8/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Philip K. Dick Award Nominee
Entertaining far-future adventure with genetically engineered animal/human hybrids, AIs bonded to human hosts and used as weapons, and schemes spanning tens of thousands of years.
Philip K Dick Award
📚 Bug by Giacomo Sartori, translated by Frederika Randall
7/2022 – ⭐️⭐️ Philip K. Dick Award Nominee
Unfortunately, this one just did not work for me. The main character is a 10-year-old deaf (and, I believe, possibly autistic) child, and it’s narrated in a first-person, nearly stream-of-consciousness style, which (in-universe) is the child dictating in sign language to a caretaker who translates what he says. In actuality, the book was originally written in Italian, and has been translated to English. So there are multiple levels of abstraction and translation, and I’m at a loss as to how much of the final writing style and choices were the character’s, an artifact of the in-universe translation from sign language, the author’s, an artifact of the real-world translation from Italian, or some combination of all of those. The end result was that I just didn’t enjoy it.
📚 Defekt by Nino Cipri
6/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Darker and weirder than Finna, complete with elements of body horror, but just as fun to read, and still with the same optimistic current to it. Liked this one a lot; a strong start to this year’s PKD lineup.
PKD Award 📚 Nominees
This year’s stack of Philip K. Dick Award nominees have arrived! (Actually, nominees plus one — Finna is the precursor to Defekt, and I don’t like starting in the middle of a series.) As usual, this looks like a strong selection of books; of note for me is Far From the Light of Heaven, as this is Tade Thompson’s second time as a nominee, and I enjoyed all of his Wormwood trilogy, the third book of which was the earlier nominated work.
Time to get reading! (And if you’re interested, I’ve created a PKD reading challenge on StoryGraph that you’re welcome to join!)
sfadb : Philip K Dick Award: The PKD Award page at the SFADB, or Science Fiction Award Database, a reference site I just found. Linking to the PKD page because the CSS on the SFADB home page isn’t loading for me right now.
📚 13/2021: The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 6/6
Very much enjoyed this one. From chasing cryptids to speculative evolution, with parallel worlds and spacefaring trilobites, and a good dose of humor and good old British stiff-upper-lip.
📚 12/2021: The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 5/6
What started as fairly standard post-apocalyptic setting (small pseudo-medieval communities relying on poorly understood surviving tech) went in more interesting directions than I expected.
📚 11/2011: Dance on Saturday by Elwin Cotman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 4/6
A really strong collection of short stories and one novella. I really enjoyed the way these slipped between the real and the fantastic, and between mundanity and surreal horror and humor.
📚 10/2021: Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 3/6
Another apocalyptic trudge through wastelands (Appalachia during the long winter of an ecological collapse), finding other travelers, & trying to avoid predatory groups. Well written; not my thing.
📚 9/2021: Failed State by Christopher Brown ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #PKDickAward nominee 2/6
Not quite as “we came far too close to this” as its predecessor, so a bit easier to get through. Has some interesting ideas for a post-ecological-collapse approach to legal liability.
