But perhaps the RITAs aren't as easily gamed as the Hugos.
The scoring system makes collusion difficult if not impossible, IMHO, and it also helps that you-the-author choose whether to enter, instead of any kind of fan or critics' nomination process. Which means that as a first-round judge (members/entrants judge, though you're barred from judging a category you've entered), you're probably going to be stuck reading at least one mediocre to downright terrible entry per year, but it's worth it to see new or obscure authors mixed in with the well-known stars on the list of finalists.
They did nothing technically illegal, just nasty, especially the way they pushed honestly great work off the ballot (like, fr'instance, The Martian, which I figured was going to win the Hugo).
It's worse: two of their nominees were ineligible, two more were reviewed and found to be "substantially different," and there's one more likely to be taken off because John C. Wright keeps publishing stories on his blog and then deleting them, and Vox Day apparently doesn't realize that counts as publication.
Ironically, The Martian is the kind of SF they claim has been marginalized. He's practically channeling Heinlein and Hal Clement.
There's also a Heinlein biography that would be on Best Related Work if they didn't take the whole ballot.
And a wonderful nonfiction/scholarly pub about Greg Egan.
Ugh. Some of you wonder how I read so many books. Partly because I'm single and childless, partly because I am on planes a lot...and partly because of shit like last night. Got to my hotel at 845pm after slogging through awful traffic (San Diego to Burnank, though I stopped for dinner in Irvine). Did I write the report for work that is almost a week overdue? No. Did I prepare for today's work, which is probably going to be a serious PITA? No. Did I go to sleep early? No. I finished the book I started at dinner (which was a good one id been looking forward to, admittedly, but would have been just as good on the plane tonight) and then read half of another one (not a great one)
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, Meara.
Station Eleven was wonderful. It gave me the odd sense of being in a dream, the kind of dream that's populated with people who could never be in the same place at the same time.
I was reading it while getting a transfusion, and when I got in the car to go home, a voice on the radio said "this flu is spreading much faster than expected." The story was about the dog flu in the Midwest, but it added to the feeling I was still in the dream.
I read "The Song of Achilles" yesterday. It's a retelling of the Achilles/Patrocles story from the Trojan War. The author did nice things with Patrocles' story arc, giving him some nice growth and interest. And she made his final decisions understandable, when before they'd always made me go,
"What are you doing in that armor? You have no business on a battlefield, boy, get back to your tent this instant!"
So that's nice. And the prose is lovely. A friend who listened to it on Audible said it worked really well in that format, too.
I've been keeping track, on DW, of the books I've read--116 as of today (plus a few half-finished). It's only the 108th day of the year. Yes, I am ridiculous. Yes, my Amazon bill is enormous and the Kindle is the best thing to happen so I'm not lugging bags of books around.
Jeez, I've read 12 (I'm trying to read 4 a month). 116 is mind-blowing.
