WORLD CONTROVERSY
At the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon, held in December in Washington DC, the bid to host the 2023 convention was won by a bid from Chengdu in China. Due to China’s on-going genocide against the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang, the result has proved highly controversial in the science fiction world. There was further concern that the vote wasn’t even legitimate, with Chengdu receiving 2006 of the 2915 valid votes cast (rival bid for Winnipeg, Canada received 807 votes), yet 1591 of the votes for China were not completely filled in, with the street address being missing. Some have argued that this suggests an organised manipulation of the vote and that these ballots should have been rejected.