People say there are too many book awards.  Those people are absolutely correct.  But fuck ’em.  I love awards.

Over the Easter / Passover period some award finalists were announced, and so were winners of previously announced shortlists including the PKD Awards, the Aurealis Awards, the Ditmar Awards and the BSFA.

Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless – a book I have not read – won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award.  A special citation was awarded to After The Flare by Deji Bryce Olukotun – a book I’ve also not read, but own on my e-reader (no guarantee I’ll ever pick it up, but you never know).  I don’t have much to add here other than to congratulate both Carrie and Deji.

The Ditmar Awards were also announced.  The winner for best novel was the excellent first book in a new fantasy series, Crossroads of Canopy by Thoraiya Dyer.  My sin is that I haven’t as yet read the second novel in the series, Echoes of Understorey, which is out right now.

I am stoked to see Jane Rawson’s magnificent From The Wreck win an Aurealis award for best science fiction novel.  I’m currently re-reading it for reasons and my appreciation of the book, which was already sky-high, has increased.  For those of you who haven’t read From The Wreck, I’m not angry; I’m just disappointed.

Also a shout out to Cally Black’s In The Dark Spaces, a powerful young adult novel that Kirstyn and I discussed on the last episode of The Writer and the Critic.

I’m not going to comment on the other winners because I don’t have all day, but congratulations to one and all.

And then there’s the British Science Fiction Award which this year awarded its best novel to prize to Nina Allan’s The Rift.  It’s an OK book…

… just kidding, it’s FUCKING AWESOME a truly sublime work loved by people who hate most other science fiction.  Allan’s fiction, just like her criticism, explores what the novel can do, not through experimentation or Oulipo type word games but by inserting ambiguity and strangeness into the most ordinary of places.  Science fiction is the device she uses, but her fiction crosses the heavily armed border between literary and genre.  She is one of the best, and if this book isn’t a Clarke Award finalist (it should have been a Hugo finalist… don’t get me started) then I won’t be angry; I will be disappointed.

Nah, fuck it, I’ll be furious.