The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, a secondary-world tale with no immediately obvious physical connection to our world, begins with a somewhat mannered letter from one Albion the Younger to his Uncle, the latter very probably the ruler of "Imperial Daluz," advising him on how best to defend the empire: I was all primed for a scrumptious (if appropriate) literary banquet, and I got one, though not exactly the one I expected. I was particularly impressed when I found out that, among other finalists, Wilson's book had beaten out The Grace of Kings, a first novel by Ken Liu, whose award-winning short fiction and game-changing translation of the Hugo-Award-winning Chinese SF novel The Three-Body Problem (2008) by Liu Cixin has already made him a major figure in the field. The award will occasionally go to someone destined to become a beloved genre favorite, like Charles de Lint, but is at least as likely to be awarded to writers like Jonathan Lethem, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, or Mary Rickert, who go on to develop impeccable (high) literary credentials. The Crawford is given by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, an academic organization, and, while it isn't a stuffy award exactly, it does tend to be high-toned. I first heard of this short novel when it received the Crawford Award as the best first fantasy of the year.
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