My Picks for the Philip K. Dick Award

The nominees for this year's Philip K. Dick Award are:

• A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson (Ace Books)
• After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh (Small BeerPress)
• Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
• The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
• The Other by Matthew Hughes (Underland Press)
• The Postmortal by Drew Magary (Penguin Books)
• The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden (Orbit)

For my process, I requested everything from interlibrary loan, except The Postmortal, which appeared at the public library before I had seen the nominees list.  I will fully admit here that I did not read all the books in their entirety.  This is largely because a few of them are so far from my tastes that I couldn't force myself past the first 50 pages.

My favorite is easily After the Apocalypse: Stories by Maureen F. McHugh.  I had run across the title story in the Strahan I got to review earlier this year, and was excited to read the rest.  McHugh is an author I am eager to read more of - she has some unique perspectives, and throws some sarcasm and humor in there, which I always appreciate.

My second tier would go to The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy (which I read only the first book of), and The Postmortal.  Both of these take place in somewhat dystopian futures, and had interesting concepts driving them forward.  Both had a lot of science and math, and even just as a setting, this will rate more highly for me.

A Soldier's Duty had an interesting concept of a young female precog but it was so pro-military and full of dutyspeak that I was unwilling to overlook it to get through it.  The Other is third in a trilogy, and this volume didn't make me very interested in the main character.  The world seems to be an interesting blend of fantasy and science fiction - imagine characters from Rothfuss combined with interstellar travel.  I'd read the first Mira Grant and liked it better than the second, and I had a hard time sticking to this one.  Plus, zombies.  I'm just not a big zombie fan.  The Company Man is more of a detective novel, and is full of noir cliche.  This is someone's thing, just not mine!

Some authors have had careers defined by the Philip K. Dick Award, and if I wanted to grant that distinction to one of these authors, I'd go with Maureen McHugh or DOCTOR Simon Morden.

The award will be announced April 6, 2012, at Norwescon 35. 

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

Equations of Life by Simon Morden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this because it was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award in 2012, and I'm glad it showed up on that list as I hadn't come across it in any other way. Technically the entire trilogy is nominated.

This is set in a post-apocalyptic London (in the "Metrozone"), in a time where bombs have destroyed most of the world and countries like Japan have completely disappeared due to environmental disaster (war-related).

Samuil Petrovitch is around 20, having recently escaped from St. Petersburg and working as a graduate physics student, when he ends up helping someone who is being kidnapped. He gets involved in a situation involving Russian mobsters, Yakuza, and ends up with technology going crazy.

The story is fast-paced and has a lot of bits to make my geeky heart happy, including mathematicians who might be cracking the code to time travel in the midst of the chaos, a main character who swears in Russian, a nun who just happens to have the biggest gun of anyone, and a new Japan created in a virtual space. Samuil is written to be complex, but the age of the characters really got to me - Maddy and Sam are both around 20 and I just kept thinking how much more I'd believe their actions and powers of deduction if they were at least in their 30s.

I think I may actually read the next book.

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

The Postmortal by Drew Magary
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up because it was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, and it jumped into my arms at the public library.

I like the premise of the story, and the overarching storytelling technique. The premise is that an American scientist discovered the cure for aging, and the main narrator in the story had the cure. Most of the book chapters are accounts from his e-mail or the news during the time, and a few break and go into plain narrative.

This isn't just an idea book though. The author takes the idea and really follows it through, decades later, to see what would truly happen to a world society that had the potential not to age. There are changes in religion, the family unit, war, and government control. Somehow it all feels like it goes on too long (I started consistently looking for how many pages I had left around 240), but I'm not sure what to cut. Maybe the love story. Maybe the final career. Maybe the bizarre ending. Maybe some of the side tidbits that are thrown in just to show one detail of the issues with never aging (interesting, but not as critical to the central story). It isn't bad, but all these side trips keep the book from being as riveting as I think it could have been.