John Scalzi, SF novelist and internet personality, is the 2023 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award! He will be attending Balticon 57 in Baltimore, Maryland to accept his award.

The Robert A. Heinlein Award was established by the Heinlein Society in 2003 “for outstanding published works in science fiction and technical writings to inspire the human exploration of space.”

This award is in recognition of Mr. Scalzi’s body of work of 16 novels and numerous short stories. A majority of his work features a future in space for humanity including his groundbreaking novels in the Old Man’s War series and the Interdependency series.

He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man’s War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, where he has written on a number of topics since 1998. He won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 2008 based predominantly on that blog, which he has also used for several charity drives. His novel Redshirts won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and he was a guest on SCIFI.radio’s flagship talk show The Event Horizon .

Scalzi responed to the announcement on his blog:

“It’s me, hi, I’m the winner, it’s me.

And as you might expect, I’m pretty damn happy about it. Not only because it’s an award named for Heinlein, who is an undeniable influence on me (you may recall that the Publishers Weekly review of Old Man’s War said “Though a lot of SF writers are more or less efficiently continuing the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein, Scalzi’s astonishingly proficient first novel reads like an original work by the late grand master”), but because so many of the previous winners are writers whose work I admire and are people I consider friends: Joe Haldeman, Spider Robinson, Connie Willis, David Gerrold, Geoff Landis, Elizabeth Moon and Alan Steele, to name just a few names. This is a hell of a lineage to be placed in, and I am, honestly, a bit flabbergasted about it.”