Tonight, in Seattle, I was in the crowd when my novel Apex won the Philip. K Dick Award.

.@Ramez Naam reading from Apex at the Philip K. Dick Awards ceremony. pic.twitter.com/eY6ilrDsMl — CC Finlay (@ccfinlay) March 26, 2016

Apex is the third and final book of the Nexus Trilogy. Those books have now collectively won the Prometheus Award, the Endeavor Award, been listed on NPR’s list of Best Books of the Year, and been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Kitchies Golden Tentacle Award. They also earned me a nomination for the Campbell Award for Best New Author in 2014.

To say I’m pleased would be an understatement. The PKD is a juried award, meaning that a panel of 5 judges picked Apex as the most deserving paperback-original science fiction novel of the year, out of the more than 100 titles that were submitted.

I’m also pleased because Philip K. Dick wrote about topics that I care about: Identity, memory, surveillance, the inner workings of the mind and the structure of society. Those are the very same topics I tried to touch on in the Nexus books.

My fellow nominees (Marguerite Reed, Adam Rakunas, PJ Manney, Douglas Lain, and Brenda Cooper) are all awesome. Brenda was one of the first professional writers to take the time to read Nexus and to give me advice and encouragement on publishing. PJ and Adam are both old friends. And I look forward to becoming friends with Marguerite and Doug.

The six of us teamed up to give away copies of all six finalist books. It’s too late to enter that giveaway (almost 4,000 people did), but you can still visit the site to learn more about all six books.

Here’s all of us hanging out before the award.

Thank you everyone who helped make Apex and the Nexus books great, including Molly (who read every page of each of those books, usually on the day I wrote it), my agent Lucienne Diver, my editor Lee Harris and publisher Marc Gascoigne, the almost 60 beta readers who read one or more drafts of those three books (sometimes many more than one draft) and gave feedback to make them better, and especially the fans who bought them, shared them, and told everyone else to go read them.

Onward and upward.