Conversations at book events and publication launch parties often
turn to the fact that Seattle needs another annual book festival. But,
honestly, Seattle has had a prominent book festival for over
three decades, and for the last quarter century it’s also hosted a
world-famous, prestigious awards ceremony. If you consider
yourself a reader and you didn’t know about this festival already, it’s
probably due to your narrow tastes: it’s devoted to science fiction and
fantasy.
Norwescon happens every year in SeaTac over Easter weekend (see
www.norwescon.org for details),
a scheduling choice that seems almost intoxicatingly
sacrilegious. Fans and authors come from around the world for
seminars, sales booths, lectures, and author signings. While its
organizers keep the focus on Norwescon’s literary roots, pretty much
every aspect of the sci-fi world is covered, from anime to movies to
television shows.
Many of the seminars are as thick with nerdly giddiness as you’d
imagine. The Joss Whedon Sing-Along on Friday promises to live up to
most people’s distasteful sci-fi stereotypes and the mere act of
imagining Saturday’s Hobbit Country Dancing can herniate the
brain. But there are also classes about how to become an author and
sell your material once it’s written. There’s no other multiday event
as dedicated to the printed word in the Pacific Northwest.
The best reason to pay attention to Norwescon is the Philip K. Dick
Awards, an annual ceremony dedicated to celebrating a “distinguished
original science-fiction paperback published for the first time during
the award year in the USA.” Unlike most book awards, the PKD Awards
almost always single out an excellent book. Of the last five
years’ worth of PKD winners, three of them—Life by Gwyneth
Jones, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and The Mount by
Carol Emshwiller—are books that, in a world unprejudiced to
genre, would wind up on almost any critics’ annual best-of lists.
The Mount, particularly, is a marvel; originally published by
a tiny Massachusetts art-house publisher, this novel—about a
distant future wherein humans are content to be the transport animals
(complete with bits and saddles) for tiny aliens who have enslaved
us—is so refreshingly weird and allegorical that it evokes
some of the earliest masters of the genre, like Orwell and Verne. If
the PKD awards didn’t recognize The Mount, it’s doubtful that
anyone else would have, either, which means that they’re possibly the
only book awards in the world that actually do exactly what they’re
supposed to do. 