In less than a month, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society judges’ decision about the winner of the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award will be announced at Norwescon‘s annual conference on April 3, 2026. I always enjoy reading the short-listed novels for these speculative fiction awards, so if you are doing that too and you’re reading through this list, you have only a few more weeks to finish up.
I also wonder why I have so much fun doing this. Partly it’s because these lists introduce me to great speculative fiction I may have otherwise missed. I’m not all that knowledgeable, just an avid reader encountering some amazing fiction. Yes, I did study literature in grad school, but not THIS literature. I’m enthralled. I want to know more. These lists are part of my self-directed course syllabus, I guess.
Partly, though, I’m always awestruck at the variety of speculative fiction out there, and the variety of ways readers approach it. Not all readers approach it the way I do, and so the judges may very well pick a book that I wouldn’t pick. YOU, dear reader, may very well pick a book I wouldn’t pick.
This list is especially challenging. It’s all apples and oranges. I don’t envy the judges. I just finished judging a statewide poetry contest posing a similar challenge, and I thought I’d lose my mind. But then I, in the privacy of my own head, one individual reader among many, had the luxury of making my own choice for this award. And I found I had no trouble at all.
You can read my review of it HERE, if you missed it in this series of posts. But really, get yourself a copy and read THAT. It is amazing. If the judges pick Ha’s collection of short fiction, I’ll feel gratified, but they could pick any of the others. You might pick any of the others. After all, it’s not a horse-race, even if these awards have that feel.
One reader of this blog complained I’m contributing to the horse-race atmosphere. I hope not. But he has a point, and also I have real concerns about the gate-keeping that allows one book to be considered for awards and shuts another book out, for reasons completely other than excellence. Anyway, fair point, and of course you can read any, all, or none of these books before, during, or after the judging. But if you read just one. . .
By the way, I am not in any affiliate program, do not benefit financially from this blog, and have no financial interest in any of these books or the outcome of this award. The only thing I do is sometimes–not often–flog my own books.
In this post, I review the last of the seven short-listed nominees for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award. I have proceeded through the list alphabetically. See earlier posts in this series for all the rest. 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 gorgeous cover says it all about this experimental novel. It’s a novel about division and fracture–between civic visions, between family factions, and even within the individual. That makes it the story of our troubled, fractured times.
In the novel, a celebrated filmmaker named Pike, the leading citizen of Fairharbour, a city on an isolated island, is the controlling matriarch of a large and contentious clan. In the novel’s backstory, the matriarch has been murdered, and her city has been mysteriously and violently wrenched into two cities, one a city of hot, uncomfortable summer, the other a city of extreme frigid winter. The citizens of each have given up friends and family members for dead. Anyone trying to leave the island must pass through a barrier but can never come back, so there’s no way to find out what happened to their city through any information from the outside world. Each city’s inhabitants believe some mysterious “weather bomb” has descended on the city and they are the only survivors.
The disaster and resulting collapse of civil order allows an authoritarian to take control of each city. In the city of winter, one of the matriarch’s two sons employs the sinister Doormen to break down everyone’s doors and brick up every building, supposedly to protect against the freezing weather. In the city of summer, the other of the two sons employs a sinister Fenestration team to knock holes in all the walls, windows supposedly allowing more air circulation in the horrifying heat. All the citizens suffer, even the members of the Pike family, although the two authoritarians cut them more slack than others.
As the novel opens, a Pike family member in each city, mourning their close connection with their counterpart in the other, begins getting hints that a parallel but opposite city exists. Each begins wondering, then hoping, that their loved one is still alive, and each one begins devising intricate, enchanting objects to plant as clues for the counterpart to find. These two characters–Jamie in the city of winter, Esther in the city of summer–alternate telling the story.
As part of the matriarch’s huge, extended, rambunctious family, they have inherited the matriarch’s creativity and ingenuity, but they see mechanical and industrial skills as equal in importance and creativity to the matriarch’s own creative specialty, filmmaking. The grandmother asks one of the main characters, Esther, what kind of artist she hopes to be. “I thought,” Esther tells us, “deep down inside myself, that I didn’t want to be an artist at all but a maker. . .” Artist, maker. The novel asks whether there is actually a difference between the two. Esther really gets what it means to be an artist. When another character questions her motivations for creating a forbidden object, a glass harp–“You wasted all that glass. . knowing it would have to be broken?”–Esther’s response tells us a lot. “It’s the job of the artist to create, not to tell other people what to do with the creation.”
The novel is actually, I think, a huge extended poem or maybe extended metaphor. Both, I guess. As I began reading it, I was puzzled by the dystopian yet whimsical tone, by a setting where the technology suggests a world stuck in the ’50s, and by the erratic characters and plot developments. By the end of part one, told from Jaimie’s point of view, I had sort of figured it out. Then, as Esther’s point of view took over in part two, I got it–or thought I did. I was a bit disappointed by what I believed to be an ingenious but over-labored plot gimmick. As I read on, I discovered the novel is actually much stranger and more intriguing. By part three, I realized I was reading a call-and-response that was more about poetic concepts that believable plot.
This makes a kind of sense. One of the co-authors, Langmead, has written two verse novels. And the alternating points of view, the call-and-response structure, make sense of the dual authorship. I have to admit, when I see a co-authored book, my natural tendency is to steer away. I always think I’m about to encounter a manufactured object, not a real novel. A marketing arrangement, maybe. Especially in genre fiction, readers fairly frequently encounter books where one co-author has the “ideas” and the other has the words. Unfair, I know. What about all the brilliant collaborations in literary history? What about Gilbert and Sulllivan? What about Shakespeare’s collaboration with John Fletcher (and probably other uncredited or unknown collaborators)? City of All Seasons calls me out on my prejudice. Dual authorship, in this novel, only intensifies the doubling and dualities all the way through.
I ended up admiring this ingenious contraption of a novel, as ingenious and magical as the contraptions devised by Jaimie, Esther, and others in the authors’ novel–marvelous kaleidoscopes, puzzle boxes, glass harps. A contraption of a novel that provides us, the readers, with the clues we need to make sense of the fractured wider world beyond the fictional construct of the novel.
The whimsical tone, sometimes irritating, can be truly funny, too. In this maritime setting, Fairharbour celebrates The Turning of the Tides every year. The festivities involve the parading of an enormous tuna through the town, the eating of fish pies, the wearing of fish masks, and the like. (I’m reminded of Porto’s sardine festival with all the sardine hats.) Jaimie, the narrator of this part of the novel, faces a crowd and loses his courage. “I briefly flounder,” he tells us, before regaining his composure. Fish jokes!
The matriarch gives us a clue, too. Of her two wanna-be dictator sons: “You’ve always been boys with bricks. One makes a wall, the other knocks holes in it.”
I admired this novel but I had trouble reading it. Nothing made any overt sense in it, not in the ordinary way, so I as a reader was always looking for the surreal sense at the heart of it. But it’s a novel, and in novels, characters and plot do make sense. Usually. I do think fiction can establish a surreal world in which words suggest beyond themselves rather than try to nail things down. I think it’s very hard to bring off, though, especially at this length. And I don’t think this novel always works at the level of word, phrase, sentence as a great poem must. I’m thinking, for example, of China Miéville’s The Iron Council, where every word, phrase, and sentence does work. But then it’s just all too, too much. I ended up admiring City of All Seasons as a noble and very intriguing effort. Above all, I loved the call-and-response structure and its connection to the divided and the divisive. I admired its attempt to name and drop clues about and heal the breach.
Here’s my next post reviewing the seven short-listed 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.
Wow. I don’t review much short fiction on this blog, but this is some of the best writing I’ve encountered in a long, long time. These stories are truly weird, too. The uncanny is huge in every one of them, some set in a near-future dystopic world, others set in an alternate reality. That’s an important aspect of every one of the stories in Ha’s collection. More important than the uncanny: these are horrifying, unreal, tender stories of human relationships–especially the father-son relationship–relationships that come across to us as extraordinarily, stunningly real.
While I admire the short story form–especially in its resemblance to poetry, which I write–I have an undying affection for the novel, where a story can stretch out, and a reader can immerse herself with the illusion she lives in that world. I keep trying to write those, too. But the short story requires the poet’s discipline and the poet’s precise placement of words and sounds and beats. AND it is a narrative. Although, as Gregory Orr points out, every poem, no matter how lyric, has a nugget of narrative at its center, and poetry aligns along a sliding scale of very narrative–think The Iliad, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost–to very lyric–think Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” or the haiku of Basho. So can we say every successful short story, no matter how wholly narrative, contains a nugget of the lyric? I’ll say it. I’ll say it does.
These stories have more than a nugget of the lyric–and I don’t mean by that any kind of croony, flowery stuff. Every word in Ha’s stories counts and has weight in its sentence–how long, how short, where the word is placed. What kind of sentence. Is it a sentence appropriate for a tough guy, or for a troubled but inventive and intelligent young girl, or for a person terrified and running for his life, or for some wise and mysterious and faintly (or very) menacing woman? Yes. All of that.
And while these stories are short, the longest being novella length, they have the heft of a great novel. We may not spend as much clock-time inside the worlds they build, but in our imaginations, these stories explode. I can’t “explain” any of them, even to myself. Some are more Kafka-esque than others, but they all have a nightmare atmosphere that punches you in the gut even if you’re not entirely sure why.
Many of them share the same mysterious elements. Through these, Ha gives us a lot of clues. There’s a man with a tall hat. There’s the child, knowing but not knowing the terrors that surround him and his family. There’s the phrase, “On your way with you.” There are the floating alien balloon-like horrors that can’t be fought, can’t be outrun. A pair of bearded brothers. There’s a wise, enigmatic, dangerous woman. The question Is any one of us the same person we were yesterday or even only moments ago? Especially, there’s the relationship between father and son.
Hard not to pick them all, but here are some of my favorites from Ha’s collection:
House Traveler: A man from a group that might or might not have been neurologically tampered with makes a perilous journey from house to house of a neighborhood to consult a woman called The Liar. Every house he re-enters seems to be the same house he entered moments before, but maybe it’s a different house uncannily like the first. Are you the same person you were, a moment ago? What are we to make of the ritualistically repeated phrase “On your way with you” and its variations? Can the wise, gnomic pronouncements of someone named The Liar be trusted? The only solid, trustworthy character in the story seems to be a young boy trying to draw something. I am weirdly reminded of the ending of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, where the main character experiences everything in nauseating flux, until he is able to pin down one still point through the power of art (in his case, a jazz recording). Does this have anything to do with Ha’s story? This may just be me and my private associations, a danger–but also a source of enrichment–for every reader.
Balloon Season: Alien balloon-like creatures arrive every year to terrorize a town. This year, they’ve arrived earlier than ever, and in more menacing numbers. This is a story of relationships, and of a man attempting to come to terms with himself. The man refuses to go out balloon hunting because, he says, he needs to stay inside to protect his family. Now he is denying the balloon hunters the little help he has been giving them in past balloon seasons. His brother taunts him for a coward. His wife and children trust him and are precious to him. When he goes out for supplies and the balloons arrive, he faces a personal reckoning.
Sweetbaby: This story, like the others, establishes a nightmare scenario. The story is longer than many of the others, and provides the reader with more backstory about how the world ended up in such a perilous condition. Others in the collection just hint at why these terrors have descended on the world. In this story, a young girl kept from the truth by her parents figures it out on her own via her savvy understanding of technology and her courage in facing not only actual but existential violence.
The Sort: Except for the title story, this is the quintessential father-son story of the collection. A father and his young son embark on a road trip to see the country. When they stop to observe a rural town’s strange, ritualistic harvest festival, the father begins to realize how much danger his son is facing. As we begin to understand why, the father has some decisions to make.
The Fairgrounds: I thought this story was going to be James Joyce’s Araby redux. It may have started out along those lines, but it veers into something much, much stranger.
Uncertain Sons: This is the novella-length title story of the collection, and it is great. Here are all the themes–the father/son relationship, the floating scary alien things, the wise scarred woman, the phrase “On your way with you.” Even the bearded brothers. And a whole lot of stomach-churning violence. In a way, this story takes both Balloon Season and The Sort and turns them on their heads.
Coming up next: Scales by Christopher Hinz (Angry Robot)
Fantastes 
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