The nominees for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award have been announced. They are as follows:

• Elysium, Jennifer Marie Brissett (Aqueduct Press)
• The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter, Rod Duncan (Angry Robot)
• The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison (Sybaritic Press)
• Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta (Harper Voyager)
• Maplecroft: The Borden Dispatches, Cherie Priest (Roc)
• Reach for Infinity, Jonathan Strahan ed. (Solaris)

Two of those books featured in my Review of the Year post at Aqueduct Press.

Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water is a great little book provided that, as a science fiction reader, you can get over the fact that a world that is desperately short of fresh water has forgotten all about desalination technology. I’d recommend it to anyone but the most hardcore SF types.

The other book I have read is Elysium, which I actually had a review almost finished for. So I have finished it and posted it, here. The short version is that it is a really exciting, and innovative work, slightly marred by a horrible negative stereotype of a trans character.

I’m sure that Jonathan Strahan’s book is really good too. It has an amazing Table of Contents. The others I know less about, and will have to look them up. The PKD is a really good award from that point of view because, by focusing on paperback-first publications, it often catches books that the publishers are not pushing hard and we don’t hear much about.