At Torcon 3, the sixty-first World Science Fiction Convention, I won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year for my novel Hominids, first volume of the “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy. The other nominees were Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick, Kiln People by David Brin, The Scar by China Miéville, and The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This had been my sixth Hugo nomination; I’d most recently lost the award in 2001, when J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire beat my Calculating God. Here’s what I said when I won… First off, I’d like to thank J. K. Rowling for being late delivering the manuscript of The Order of the Phoenix, so that it didn’t come out until 2003. I guess since there was no Harry Potter on the ballot, a hairy Ponter was the next-best thing… I’d also like to thank the Hugo administrators for deciding that Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline was really a novella rather than a novel.
