Thursday, February 23, 2012

My Picks for the Philip K. Dick Award

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

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for visiting the Reading Envy blog and podcast. Word verification has become necessary because of spam.