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2023 World Science Fiction Convention is scheduled to happen in Chengdu, China - as I understand the first in-person Worldcon since the pandemic. The reason why it's in CW topic is because one of the guests of honor is Sergey Lukianenko, who, besides being a mid-grade SciFi writer (his early works are decent, his late stuff is IMO garbage), is an active supporter and propagandist for the Russian war in Ukraine, hating Ukraine so much that he prohibited translating his books into Ukrainian (I am sure Ukrainian-speaking culture is doomed now). If one needs somebody to embody a militant Ukraine hater, who denies the nation's right to exist, claims the whole national claim is fake, the language is broken Russian, Ukrainian government are Nazis, puppeteered by the West, the whole nine yards - he's the man.
Predictably, this did not sit well with everybody. Somebody, representing "Polish fandom", even started a petition to rescind the invitation. However, given as it is unlikely the Chinese organizers didn't know who Lukianenko is and what his views - which he is actively and loudly voicing - are, and general stance of China towards Russia, I do not think anything would happen.
I wonder how would this play out. I used to hold Hugo's in high regard a while ago, but given the wokeisation and politization of everything lately, I don't really care anymore. But I heard WSFS are pretty woke, and so I wonder how it would sit with some of them to appear on the same scene with an actual fascist for once. I am not sure what is the function of the "guest of honor", but obviously the distinguished position alone, in any other setting, for an US person of similar views, would trigger them immediately. And, for various reasons, being Ukraine-friendly is in fashion with the wokes for now. But, the wokes appear to be very deferential to China in general, and maybe they could just pretend nothing is happening. After all, Disney literally filmed a movie with the concentration camps as the background, and everybody pretty much just shrugged. The various Puppies have also a chance to point at this as an exposure of the hypocrisy of the wokes (as if we were short of examples otherwise?) - would they use it?
The other guests of honor are Cixin Liu (who earned the honor, I think, and being Chinese, probably is appropriate figure to appear in this position) and Robert J. Sawyer, a Canadian writer of whom I know virtually nothing, except watching Flashforward (did not read, but liked the idea), and praise by Orson Scott Card, which I value very highly (so maybe I should check more into him?). I wonder if he has had any thoughts on the matter either?
I don't follow sci-fi cons all that closely but I do follow some authors on
TwitterMastodon that care, and I recall them being pretty upset at the idea of Worldcon in China with Cixin Liu as a guest of honor (given his public positions on the Uyghurs). And I didn't remember the details mentioned below of accusations that an organization within China rigged the vote (by purchasing lots of voting memberships), suggesting the general Worldcon community wasn't a fan of holding Worldcon in China.I was pretty surprised by your comments in this thread about the left giving China a pass... but I think there's a difference between business/media and individuals here. Left-leaning business and media rely on China's business enough that they don't they want to say much. But left-leaning individuals on social media have plenty negative to say about China's government in my experience. Some of it complaining about Disney appeasing China.
Let's compare. Somebody saying a wrong pronoun once: we have firestorms on social media, boycotts organized, marches, dis-invitations from conferences and events, the whole shebang. I mean, look at how Rowling is treated - and she's a leftist just like them. I hear most of HP movie cast doesn't even talk to her now, she's not invited on events celebrating her own creations, and they tried to boycott a game just because it was set in HP universe.
Now let's consider a fully grown fascist state, having actual concentration camps, murdering people and disassembling them into organs, also very explicitly racist and homophobic - and let's consider Disney going to that place, and literally filming a movie where camps can be seen on the background - and what we have? Some mild complaining here and there? I think it's clear where their hearts are.
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Eh, I think woke support for China tends to be overestimated, especially in right-leaning circles. There are some groups in the woke coalition that take its side for tactical reasons - big business that economically depends on them, and various groups that might at times find that they have a positive edge connecting them in the affect-loading graph (Asian-Americans, staunch technocrats) - and a brief strong enemy-of-my-enemy reflex when the Trump presidency brought some fanatical China haters to the forefront of their outgroup, but otherwise I think they have little love left for them. If China/Taiwan comes to head, I would suspect US alignment chips to fall similarly to Ukraine, with strong bi-partisan support for Taiwan and any insufficiently enthusiastic (or downright pro-China) being overwhelmingly branded right-wing.
I think the left-wing sci-fi fandom has a larger explicitly pro-communist streak than in general progressivism, perhaps due to the influence of, and reaction against, anti-communist MilSF. I remember there was a minor dust-up when Brad Torgersen referred to villains in a story as "ChiComs." Some lefties insisted it was a racial slur, somehow.
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Tactically, yes, that's probably what would happen. But culturally, I don't see any mainstream opposition to China or pushback against its obviously fascist nature anywhere in woke cultural spaces. Say "Israel", and you'd get a multi-hour tantrum about apartheid and so on. Say "Russia", and you know. Say "China" and... pretty much nothing? There were some "Free Tibet" groups on the fringe, but I don't think they are taken more seriously than PETA trying to convince us drinking milk is racist. That's one of the reasons why Trump could use China as a wedge issue - because the Left's stance towards China is submissive, and his criticism highlighting it works.
There was never anything pro-(post-communist-)Russia in the woke coalition, and my impression is that the "Israel apartheid" stuff is about as marginal as the "China concentration camps", and before Trump the latter was arguably going stronger.
I don't see any evidence of the American Left being directly submissive towards China. Rather, it's submissive towards globalised American industries, which in turn are submissive towards China, because China is both a massive supplier and market for them. If the American Right keeps mismodelling this transitive submissiveness as "pining for the strong hand of their communist daddy like the communists they are", their maps will remain useless for doing anything about it beyond working themselves into a rage (what you call "using it as a wedge issue").
I must admit it's an easy mistake to make when you read lefty authors literally pining for the strong hand of their communist daddy over and over again. Whatever is the favorite cause - from climate change to women's rights to economic prosperity to healing the social ills - there are dozens of articles by prominent lefty intellectuals praising various communist daddies for handling it much better than our stupid democracy ever could. Never mind that these articles are always atrociously factually inaccurate and historically ignorant - its par for the course for those quarters - but the genuine love for the communist daddy is shining through strongly and prominently.
What's an example of such an article? I'd suspect that to the extent they exist, they are about genetic technocratic authoritarianism rather than anything particularly communist. To think that technocratic authoritarians must like the most prominent technocratic authoritarian system around is a mirror image of the "religious trads must like Somalia/Saudi Arabia" trolling.
Well, yes, it's the mostly daddy part as much as anything else. But with that, I don't see them praising economic successes of Franco or Pinochet (some on the right do, of course). So they are selective in their choices of which authoritarian daddy to praise. So, daddy + leftism necessarily turns into "communist daddy".
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I'd say it's a multitude of factors playing together.
The debates surrounding Israel and American policy in the Middle East in general has been red hot since 9/11 and the Iraq War. The nuclear holocaust scare that came with the Cold War mentality against Russia never really went away and if anything, has just taken an adrenaline shot in the last year. China is a relatively new "threat" in comparison. Whereas a full generation of American thinkers cut their teeth on Russia/MENA.
The US has been the uncontested superpower between 1990-2010, as a result a lot of American foreign policy thinkers believe there will always be enough resources to do anything, anytime, anywhere.
Lots more big and rich allies are in Europe, so European concerns will trump Asian ones. How many "true" Asian allies in the most traditional sense, let alone allies (as in, not including "major partners" like India) to whom China is the number 1 security threat, besides Japan and SK? The "pivot" to Asia is just not happening soon enough.
And yes, China has historically bided its time, got in bed with American elites and kept their purses protruding. It's deeply integrated with Wall Street and Hollywood and makes American supply chains dependent on it. How many films have you seen of suave American action stars taking on the robotic, reticent KGB agent as opposed to a Chinese one? Hell do most Americans even know what the Chinese intelligence agency is called?
You also require a lot more creativity and deep policy reforms to meaningfully counter China, Russia is much smaller and therefore easier to pick on in comparison. Just keep doing what you do now and Russia will eventually bleed.
America is divided. The Great American Culture War is it's biggest novel cultural export. It's very difficult to spend time on social media without seeing something about an American culture war issue one way or the other. Various political tribes hate one another far more than they hate any external foe. Recall how to a lot of American progressives, the notion that Trump, their number 1 enemy, could be a "Russian plant" is a strong unifier against Russia. That's right, a fellow American, a former POTUS no less, can radicalise an entire party and its voters against Russia. And even now, some Republicans do believe that Russia "rightfully" belongs in the western bloc. The China scare just couldn't unite the culture war factions.
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Trump wasn't running against some generic "Left", Trump was running against Biden, and Biden's practical policies towards China have been identical to Trump, if possible even slightly more hostile.
This is a very narrow outlook. While technically true, the issues in play are much wider than Biden personally, who I suspect if he is informed what "his" China policies are at all, doesn't care too much about them. Seeing elections as exclusively personal contest means misunderstanding the whole US politics and missing most of it. America does not just choose between a boisterous populist with weird hair and a senile grandpa with penchant for wild stories, it chooses between political directions those people represent, in Biden's case even more so than in Trump's. So yes, the stance of the generic "Left" and "Right" (it's more complex than binary, if there's ever a place for appropriate use of "non-binary" it's in the US politics) matter, and they matter much more than Biden's persona. But, if we replace Biden with the generic policy package that chooses him embodies, then yes, that was the choice.
And to be honest, beyond some random wild gestures towards Taiwan, I do not really see how Biden admin is that tough on China. They may be continuing Trump's policy, but I think it's rather due to not having their own than following any particular strategy. At least, I haven't seen this strategy coherently expressed anywhere, have you?
Then again, there's a difference between things like trade agreements and monetary policy and whose ships are allowed to parade around which deserted island in the Pacific, and the cultural stance towards what is happening in China. These are related, but different questions. I am talking about the cultural stance and how there's virtually no discussion of China despite their positions being something that would otherwise be very offensive to the woke sensitivities.
It's probably a reference to messing with China's cutting edge industrial/science infrastructure. The whole US persons working for China restrictions that TPOT/ratsphere/postratsphere types went wild about but barely registered in general CW/politics spheres.
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Why is the world science fiction convention being held in, or all places, China? I would assume that an international group of writers would prefer to meet up somewhere that has rather more freedom of expression.
The host of each WorldCon is voted on by the members of the WorldCon two years previously who also commit to buying a membership to the WorldCon they are voting on. A supporting membership (which gets souvenir programmes etc. plus voting rights but not admission to the con) costs about 50 USD, so you can buy a vote in site selection for about 100 USD. The Chengdu WorldCon bought 2000 votes and outvoted the core WorldCon fanbase. The conspiracy theory is that Chengdu WorldCon is controlled by a for-profit Chinese real estate developer who are using WorldCon to promote their development, and the 200,000 USD is cheap publicity.
This is of course the second ganking of WorldCon by a bunch of outsiders buying supporting memberships and outvoting the ingroup, after the puppy kerfuffle where two groups of less-woke fans bought memberships and block-voted in the Hugos ballot (which used FPTP at the time, meaning they could control the nominations). Or the third if you count the unsuccessful attempt by the Church of $cientology to buy a Hugo for L. Ron Hubbard (which was disqualified by WorldCon staff on the grounds that all the paperwork for hundreds of members arrived in the same posting and written in the same handwriting).
Core WorldCon fandom does not want WorldCon to be in China, as far as I can see.
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DIE trumps all. Also, China is a big market, you gotta sell books and movies. So if that requires pinching your nose a bit, shutting up you mouth and maybe walking past a concentration camp or two while commenting how beautiful the nature is - I guess you do what you gotta do?
Historically China has been able to trump pretty much all other woke cards, and dictate their own rules to all the uber-woke places like Hollywood and academia. One must not forget that wokeness is hierarchical - being a white woman doesn't get you out from baking the cake, but being a Muslim does. In think in this context China stands above Muslims (which is evident from the fact they are allowed to put Muslims into camps without wokes being offended at the least) so this is pretty high position on the hierarchy. I imagine the pronoun folx would be told to not make waves, and feel the sensitivity of the venue, and they will largely comply. But maybe some sparks will fly, who knows. I'm keeping the popcorn around just in case.
China dictates to Hollywood and academia using raw power, not wokeness. If you want to be in China, you need to conform your worldwide activities to the tastes of Winnie-the-Panda. This is how you get American basketball players in America being expected to mind their language so the NBA can stay on Chinese TV.
These are not opposite things, these are aspects of the same thing. A part of wokeness is gaining power. The source of China's power is different than, say, woke academia's power or NBA's power, it is true - but both are powers, and the former power is greater than the latter, thus the latter submits. In the US, if you tried to gain power by pure lawless intimidation, you may have gotten some pushback (though reading about how FBI is now, I am thinking maybe it's not the case anymore?) - but the "long march through the institutions" tactics of gaining power has been hugely successful. So they do what works.
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The hierarchy of wokeness makes little difference when it encounters a wall that simply does not care about criticism and has a lot of financial power. Unlike in North America, twitterati & such have no power to cancel Chinese entities with a large financial clout, including the government itself.
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Chinese are very low on the totem pole in the west though. They are openly discriminated against in academia, both through admissions and personally. Razib Khan on his blog has talked about how hyper woke academics will say horrible things about Asians in private.
Could you provide examples? (I tried digging it up quickly but wasn’t sure what to look for.)
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A quick check on File770 suggests that this is old news (the GoHs were announced in November 2022, and the current Chengdu Worldcon website says that the GoH is "updating".
The main fan happenings around Chengdu WorldCon have been about the ability of the organisers to run a WorldCon at all - the con had to be rescheduled because the venue hadn't been built, and a number of key websites (registration, Hugo nominations) were only working at the last minute, and there has been next-to-no communication about all of this.
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Sawyer's a mediocre author who is kept around to satisfy Canadian content restrictions. (OK, more likely he's just good at small-group politics)
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The letter/petition was issued by the Union of Polish Fandom Associations, i.e. a council of representatives from various cities' fadom organizations that has supervises the organization of Polcon conventions and the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. If someone has had their hand in organizing a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, they're probably one handshake from the letter's issuers. If one's been to a non-manga convention in Poland in the past 20 years, probably less than three handshakes away. So, I'd say that the claim to representation is accurate.
(I've been at the council meeting where a draft of that letter was first (?) proposed)
I didn't mean to imply the claim is suspect, just that I didn't know anything about its veracity. Thanks for confirming.
To be honest, I just jumped at the opportunity to speak about something I have first-hand experience with, for a change ;)
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Having once worked for a company involved hosting a previous edition of Worldcon, for me the more pressing question is - will there be a culture clash between most Worldcon attendees and the Chinese, who I suspect have far stricter standards of bodily hygiene?
Masks will be enforced not by mandate, but by rational self-interest.
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Inviting a supporter of the Russian regime hardly seems like the most notable complaint one could have about this convention. The more pressing problem is that it's scheduled to happen in China at all, which necessitates that all in attendance are at best ambivalent about the even fouler Chinese regime. But that matter doesn't even require vague speculation. Liu Cixin's views on Xinjiang are hardly some well-kept secret, and involve denying the Uyghur nation a right to exist, claiming they are all terrorists etc. So alongside the "actual fascist" you're also going to get the "actual communist".
I'm not sure whether Cixin is an actual communist (not that the wokes would have any problem with it anyway), but China is also a full blown fascist state, so yes, it makes sense that there would be foreign fascists invited. But recognizing the fascist nature of China is very, very taboo in leftist US politics, because they call themselves communist, and that raises very uncomfortable questions. So discussing China is out of the question. But discussing Russia is still on the table for the wokes - so, in this case, would they dare?
The broader problem is that applying woke cancellation standards evenly would mean cancelling probably 99% of the population of the big upcoming market that everyone wants to sell stuff to. Cancelling the CCP is the rock upon which the ship of cancel culture sinks, mainly for reasons of sheer impracticality.
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According to my friend more involved with that scene, most Russian Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors are stalwart Z patriots now.
I think it's time we discussed the fiction writer question. It seems, unsurprisingly enough, that these people, left or right, are prone to believe in extreme, exaggerated political philosophies; and their genre fiction holds sway over nerds with a lack of common sense or taste and an excess of intellect, over people who can in fact influence the real world. Ukrainians ought to be thankful that the Russian state despised such people and their attempts at revolutionizing the military-industrial complex, so they merely coped, reading even more fiction (sometimes about popadantsy). In the west, however, Yud alone caused massive damage to our AI discourse. Gibson informed a bunch of negative progressive intuitions about information-age capitalism; Stephenson's naive libertarianism molded Silicon Valley and perhaps made the regulatory backlash inevitable. What are other examples?
Most of them are also utter garbage. I could probably name a couple that are kinda decent, none of the currently living that I can remember who are great or genius-level. Maybe Pelevin, though his work is kinda downhill lately. But I think he doesn't live in Russia and also kinda keeps his views under the lid.
It is also understandable - given as most of them are producing mass-market commercial dreck, and you can't sell that while not being Z-ombie... so those that aren't Z-ombified are actually the better ones, but also frequently ones that aren't professional writers or not living in Russia.
I just wrote a comment about SV's supposed "libertarianism": https://www.themotte.org/post/488/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-14/98242
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On one tentacle, in rare cases when science fiction geeks were asked for advice in RL political and military matters, the results were rather underwhelming.
On the other tentacle, it is hard to imagine Russian war effort being run worse.
On the gripping tentacle, it is always possible to do worse. Geeks are human beings who will steal like any other human beings when given the opportunity, in addition to pursuing their brilliant scientific plans.
Even very trivial common-sensical stuff like drone warfare and digital comms was being scoffed at, years in advance; I know of decent projects in the realm of electronic warfare that were turned down. Geeks would at least have established new opportunities for stealing, with some workable equipment trickling down to the force.
But the guys in charge had it all sorted out.
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I've read the first and most of the second Three Body Problem books, they're pretty nice.
I'm recommending people to read the first book, but nothing else. It presents a really interesting and unique setting and through focusing on and exploring that setting it manages to be good. By his second book, the novelty wears off and you begin to see more and more how silly his character writing is, the story writing is mediocre but salvageable, as is the prose.
I liked the second book because of how ridiculously misogynistic it is.
The third book goes so soft sci-fi it breaks my suspension of disbelief.
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I think that all the books are worth reading but I agree the series gets worse as it goes on. The first book is amazing, the second book good, and the third book ok at best.
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The third book is easily the best of the trilogy. Unless you read books for "the characters" there is no contest.
I think the third book is by far the worst, and I don't read books for characters. It's just... a hot mess without any really interesting ideas.
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I had exactly the opposite take — first book okay, second book good, third book excellent.Liu can’t write characters or plausible motives for shit, but his ideas are absolutely wild. Book 1 is mostly badly written characters doing stuff. Book 2 is badly written characters doing stuff with a great reveal at the end. Book 3 is Liu coming up with insane genius explanations for string theory, matter-antimatter asymmetry, entropy, etc..
Admittedly I stopped somewhere towards the end of the second book (I don't even remember whether I finished it, just that I put it aside with the thought "these characters are worse than most YA fiction"). Maybe I should pick up the third book after all?
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I agree. His ideas are pretty pessimistic, and his prose - which may be the effect of translation - may feel a bit dull sometimes, but if one looks past that - and I argue it is worth it - then one can see a very good SciFi writer.
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