There was much enjoyment and anticipation in reading the books I liked as a youngster and seeing them rack up awards or at least show up in the column of books likely to receive an award but the people that ran the awards changed over the years into a tiny clique of like-minded degenerates and the awards lost all meaning to me long before they were challenged by the Sad & Rabid puppies. Their campaigns were fun to watch, doomed to failure and led to the complete trivialization of all awards in that genre. Hell, they even tried to change the names because they suddenly found themselves too woke to tolerate the foibles of men and women long dead.
I thought it was interesting when the degenerates all suddenly decided to hold their next round of award proclamizing in one of the last Totalitarian States that still matters north of the Equator. Yes, they decided that the thing for a bunch of supposedly future looking individuals was to hie off to Red China and vote for the best works in the genre. They had of course, to weed out all those that their hosts felt were unworthy and so they did without fanfare or actually telling anyone. It was a disaster.
The decided to hold their next great awards meeting in an almost English Speaking Country that very few Americans can find on a map, on account of its not on most maps and this time the awards judges didn't winnow through the authors and throw them out. Nope, they winnowed through the votes and tossed out over 300 votes as somehow 'unworthy'. So, nothing really new.
What stabbed me in the eye and left me with a headache though was when I realized just a couple of hours ago that I so failed to pay attention to the stupid awards that I didn't even know what book 'won' this years accolades for best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. So I looked. God help me, I looked.
If you're interested you can see what the real book with that title was about here.
Some Desperate Glory is the diary of a British officer (Edwin Campion Vaughan), written during the first eight months of 1917 while he was deployed near the Cambrai sector and then moved up in late July to Ypres at the start of the Battle of Passchendaele. The diary was published posthumously in 1981 by Henry Holt and Company. Writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2006, James J. Cramer cites Some Desperate Glory as one of the five best books on war: “Vaughan describes the screams of the wounded who had sought refuge in the freshly gouged holes only to find themselves slowly drowning as rain fell and the water level rose. A relentlessly stark account of the war's bloodiest, most futile battle.”[1] Vaughan ended his diary on August 28, reflecting the futility of Passchendaele with: " So this was the end of 'D' Company. Feeling sick and lonely, I returned to my tent to write out my casualty report; but instead I sat on the floor and drank whisky after whisky as I gazed into a black and empty future."[2]
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