The PKD is the first genre award for the year and celebrates the best original paperback published in the previous year.  This years nominees, announced while I was fast asleep, look something like this:

  • EDGE OF DARK by Brenda Cooper (Pyr)
  • AFTER THE SAUCERS LANDED by Douglas Lain (Night Shade Books)
  • (R)EVOLUTION by PJ Manney (47North)
  • APEX by Ramez Naam (Angry Robot Books)
  • WINDSWEPT by Adam Rakunas (Angry Robot Books)
  • ARCHANGEL by Marguerite Reed (Arche Press)

There’s a wonderful and exciting hit and miss quality about the PKD Awards.  In one breath the judges can choose vibrant and extraordinary works like Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett or last year’s winner The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison and, on the same ballot, more mainstream, less innovative and middle of the road novels like Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches or The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter (of course your mileage may vary).  It’s the award’s eclectic nature, and it’s willingness to promote small press, that makes it a must read every year.

While six books have been nominated I’ll only be reading five of them.  That’s because I’m instituting a new rule this year whereby I don’t read a novel by an author whose work I’m not keen on.  Ramez Naam’s Apex is the third book in a series of which I read the first, Nexus, and thought it was not very good.  I know I’m a minority in regard to Naam’s work but there you go.

Of the others, I’m really looking forward to Douglas Lain’s novel, an author I’ve been meaning to read but because I’m apathetic have never got around too.

I’ll report on each of the five novels in my weekly journal entries.