The Endeavour Award for books published in 2021 was presented at Norwescon 45 on April 8.

• How to Get to Apocalypse by Erica L. Satifka (Fairwood Press)

The award encourages the growth of literature in the field and recognize works of excellence. It is named for H.M. Bark Endeavour, the ship of Northwest explorer Capt. James Cook. It is accompanied by a grant of $1,000 to the winner.

The winning book was one of five finalists selected by a group of preliminary readers. The others included Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee (Orbit), Calculated Risks by Seanan McGuire (Daw), Blood of the Chosen by Django Wexler (Orbit), and On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu (Erewhon).

The award winner was determined from the finalists by a panel of judges consisting of Catherine Asaro, Andy Duncan, and Fran Wilde.

In combined remarks, the judges said: “We congratulate all the writers on this impressive shortlist, and salute our latest Endeavour Award winner, Erica L. Satifka.”

Regarding the winner, they said: “We are delighted to help shine an eerie phantasmagorical glow of regard onto a book of such spiky originality as this. Satifka’s How To Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters is a fractal triumph that works on every level, from individual sentences and stories to the splendidly counterintuitive jigsaw of the whole. Rather than forming a seamless sameness, they constitute a fully interlocking kaleidoscope of moods and modes. These 23 stories take a gorgeously broad view of the genre, jacking especially into the cyberpunk mainframe, while exploring 21st-century concerns in language that raises a shower of sparks on every page. One juror compared this book to classic collections by Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty, which is the same as saying it’s basically incomparable; another juror summed up by saying, simply: ‘I’m very impressed.’ We also must honor the chutzpah of a book that identifies all the stories therein as disastrous.”

The Endeavour Award recognizes science fiction or fantasy works of 40,000 words or more, or single-author collections of short fiction. Eligibility for nominees remains the same. The author or authors must have been living [maintaining legal or physical residence] in the Pacific Northwest [Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, The Yukon, and British Columbia] when the publisher accepted the book, and must affirm that they wrote the majority of the book while living in the Pacific Northwest. The books must have been published in the United States or in Canada.

Update 04/10/23: Added information from a press release. 04/11/2023: Added photos.