Here’s my first post reviewing the nominees for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award. A reminder–the awards are made by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and will be presented at Norwescon‘s annual conference on April 3, 2026.

The Nominees

• Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)–REVIEWED IN THIS POST
• Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey (Orbit)
• Casual by Koji A. Dae (Tenebrous Press)
• The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon (Solaris)
• Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow Publications)
• Scales by Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot)
• City of All Seasons by Oliver K. Langmead and Aliya Whiteley (Titan Books)

Sunward, William Alexander, Saga Press

This novel is what you might call “cozy SF.” The cozy subgenre is having a moment these days. HERE is a great explanation. William Alexander is well-known as a children’s author. Here, he translates his engaging vision to an adult SF readership. The book’s afterword tells us it originated as a short story. Then it morphed into this short novel.

Sunward is a whimsical and heartwarming tale of found family, the human fear of robots (Meat vs. Machine), and Newton’s First Law of Motion. Also the nobility of the postal service. It reads a bit like a children’s book, which makes sense, given its author. I found it fun, but a bit too twee. That’s just me. You may love it. People have compared it to the fascinating novels of Becky Chambers and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. (The book’s marketing copy compares it to Ursula LeGuin. No way. Unless you’re thinking of Catwings, I guess.)

The plot is intricate and engaging. In the far future, the main station on Luna has been destroyed–by robots? The captain of a postal service space ship is the unassuming daughter of the Moon queen, which makes her a moon princess. She has a bureaucrat brother with a stick up his hoo-ha, but Captain Tova has no political ambitions of her own. She just wants to keep peacefully delivering the mail and fostering baby robots so they become socialized enough to fulfill their functions. And no, she does not aspire to advancement in the postal service. The top-rung people carrying the top-secret messages too often get themselves killed.

Then hysteria over the unproven robot conspiracy to blow up Luna puts the captain’s latest charge, an exceptionally bright and promising robot named Agatha Panza von Sparkles, at risk of having her whole personality wiped. “Captain Mom” is determined to save her current baby robot and all of her other far-flung robot fosters. Meanwhile, a flotilla of religious zealots is converging on the sun, there’s a conspiracy involving a dead body, and a robot production of Twelfth Night wows the crowd. Did I mention a talking parrot and a crazy pirate hat? Captain Moon Princess Mom finds herself in the thick of it.

Sunward really is a cute, fun, brisk read. And I love Twelfth Night, so there’s that. Does Alexander’s novel fulfill the mission of the Philip K. Dick Award–to honor the best science fiction paperback original published during the award year? Does it honor the legacy of Philip K. Dick, who has been compared to Thomas Pynchon and Franz Kafka? You tell me.