More About China Worldcon

[lisa_goldstein]

My last entry was about some comments by Sergei Lukyanenko, one of the Guests of Honor at the Worldcon in China. Lukyanenko not only thinks the Russian invasion of Ukraine is justified, he also says that all Ukrainians are fascists and should be murdered.  Now there's a petition calling for the Worldcon to "rescind the status of guest of honour from Sergei Lukyanenko….”  The URL is here.

Please sign.  Doing so will put you on yet another mailing list, but it's easy enough to unsubscribe.

Comments

[bibliofile]

THank you.

In some ways I'm glad that Sergei L was so horrible so publicly in this timely way. It's a pretty clear indication of how bad a choice he is as GoH. Before, the evidence was much harder to dig up, much less reference easily in many languages. (Gah!)

[lisa_goldstein]

I've never heard of this guy before. Just from this one thing, though, it's obvious he's a terrible choice for GoH.

[davidgoldfarb]

Lukianenko is repeating what I understand to be the Russian justification to themselves. Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift linked to Russian documents about this, in the early days: the victory condition from their perspective is cultural genocide. No more Ukraine, no more Ukrainians, no more Ukrainian language. Only Russian-speaking Russians who happen to live in the southern part of the country.

[lisa_goldstein]

It's terrifying to see an entire country support genocide in the 21st century -- but it looks like we're no wiser than the people that came before us. It's also terrifying to see a GoH at a convention support genocide. I think that's why I feel so strongly about this -- science fiction is our space, where these people should be shunned, not honored.