Philip K Dick Awards

The winner for this year's Philip K. Dick Award----distinguished original science fiction paperback----was picked over the weekend. Odd to me, because the winner is the only one on the list of nominees I've managed to read thus far. Well deserved, though. Mark Hodder tells a great story with The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack and it's easily one of the better steampunk titles I've read in recent years, mostly because of how great a character Sir Richard Burton becomes under Hodder's pen.

I'll need to buckle down and read the others---for whatever reason my tastes tend to lean more towards the PKD Awards than with the other Sci Fi and Fantasy awards. Harmony by Project Itoh sounds particularly fun.

Excelsior

Interview with Jesse Karp

One of my cool side-gigs is doing a lot of things with the professional association YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), and one of the things I do for them is manage a semi-regular Podcast. A lot of them end up being YALSA-business kinds of interviews, but this past week was a fun one. I interviewed Jesse Karp about his first published novel, a dark and mind-bending SpecFic book called Those That Wake. For more about Jesse, check out his own site Beyond Where You Stand.