2022 Philip K. Dick Award Nominees

Derek lives and breathes his job at LitenVärld to the extent that in his off hours he resides in a shipping container at the back of the massive store’s parking lot–and this is all he remembers. Then one day he takes his first ever sick day, an unheard of thing for a star employee like himself. Suddenly he finds he must prove his loyalty to the company by doing a special overnight inventory shift… with four other employees named Derek who all look like him. (Full disclosure: Nino and I have the same agent.)

The plague birds are hated and feared in the world that remains after civilization has collapsed; they are the merging of gene-modded human and AI, and they pass judgment on the those deemed criminal by the benevolent AI that watches over humanity. After seeing her mother killed by a plague bird as a child, Crista must become one of those feared monsters if she is to save her father and her home village.

Bug is a self-declared “fast friend” who enters the life of the book’s young, deaf narrator without warning and seems to know far too much about both him and his family. But after continuously being misunderstood by the world at large and getting in trouble at school, at least at first, Bug’s help is a welcome relief… even if it’s not strictly legal.

When the ship Ragtime arrives in the Lagos system, first mate Michelle Campion wakes from hibernation to discover that some of her fellow travelers will never join her at their new home. She puts out a distress call, and investigator Rasheed Fin answers, determined to find the cause of these deaths. But its no simple system malfunction–and the repercussions of his discoveries will resonate as far as Earth itself.

A lone gunman called the Stranger embarks on a quest to save his son from another world, striding across the plane known as the Escapement, a place populated by strange and terrible versions of the boy’s favorite things. The Stranger must make it past the Mountains of Darkness if he wants a chance of success, but his time is growing short…

After being injured in an attack, Hester Marley finds herself stranded far from home and deep in debt. She has no choice but to take a security job with an asteroid mining company, where her main task is to help her employer maximize profits rather than provide any actual safety. Then she’s contacted by an old friend who was hurt in the same terrorist attack as her… and then that old friend gets murdered. Determined to find the killer, Hester soon realizes that the situation is far worse and more dangerous than she could have imagined.