This past weekend, at Norwescon 47, the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust announced the winner of the 2025 Philip K. Dick Award: Time’s Agent, by Brenda Peynado.
Time’s Agent, published last summer by Tordotcom, is a novella about a woman living in a near-future where pocket universes have been discovered. Some are tiny, some are massive, and many are unfortunately ripe for corporate colonization. When archaeologist Raquel gets stuck in one where time moves very differently than it does in our universe, she comes back to find her whole world changed. The Washington Post called it “A genre-bending sociopolitical commentary with prose that shines.”
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay received this year’s special citation.
The Philip K. Dick Award is given each year to a work of science fiction published in the United States in paperback original form. This year’s finalists included City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell; Your Utopia: Stories by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur; The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar; and Triangulum by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
This year’s judges were Maurice Broaddus, C. S. Friedman, Rajan Khanna, Carol McGuirk, and Carrie Vaughn. You can watch the award ceremony here.
