Annal:1998 Philip K. Dick Award

253: The Print Remix

Geoff Ryman

• 1998 Philip K Dick winner
• Score: 10.48

A London tube train, with all seats occupied, carries 252 passengers. The driver makes 253. Each one has a secret history, thoughts about themselves and the world. And each one’s story takes one page (comprised of exactly 253 words) in this novel. Meet Estelle, who has fallen madly in love with Saddam Hussein; James, who anesthetizes sick gorillas for a living; and Who? a character who doesn’t know where, or what, on earth he is. Perhaps you’ll see a bit of yourself in some or all of them. This seven-and-a-half-minute ride between Embankment and Elephant & Castle is highly original. And enjoyable. And unpredictable. And full of marvels.

Lost Pages

Paul Di Filippo

• 1998 Philip K Dick citation
• Score: 8.48

When Paul Di Filippo unleashes his imagination, watch out. The result is sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, always unpredictable. In Lost Pages, Di Filippo has deliberately selected as protagonists for his nine alternate world stories men and women who in our world became known for their work as writers—people of strong character who, whatever their situation, would have proved extraordinary.

He envisions “Frank” Kafka as the scourge of Gotham’s mean streets—by day, the mild-mannered advice columnist behind “Ask Josephine,” by night, “the Jackdaw,” a superhero who terrifies evildoers. Anne Frank, having escaped by a matter of days the German invasion of Holland, becomes the Hollywood stand-in for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and later the drug-addled ex-wife of Michey Rooney. Little Prince author Antoine de St.-Exupery—”Tonio de Saint-Ex” to his many admirers—is as dashing in Di Filippo’s world as he was in ours. He appears as the pilot who can save the remnants of Western civilization in the aftermath of a devastating plague, and along…

Brown Girl in the Ring

Nalo Hopkinson

• 1998 Philip K Dick nominee
• Score: 6.48

Set in Toronto after the turn of the millennium, Brown Girl in the Ring focuses on “The Burn,” the inner city left when Toronto’s economic base collapsed. Young Ti-Jeanne lives with her grandmother, who runs a trade in herbal medicine that is vital to the disenfranchised of The Burn. A fascinating cast of characters combined with the dark world of Afro-Caribbean magic create an altogether original and compelling story by an intriguing new voice.

Slaughtermatic

Steve Aylett

• 1998 Philip K Dick nominee
• Score: 6.48

Full of sass and sarcasm, ultra-cool Dante Cubit and his pill-popping sidekick, the Entropy Kid, waltz into First National with some serious attitude and a couple of snub guns. Within minutes, another (timetraveling) Dante appears—inside the bank vault—and the heist is on. But something’s not right. Is it all just a virtual reality prank of Dante’s hacker pal, Download Jones? Have Dante and the Kid really heisted the bank? What follows is a tangle of reality and virtual reality. Adding to the fireworks is the very real hitman Brute Parker, hot on the trail and out to exterminate Dante—or is it Dante Two—his rival for the love of the captivating assassin Rosa Control.

The Invisible Country: Stories

Paul J. McAuley

• 1998 Philip K Dick nominee
• Score: 6.48

In these nine exraordinary tales, acclaimed author Paul J. Mcauley—winner of the Philip K. Dick, British Fantasy Society, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Aruthur C. Clarke Awards—explores the wonders and dangers of biotechnology and its creations in stories whose settings careen from a distant alternate past to a breathtaking far-flung future.

In a sixteenth-century Venice, transformed by a premature Industrial Revolution, a physian mourning his daughter’s passing meets a mountebank with the power to raise the dead. In a tomorrow of raw and terrible beauty, revolutionaries struggle to free genetically engineered creatrues fated to die in combat games and violent sexual encounters. And ten million years in the future, on an artificial world orbiting an immense black hole, a civilization of awesome strangeness and complexity created—and abandoned—by the Godlike Preservers is about to meet the human ancestors of its makers.