Second paragraph of third section:
“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”
This won the the 2001 Best Novelette Award in both the Hugos and the Nebulas, the author having been born in 1908, making him certainly the oldest person to win either award in, I suspect, any category (Retro Hugos aside). These were the only final ballot places for fiction that Williamson ever got in his long career (his autobiography won a Hugo for Best Nonfiction Book sixteen years earlier, in 1985).
I wrote at the time of the Hugo final ballot that although I preferred Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” and Greg Egan’s “Oracle”:
None of the others were real turkeys though. “The Ultimate Earth” didn’t have a very satisfactory ending but that seems to be standard for stories about nanotechnology.
“The Ultimate Earth” came eighth in the Locus poll, which normally hews closer to the Hugo and Nebula rankings, and only fourth in Analog‘s own readers poll of novellas of 2000. (The Locus poll was won by “Radiant Green Star” by Lucius Shepard, and the Analog poll by “A Roll of the Dice”, by Catherine Asaro, both of which were also Hugo and Nebula finalists.) Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” surely has shown more staying power; likewise Greg Egan’s “Oracle”.
Looking back now, it’s clear that the Hugo and Nebula voters of the day were honoring Williamson’s career rather than the qualities of this particular story, which is rather old-fashioned despite the use of nanotechnology.
After disaster strikes Earth, a group of clone children who have been raised on the Moon steal a spaceship to go back to the home planet. They find it is not what they expected (this is where the nanobots come in) and head off into the stars. Not very new ideas, and not really done in a new way. But you can get it here.
The Hugo for Best Novel went to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; the Nebula to Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose, neither of which are brilliant choices. There is better luck in some other categories – Dave Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness” is a jewel of a short story Hugo winner, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won both Hugo and Nebula
Next in this series of joint Hugo/Nebula winners will be “Hell Is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang. After that, I will skip American Gods and Coraline and go straight on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
