Which Locus Award did Contact win in 1986?

Contact won the 1986 Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Carl Sagan’s Contact was his first and only published novel, and it won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 1986. The book follows Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway, an astronomer involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence who becomes central to humanity’s response after an apparent signal is detected.

The award category is easy to confuse with the Locus Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel and Best Fantasy Novel. Contact is certainly a science-fiction novel, but its 1986 Locus win was specifically in the first-novel category. In the same year, it also placed highly in the separate Best Science Fiction Novel poll, which helps explain why the categories are sometimes conflated.

Contact was published in 1985, while the award was presented in 1986. That one-year distinction is typical of awards named for the ceremony year rather than the book’s publication year. The novel was later adapted into the 1997 film starring Jodie Foster.