Double Aurora Award win!
by Rob - September 23rd, 2017.Filed under: Auroras, Awards, Hominids, Humans, Hybrids, Neanderthal, Quantum Night.
Woohoo!
First, I’m thrilled that my Quantum Night just won the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora“) for Best Novel of the Year this evening; the award (pictured above) was presented at Hal-Con in Halifax. The nominees were:
- Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada
- Company Town by Madeline Ashby, Tor
- The Courier by Gerald Brandt, DAW
- The Nature of a Pirate by A.M. Dellamonica, Tor
- Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer, Penguin Canada
- Stars Like Cold Fire by Brent Nichols, Bundoran Press
Hayden Trenholm graciously accepted the gorgeous trophy above on my behalf and read these remarks from me:
I’m sorry I can’t be with you in Halifax today; I’m a presenter at the Word on the Street festival in Toronto this weekend. But I’m thrilled to have won, and I thank my editors, Adrienne Kerr and Helen Smith in Toronto and Ginjer Buchanan and Jessica Wade in New York.
I’d also like to thank the voters for the Aurora Awards for this honour — while at the same time decrying those voters south of the border who turned what was supposed to be a cautionary science-fiction tale into a dystopian reality. I had good luck today; let us hope we all have better luck in the next U.S. presidential election.
And, for the first time ever, the Auroras had a “Best of the Decade” category this year, honouring works published from 2001-2010. To my absolute delight, my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy won; the trilogy consists of Hugo Award-winner Hominids, Hugo Award-finalist Humans, and Spectrum Award-finalist Hybrids.
The Best-of-the-Decade nominees were:
- Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson, Tor
- The Blue Ant Trilogy by William Gibson, Berkley
- Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, Tor
- The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer, Tor
- The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint, Tor
- Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada
(Bill Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy consists of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History.)
Hayden Trenholm — who won the Aurora for best short story himself tonight — accepted the beautiful trophy shown below on my behalf in Halifax, and read these remarks from me:
A best-of-the-decade award is about looking back, and although I’m thrilled with this honour, the sad truth is that both the agent who sold this trilogy for me, Ralph Vicinanza, and the editor responsible for it, David G. Hartwell, have passed away in the interim. Also no longer with us is one of my most insightful and helpful beta readers, my younger brother Alan Sawyer.
When I wrote this trilogy, the Neanderthal genome hadn’t yet been sequenced, but we know now that most of us carry a little Neanderthal within ourselves — and so, on behalf of myself and the Neanderthals, I thank you all and wish you, as Ponter Boddit would say, “Healthy day.”
What a night!
Robert J. Sawyer online:
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September 27th, 2017 at 8:53 pm
Well deserved, in both cases. Quantum Night became an instant new favourite for me.