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049 PK Dick Award reading of 84K by Claire North

MCed by William Sadorus (https://www.facebook.com/william.sadorus) and Gordon Van Gelder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Van_Gelder)

PK Dick Award official website: https://www.philipkdickaward.org

Award banquet video: https://youtu.be/cN_bcnNADi0

The Nominees:

episode 44 TIME WAS by Ian McDonald (Tor.com)

episode 45 ALIEN VIRUS LOVE DISASTER: STORIES by Abbey Mei Otis (Small Beer Press)

THEORY OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions)

THE BODY LIBRARY by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot) read by Adam Kakoonis

AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES by Vandana Singh (Small Beer Press) read by Brenda Cooper

84K by Claire North (Orbit) read by Vonda Lee

A special citation was awarded to 84K by Claire North (Orbit).

The winner of the 2019 PK Dick award was THEORY OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions).

Dick sold his first story, “Roog”, in 1951 at the age of twenty three. Roog was about “a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container”. After that sucess he wrote full-time. Within the next twelve months he published stories in Planet Stories and in If and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that year. His debut novel was Solar Lottery, published in 1955 as half of an Ace Double #D-103 alongside The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett. The 1950s were a difficult and impoverished time for Dick, who once lamented, “We couldn’t even pay the late fees on a library book.” He published almost exclusively within the science fiction genre, but yearned for a career in mainstream fiction.

In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle and he was hailed as a genius in the science fiction world. The mainstream literary world was unappreciative, and he could publish books only through low-paying science fiction publishers such as Ace. Although he yearned to break into the mainstream market and have his novels come out in hardback, he never made it. Thusly, we get the PK Dick award which each year honors the best new “straight to paperback” novel.

2019 PK Dick judges :

Madilyn Ashbee

Ryan Adaberry

Christopher Brown

Rosemary Edgehill

Marilyn Asherbe

Jason Huff