More on Other Chinese Hugo Nominations, based on “Charting the Cliff”

Introduction

As a part of the analysis in Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones (hereafter referred to as “CtC“), the works in SFW’s rec list are dutifully mapped to the candidates in 2023 Hugo nominations (both the Hugo23 Admin’s “Stats-Final” and the leaked “Validation” lists), while the backgrounds of other Chinese works – those which are not in the SFW’s rec list – are not explored fully.

This article tries to probe the backgrounds of the Chinese literatural works in Novel/Novella/Novelette/Short/Series that did NOT appear in SFW’s rec list. Candidates in other categories are not covered.

Assumptions

The analysis done in this article will be based on the assumption that the information in both the Validation table and the Hugo23 Admin’s “Stats-Final” report is accurate, which might be questionable as probably implied in CtC. If that this the case, some parts of this article will be moot. Still, I’d like to contribute due diligence from my part, also out of personal curiosities.

Disclaimer

I am a native Chinese SF&F reader living in China. I have not paid enough attention to China fandom besides reading SF&F (mostly in English) and checking their reviews on Douban, or at least had not done so until about half a year ago. Please read my article with a grain of salt. Any suggestions are welcome. I’ll be happy to correct my factual error once it’s pointed out.

Overview

Updated on 2024/2/26 22:15 (UTC+8)

The snapshot above is an overview of such works scoped in the Introduction section. Texts with weblinks can be found in the ensuing chapters.

• Links in titles are pointing to CSFDB entries, or Qidian entries in the cases of web-based publications of that site.
• The “1st publisher” for anything shorter than a full novel, is usually a magazine; the “2nd publisher”, if it exists, often published them as a part of an anthology.

Novel Nominations

提名推荐/nom.	作者/name	1st publisher	2nd publisher	Notes
我们生活在南京 We Live in Nanjing	天瑞说符 Tianrui Shuofu	起点 Qidian	中信 CITIC	An example of self-promotion*
余光 Residual Light	言归正传 Back to Business	起点 Qidian	–
南天门计划 Nantianmen Project	吴俊 Wu Jun	人民文学出版社 People’s Lit		Although the author is associated with another web-novel platform, this novel was first published in the traditional form of a physical book, by a mainstream publisher.

A snapshot of the Novel part of Camestros and Heather’s spreadsheet, with my changes highlighted; “Diff” column is color-scaled; the last two rows are added; Affl and Pri Src columns are added with rough grouping (see notes in Demographics)

CtC mapped four titles from SFW’s list, three Chinese ones and one English title, which dropped by 12, 10, 1 and 2 ranks from the “inferred rank (from ‘Validation’)” to the official stats. When I appended the last two rows (titles in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet), we find another title from the SFW’s list.

Two of the other three Chinese titles were first published on Qidian. The first one was published by a traditional publisher (CITIC, the same one who would publish translated Babel) in 2022, while the second (concluded in 2022) remains on Qidian as of now. They dropped 11 ranks apiece.

The author of We Live in Nanjing, 天瑞说符/Tianrui Shuofu, has been well known in China for a while. He promoted this novel on Weibo (link in the table, and got reposted by at least one of his fans). Of course, as explained in the original post which he reposted from and appended his promotion text to, many authors promote their works for award eligibility, and there is nothing in the Hugo rules against it.

Another title of his, 保卫南山公园, appeared in the Best Series category. But he didn’t mention this work in his self-promotion.

I also browsed 言归正传/Back to Business’s Weibo posts, but found no mentioning of 雨果/Hugo. He also has another title in the Series categeory in the “Validation” spreadsheet.

In a very quick search, I didn’t find any social media posts related to Hugo from the other two writers. When I did a search using these three titles plus “雨果”(Hugo), I didn’t find any related results.

Disclaimer: 
Checks for self-promotions are NOT performed for all writers in the ensuing sections. The examples in this chapter mean no personal judgement whatsoever. I just try to lay out the fact that some (but not necessarily all) Chinese writers were also doing what many English-speaking writers do nowadays.
Notes about the names of these web-novels and their writers:
Web-novels run in very different ways than traditional novels, in almost every aspect. Among them are these unusual title patterns and pen-name patterns. If you think they are weirder than what is usually translated from Chinese, know that this is kind of expected. Not knowing better, I'm keeping the "TranslationMT" (I presume it means "machine-translated") texts from the CtC spreadsheet, to maintain consistency.

Another title of a lower rank, 南天门计划/Nantianmen Project, was published by a mainstream publisher. It disappeared in the official nomination list.

Babel’s “affliliation” is attributed to a bucket “Eng”, like all other works which were pubished in English initially; but it’s “Primary Source” has an suffix “CITIC” here, marking that it would be soon published in Chinese by that publisher. This kind suffix will be further used in the pivot tables later. KPS is labeled “Eng-8LM” in that column, meaning it would later be published in Chinese by Eight Light Minutes.

Series Nominations

提名推荐	作者	1st publisher	2nd publisher	Notes
深渊独行 Walking Alone in the Abyss	言归正传 Back to Business	起点		Three volumes and 570 chapters in total; the last chapter of Vol.3 was published on 2023/7/7.
深海余烬 Deep Sea Embers	远瞳 Far Eye	起点		Three volumes and 776 chapters in total; the last chapter of Vol.2 was published on 2023/4/28; Vol.3 has NOT concluded as this moment (2024/2/23).
保卫南山公园 Defend Nanshan Park	天瑞说符 Tianrui Shuofu	起点		Vol.1 has 72 chapters, concluded on 2023/11/14; Vol.2 has NOT concluded as this moment (2024/2/23).
灵境行者 Spiritual Realm Walker	卖报小郎君 Newspaper Seller	起点	Vol.1 (352 pages) publised on 2023/11 by 湖南文艺出版社 Hunan Lit & Art	Five volumes in total (not concluded yet). The last chapter of Vol.3 was published on 2023/4/13.
7号基地 Base No. 7	净无痕 Jingwuhen	起点		Six volume in total (concluded). The last chapter of Vol.3 was published on 2022/9/23.

A snapshot of the Series part of Camestros and Heather’s spreadsheet, with my changes highlighted; “Diff” column is color-scaled; the last rows is added; Affl and Pri Src columns are added with rough grouping (see notes in Demographics)

All five Chinese titles under this category come from Qidian. The first three’s ranks dropped by 10, 7 and 7 respectively. The last two disappeared, marked with red 16 and 17 in “Final Rank”, for the use in pivot tables (see chapter Preliminary Demographic).

Interestingly, these 网文/web-novel fans seemed unfamiliar with Hugo rules. See notes in my table, four of them don’t meet the basic criteria of this category of “at least three works and the last work published in the last year”. Some confusion between 系列小说/series and 连载小说/serializations might be at work. You may double check the stats via the links to their entries in the first column.

There might be less controversy if the first four were removed based on this check, which would be straightforward to Chinese speaking people (if they understand the rules too). But there seems to be zero mentioning of this aspect by any concom member.

In the mean time, 7号基地/Base No.7’s disappearance remains unexplained.

Due diligence was also paid by searching with all these five titles combined plus “雨果”(Hugo). There seemed to be a lot of relevant hits this time. A closer look, however, revealed they had no (direct) relationship with Hugo. Qidian sponsored a nation-wide award called “起点科幻启明星奖”/Qidian Sci-Fi Morning Star Awards with some real awards. The first three positions got Qidian’s exclusive contract offers of 10M, 5M and 2M yuan respectively. Those three are the first three in the “Validation” sheet above, but the first two’s ranks were swapped. Spiritual World Walker and Base No.7 got a cash award of 10K yuan apiece.

A pictured news coverage with prizes listed: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1758414474851984740&wfr=spider&for=pc

Another coverage with lists in plain texts: https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20230221A02ZC500

Novella and Novelette Nominations

Category	提名推荐	作者	1st publisher	2nd publisher
Novella	黄泥塝 Huang Ni Bang	萧星寒 Xiao Xinghan	科幻立方 SciFi Cube	百花文艺出版社 科幻立方编辑部 SFC editorial office of Baihua Lit & Art
Novelette/Short	菌歌 Song of Fungus	陈楸帆 Chen Qiufan	收获	漓江出版社 Li River

Snapshot of a part of Camestros and Heather’s spreadsheet, Novella and Novelette, with my changes highlighted

Novella

Huang Ni Bang is affiliated to another Sci-Fi magazine of less influences, 科幻立方/Sci-Fi Cube. SFC seems to be working closely with mainstream non-genre literatures. They worked together to add a subcategory to a mainstream lit award, called 百花文学奖·科幻文学奖/Sci-Fi Literature Award of the Baihua Literature Award(?). Huang Ni Bang hasn’t won this award exactly, but was included in an anthology called 第二十届百花文学奖·科幻文学奖获奖作品集(A Collection of the 20th such award winners) nontheless. (To be clear, that lit award has been running for 20 years but the Sci-Fi subcategory wasn’t set up until the 18th.) The three actual winners from the same year ended up nowhere within the Hugo radar.

修行/Immortality from SFW rec list #9, was missing in the original mapping. Its rank dropped by 4, which seems a norm for many SFW rec’ed titles.

When we expand the Novella table to include the titles in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet, we have to append five new rows. We find titles from SFW’s list and the 8-Light-Minute list apiece:

Novelette

时空画师/The Space-Time Painter, appeared in the Eight-Light-Minute rec list, rose by 9 ranks from the bottom straight to the top, and won the Novelette award eventually. It is the only one from that list that made its way into these five categories in the “Validation” sheet disclosed by a concom member. (Some appeared in other categories.) There seems to be no working explanation to this extremely abnormal raise (of a Chinese work at that!) as far as I can see.

Three titles from SFW’s rec list dropped 8, 4 and 4 ranks. The only one that did not, Color the World, was later judged as not eligible.

菌歌/Song of Fungus is present in both the Novelette list and the Short Story list. It’ll be discussed in the latter. After a closer look, I decide to place 菌歌/Song of Fungus in this table instead of the Short Story table. I think this is the more probable position for it, although in the “Validation” sheet this title is indeed in the latter. A tentative “Inferred Rank” of 0.99 is assigned to it, with the decimal denoting this abnormal adjustment.

When we also expand the Novelette table to include the titles in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet, we have to append five new rows. Besides 菌歌/Song of Fungus, we find two more title from SFW’s rec list and another from the 8-Light-Minute list:

Short Story Nominations

提名推荐	作者	1st publisher	2nd publisher
菌歌 Song of Fungus	陈楸帆 Chen Qiufan	收获 Harvest	漓江出版社 Li River
孤独终老的房间 Lonely Room	郝景芳 Hao Jingfang	收获 Harvest	花城出版社 Huacheng 人民文学出版社 People’s Lit
白色悬崖 The White Cliff	鲁般 Lu Ban	SFW	–
火星上的祝融 Zhurong on Mars	王侃瑜 Wang Kanyu	天涯 Tianya	花城出版社 Huacheng
命悬一线 On the Razor’s Edge	江波 Jiang Bo	SFW	(6 books from 4 publishers)
437火锅诞生记 437 Birth of Hotpot	凌晨 Ling Chen	科幻立方 SciFi Cube 不存在科幻 Nonexist SF	漓江出版社 Li River 未来局 Future Aff Admin
无面之城 Unfaced City	杨晚晴 Yang Wanqing	西部 The West	人民文学出版社 People’s Lit
雪中追忆 Memories in Snow	任青 Ren Qing	SFW	漓江出版社 Li River

A snapshot of the Short Story part of Camestros and Heather’s spreadsheet, with my changes highlighted; “Diff” column is color-scaled; the last five rows are added (including the special treatment of 菌歌/Song of Fungus); Affl and Pri Src columns are added with rough grouping (see notes in Demographics)

This category features a wide variety of diverse sources of Chinese nominations. Here we have:

• Two titles from the SFW rec list, 尽化塔 and 通济桥, whose positions saw little or no change, in contrary to the big drops we often see in previous categories.
• Another two titles from SFW which did NOT appear in SFW’s rec list:
  • 白色悬崖/The White Cliff claims no award or anthology up to now, albeit penned by a fast rising young writer;
    • He has another title, 新贵/Upstart, rec’ed by SFW and listed, and dropped drastically from #2 to #10, in the Novelette category – the latter has garnered an award, three anthologies including two in Englisth translations. This makes an interesting comparison.
  • 命悬一线/On the Razor’s Edge is by a renowned writer with a number of works and awards under his belt. This title won the (SFW’s) Galaxy Award and was anthologized in six books from four different publishers. Its eventual high ranking might not be a surprise.
• (assumming 陈楸帆/Chen Qiufan’s 菌歌/Song of Fungus belongs to the Novelette category) A past Hugo winner, 郝景芳/Hao Jingfang, topping the “Validation” list with her work first published on 收获/Harvest, a non-genre magazine with a (if not the most) mainstream significance. Her story were later anthologized also by mainstream publishers. Chinese fans would be very interested in the reason behind her dropping out of the short list.
• A well-received title, Zhurong on Mars, by an active writer/translator/editor/etc, appearing on a mainstream magazine and now ranked high in both lists. No surprise here, perhaps.
• The last two titles in my table of relatively lesser significance. Sorry I won’t explore them further.

When we expand the Short Story table to include the titles in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet, we have to append four new rows, where we find another title from SFW but not in its rec list and yet another from the SFW’s rec list, plus another row to place 菌歌/Song of Fungus with a question mark – I now tend to believe this title should belong to the Novelette list, and another unknown title belongs to Short Story table’s 16th position in the final stats. This position is not assigned values in the Affl and Pri Src columns, and not accounted for in the pivot tables below.

Preliminary Demographics

The 16 titles (except the one from 8LM) visited in the first version of this article fall into the following categories in terms of primary publications:

• Eight Seven titles were web-published primarily, namely, by 起点/Qidian. They are in two categories: Novels and Series;
• Four titles from Sci-Fi related magazines (SFW [but not in SFW’s rec list] and SFC). One in Novella and three in Short Story;
• Five titles from various non-genre mainstream magazines. One in Novel, one in Novelette and three in Short Story.

Since the third version, some new rows are appended to include those in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet. This adds several more SFW’s rec’ed titles, two more 8LM rec’ed titles, and one new title from SFW (but not in its rec list).

Next, a pivot table analysis is done, similar to what CtC has done in page 27:

a snapshot of CtC page 27

With the following changes:

• The original pivot table did not count in the five “missing” title; now I include them with their Rank in the “final stats” assigned to be 16 (or 17 and so on if there are more) tentatively;
• The original pivot table included only titles in the “Validation” sheet; now some new rows are appended to include those in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet. Such appended titles’ “Inferred Rank” are continuing the numbering from the largest inferred rank number above it;
• Instead of the analysis between primary languages, the pivot view now breaks down the Chinese-language titles into five (somewhat rough) types of affiliations, as repeatedly elaborated in the sections above.

Average ranking changes, by loosely defined affiliations

Another pivot table snapshot, doing counting instead of averaging, for both a sanity check and a quick overview:

A similar pivot doing counting instead of averaging

The question-marked entry of 菌歌/Song of Fungus is not counted in any column – there is no information to infer what kind of work should have been in that place.

Now we expand these two pivot tables to include the more loosely defined “Primary Source” (I admit this is a misnomer but can’t come up with a better name):

Average ranking changes, and counts, of loosely defined “Primary Sources”

• “Eng” means the works initially published in English, and not published in Chinese translations by the end of 2023;
  • 八光分文化/Eight Light Minutes annouced at end of 2023 that they would pubish Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, but didn’t specify exactly when, or whether they were referring to the first book or all three books in the series. So I don’t count it into the next group yet.
• There are five English works the have been translated into Chinese and officially published by the end of 2023, not counting Children of Time, or The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (which has been mapped as an entry from the SFW rec list). All these five titles got increases in ranking from the Validation sheet to the final stats. These five titles will be examined later.
• There are reasons I repeatedly call these grouping “loosely”, some (but far from all) of them listing below:
  • SFC (Sci-Fi Cube) and SFW (Sci-Fi World, those from SFW but do not appear on its rec list) are grouped as “Sci-Fi (related magazines)”, but these two magazines are not connected much in terms of operations.
  • Similarly, the four publishers under the “mainstream” are not necessarily connected.
  • FAA (未来事务管理局/Future Affairs Administraion) and 8LM (八光分文化/Eight Light-Minutes) are not publishing houses. They are both organizations with connections to multiple publishers (some of them are even overlapping). So it’s wrong to list them with publishers like CITIC at the same level. But these two organizations are well known in this circle so I’ll leave them as is here. On the other hand, FAA and SFC are somewhat connected.

With those in mind, let’s have a closer look at these titles:

Category	Work	Src	Chinese Title	Publisher	Published	Val. InfRank	Final Rank	Diff
Novel	Babel *	Eng-CITIC	巴别塔	中信出版社/CITIC	2023/10	5	3	2
Novel	The Kaiju Preservation Society	Eng-8LM	怪兽保护协会	八光分文化/8 Light-Minutes – 新星出版社 Xinxing	2023/10	13	6	7
Novelette	We Built This City	Eng-FAA	此城由我们建设	未来事务管理局/Future Aff Admin – 不存在科幻/Nonexist Sci-Fi	2023/5/15	8	6	2
Novelette	A Dream of Electric Mothers	Eng-FAA	电母之梦	未来事务管理局/Future Aff Admin – 不存在科幻/Nonexist Sci-Fi	2023/5/16	10	4	6
Short Story	Rabbit Test	Eng-Bird Lit	兔子测试	小鸟文学/Bird Lit.	2023/4	9	2	7

References with Notes and Acknowledgements

• Charting the Cliff: An Investigation Into the 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics, by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones, as of 2024/2/24, https://file770.com/charting-the-cliff-an-investigation-into-the-2023-hugo-nomination-statistics-by-camestros-felapton-and-heather-rose-jones/
  • Full report of 51 pages, in PDF, from this article, as of 2024/2/24, https://file770.com/wp-content/uploads/ChartingTheCliff-Hugo2023.pdf
    • This article explores one of the aspects in this report (CtC); readers are presumed to have read CtC in advance. The full coverage of this aspect is not repeated in this article. Other aspects of CtC are rarely touched in this article.
  • A Google Sheets spreadsheet from page 7 of the PDF report above, as of 2024/2/24, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12bqjcuGMnSUqNR62SK2GEMBnfe8WqTUq7MvbpQeDkc0/edit?usp=sharing
    • The spreadsheet snapshots in this article are taken from my own edited revision of this file.
    • Thanks a lot to the work of Camestros and Heather!
• Hugo Award 2023 Nominating and final ballot statistics, by Hugo 23 Admin., as of 2024/1/26, https://www.thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Hugo-Award-Stats-Final.pdf
• The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion, by Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford, as of 2024/2/14, https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/
  • A “Validation” spreadsheet linked in the report above, as of 2024/2/14, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rhCwKLMydCto6HvXvcqjR553DqrhTfBu/view?usp=drive_link
  • A specific part of the differences between this spreadsheet and the Hugo23 “Stats Final” is the focus of this article. But the comparison and most of the analysis is NOT done by me from scratch. I am quoting Camestros and Heather’s comparison and analysis from CtC mostly, with slight revisions which I noted wherever applicable.
• 中文科幻也能提名“雨果奖”了？/ “Can Chinese science fiction be nominated for the Hugo Award?”, by SFW, as of 2024/2/24, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jZZifGH_3Aa0uTvDWIqwUg
  • This article does NOT mean to further the analysis of the list above. It is listed here just for the sake of completeness, since its contents are referenced on the spreadsheet snapshots.
• Various web-novel entries in 起点中文网/Qidian, as of 2024/2/24, https://www.qidian.com/
  • These are used as the primary evidence of publications affiliated to Qidian. Links to each entry is duly provided wherever applicable.
• Various book/magazine/author/award entries in 中文科幻数据库/CSFDB, as of 2024/2/24, https://csfdb.cn/
  • These are used as the evidence of all publications mentioned in this article, except those from Qidian. Links to each entry is duly provided wherever applicable.
  • In many (but not necessarily all) cases, another reference has been cross-checked, without mentioning in the article.
  • Thanks a lot to 天爵/Arthur Liu and the CSFDB team for their diligence! With their excellent and circumspective work, the answer is just one click away in most cases.
• Various book entries in 豆瓣/Douban, as of 2024/2/24, https://www.douban.com/
  • This is where most of my cross-checks took place. However, Douban book entries are rife with subjective information like ratings and reviews, which is of no interest to this article. Besides, objective information in Douban book entries is almost identical to that in CSFDB, thus Douban links are usually not provided (except for the Qidian cases).
  • Douban is often compared to Goodreads, but one of the distinctions is that the former requires an ISBN number for the creation of a book or magazine entry. Coincidently (or not), ISBN is also mandatory for their publications in China. So, whether a Douban entry exists is the quickest way to verify if a book of conceivable popularity has been published in the traditional, physical way (or will be so). I used this way to double check the publication statuses of Qidian titles.
• Various entries in 微博/Weibo, as of 2024/2/24, https://weibo.com/, and various Chinese news sources, as of 2024/2/24, with links provided wherever applicable.
• 2023年雨果奖审核情况浅析, by Zion in Ulthos (Zionius), as of 2024/2/24, https://zionius.wordpress.com/2024/02/15/2023-hugo-awards-censorship-analysis
  • Although Zionius’s article is not directly quoted here, it is another inspiration for me to write this down. During writing, I was cross-checking with his article from time to time. Thanks to him for his insightful analysis so quickly after Barkley and Sanford’s report was published.

Revisions

• Updates on 2024/2/25 15:00 (UTC+8)
  • Slight revisions to rephrase some too subjective descriptions;
  • Adding more notes to web-novels in the “Novel” chapter;
  • Adding a new chapter at the end for ref, ack & notes;
  • (The above had been done, pending pubishing, by the time I was notified by File770’s sharing of my article. Sorry for the confusions.)
  • A hasty edit to address Zionius’s questioning of《南天门计划》.
    • Further revising is still pending more investigation. But I wish to publish updates #1~3 in time so that’s it for now.
• Updates on 2024/2/25 23:50 (UTC+8)
  • 南天门计划’s is changed publisher from Qidian to People’s Lit. Thanks a lot to Zionius’s correction!
  • Tables in the last revision was derived from CtC and include only titles in the “Validation” sheet; now some new rows are appended to include those in the final stats but not in “Validation” sheet. Such appended titles’ “Place” row cells are marked as “na”, their “Inferred Rank” row cells continuing the numbering from the largest inferred rank number above it.
  • The second last chapter is renamed to “Preliminary Demographics” and analysis is updated with more detail and in accordance with update #2.
    • A note on 2024/2/26 22:15 (UTC+8): This chapter is pending further update!
      I have found a couple errors in the pivot tables, but would like to update them in the next batch with some further demographics.
• Updates on 2024/2/27 23:30 (UTC+8)
  • Preliminary Demographics is massively revised; especially, five English works that have Chinese translations are examined.