the awards, were withheld for three months. After the release, voters and nominated authors discovered that four works, including two highly favored to win, had instead been ruled ineligible. The WSFS official responsible would not explain why, even after having to apologize for insulting remarks made to those who questioned him about the decisions on social media. He and two other officials subsequently resigned. Critics speculated that either the awards committee was covering for a serious mistake in counting the ballots, or that it had yielded to political pressure from the Chinese Communist Party; later disclosures pointed to the latter.

Site selection
The following committees announced bids for hosting the convention:


 * Chengdu 2023
 * Memphis in 2023 (cancelled in October 2021 )
 * Nice 2023 (cancelled in July 2020 )
 * Winnipeg in 2023

The site was selected by members of the 79th World Science Fiction Convention.

Over 100 authors, including Hugo winners and Uyghur writers, signed an open letter in March 2022 calling for the hosting to be reconsidered due to ongoing human rights violations in the Uyghur region. The choice of location was also criticized due to the effects of the Chinese government's censorship regime and the exclusion of authors publicly critical of human rights in China.

After Chengdu was selected, the organizers of the Winnipeg bid pivoted to bid for the 2023 NASFiC, at which they were successful.

Guests of Honor

 * Cixin Liu (writer)
 * Sergey Lukianenko (writer)
 * Robert J. Sawyer (writer)

Awards
The winners were:

Ballot controversy
The voting statistics for the Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award, and Astounding Award were published on January 20, 2024, much later than usual. Questions quickly arose amongst authors surrounding several works that had been marked as ineligible without justification, such as author Xiran Jay Zhao, The Sandman episode 6, "The Sound of Her Wings", and Babel by R. F. Kuang, which had been favored to win. Further scrutiny has been leveled towards possible inconsistencies or anomalies in the statistics themselves.

Commenters on the Facebook page where the statistics were released asked Dave McCarty, a veteran of the awards committee, to explain why the four works were found ineligible. He said that he could not share exactly why but pointed them to the organization's constitution and rules. When they were unable to find a rule or constitutional provision that sufficed, the exchanges grew heated, with McCarty sometimes questioning or disparaging the intellectual capacity of his interlocutors, behavior he later apologized for. Leaked emails later revealed that these works had been excluded due to self-censorship by the Hugo Award administrators in order to appease the Chinese government, which has a strict censorship regime; emails demonstrating this were leaked by Hugo committee member Diane Lacey, acting as a whistleblower. Additionally, an unknown number of ballots from Chinese voters were rejected because the award administrators considered them to be too similar to a recommendations list published by Science Fiction World, and thus equivalent to a slate. Locus noted that this occurred even though "there is no provision in the WSFS constitution to remove slates from the ballot".

Based on complaints about the 2023 Hugo award process and official statements made about those complaints, Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP), the non-profit organization that holds the service marks for the World Science Fiction Society, censured McCarty and two individuals who presided over the Hugo Administration Committee of the Chengdu Worldcon. WIP also reprimanded the chair of the WIP board of directors. Both the director of WIP and chair of the WIP board of directors resigned.

In February 2024, as a result of the controversy, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, chair of the 2024 Worldcon, to be held in Glasgow, announced the following commitments for the 2024 Hugo Awards: the reasons for any disqualifications of potential finalists will be published no later than April 2024; the full voting results, nominating statistics and voting statistics will be published immediately following the awards ceremony on 11 August 2024; and immediately following the awards ceremony on 11 August 2024, the Hugo administration subcommittee will publish a log explaining any decisions that they have made in interpreting the WSFS Constitution.