This year’s nominees for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History have been announced.  

Short Form

• Lou Antonelli, “Great White Ship” (DailySF, 5/11/12)
• Sean McMullen, “Steamgothic” (Interzone 241, 7-8/12)
• Ian Sales, “Adrift on the Sea of Rains” (Whippleshield Books)
• Catherynne Valente, “Fade to White” (Clarkesworld Magazine #71, 8/12)
• Rick Wilber, “Something Real” (Asimov’s, 4/12)

Long Form

• Thomas Brennan, Doktor Glass (Ace)
• Mark Hodder, Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon (Pyr, Snowbooks)
• Jack McDevitt & Mike Resnick, The Cassandra Project (Ace)
• Matt Ruff, The Mirage (Harper)
• C. J. Sansom, Dominion (Mantle, Pan McMillan)

The Sidewise Award is another designated by the calendar year of eligibility rather than the year in which the award is presented, thus the 2012 Sidewise Award nominees. The winners will be announced at LoneStarCon 3.

The Short-Form Award is presented for the best work of less than 60,000 words. This includes short stories, novelettes and novellas, and poems. One winner was a three-issue comic book series.

The Long-Form Award is presented for the best work longer than 60,000 words. This category includes individual novels and longer works.

Nominees were selected by a panel of judges: Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stu Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

The Sidewise Awards have been presented annually since 1995. The award takes its name from Murray Leinster’s 1934 short story “Sidewise in Time,” in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines.

The nominees for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (for works published in 2011) have been announced.

Short Form

• Michael F. Flynn, “The Iron Shirts” (Tor.com)
• Lisa Goldstein, “Paradise Is a Walled Garden” (Asimov’s, 8/11)
• Jason Stoddard, “Orion Rising” (Panverse 3, edited by Dario Ciriello,
  Panverse Publishing)
• Harry Turtledove, “Lee at the Alamo” (Tor.com)

Long Form

• Robert Conroy, Castro’s Bomb (Kindle)
• Robert Conroy, Himmler’s War (Baen Books)
• Jeff Greenfield, Then Everything Changed (Putnam)
• Ian R MacLeod, Wake Up and Dream (PS Publishing)
• Ian McDonald, Planesrunner (Pyr)
• Ekaterina Sedia, Heart of Iron (Prime)
• Lavie Tidhar, Camera Obscura (Angry Robot)

This year’s panel of judges was Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stu Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway and Steven H Silver. The winners will be announced at Chicon 7.

The appearance of Stephen King’s alternate history novel 11/22/63 has prompted The New Yorker’s Thomas Mallon to take stock of an entire subgenre ’til now scorned by literati.

Most fun of all, he mentions the Sidewise Awards repeatedly. It’s great to see an award run by sf fans given that kind of recognition.

Mallon says:

One of alt-history’s stalwarts is Harry Turtledove, the winner of two Sidewise Awards for Alternative History. His “The Guns of the South” (1992), in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War, is both absurd and meticulous, a Civil War reenactment conducted with AK-47s instead of Springfield Rifles. Turtledove creates a whole intricate biosphere with a somehow breathable atmosphere.

And again:

Philip Roth won a Sidewise Award for “The Plot Against America” (2004), and Michael Chabon received one for “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” (2007).

A free copy of the abstract is here. Naturally, The New Yorker would be delighted to sell you digital access to the full article and the rest of the issue in which it appears.

[Thanks to Steven H Silver, Evelyn Leeper,and ultimately Moshe Feder for the story.]

The winners of the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were announced on Thursday, August 18 at Renovation.

Long Form: When Angels Wept: A What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Eric G. Swedin

Short Form: “A Clash of Eagles” by Alan Smale

Three of the judges —  Stu Shiffman, Evelyn Leeper, and Steven H Silver — were present as were both winners.

This year’s nominees for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History (for works published in 2010) have been announced. I’ve linked to some representative reviews if you want to know more about them.

Short Form 

• Eleanor Arnason, Mammoths of the Great Plains, PM Press
• Barry B. Longyear, “Alter Kameraden”, Asimov’s, 4/10
• Ken MacLeod, “Sidewinders”, The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, Robinson Publishing/Running Press
• Alan Smale, A Clash of Eagles, Panverse Two, edited by Dario Ciriello, Panverse Publishing
• William F. Wu, “Goin’ Down to Anglotown”, The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, DAW Books

Long Form 

• Adam Chamberlain & Brian A. Dixon, Columbia & Britannia, Fourth Horseman Press
• Robert Conroy, Red Inferno: 1945, Ballantine Books
• Jay Lake, Pinion, Tor Books
• Eric Swedin, When Angels Wept, Potomac Books

The Sidewise Awards have been presented annually since 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate historical fiction.

The Short-Form Award is presented for the best work of less than 60,000 words. This includes short stories, novelettes and novellas, and poems. One winner was a three-issue comic book series.

The Long-Form Award is presented for the best work longer than 60,000 words. This category includes individual novels and longer works. If a book is part of a series, it must be able to stand on its own to be considered. If it is part of a serial novel — a series in which the storyline is continuous and no volume can stand on its own — the complete serial novel will be considered when the final volume is published.

This year’s judges are Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stu Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver. 

The winners will be announced at Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, on Thursday, August 18.

The nominees for the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History are:

Short Form 

Long Form 

The Sidewise Awards have been presented annually since 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate historical fiction.

The winners will be announced at ReConStruction, this year’s NASFiC, in Raleigh, North Carolina during the weekend of August 5. Steven H Silver indicates in the press release that the lone nominee in the Long Form category doesn’t automatically take the award because it is still subject to a final vote by the judges in which “No Award” is an option.

This year’s nominees were selected by panel of judges was made up of Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stu Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

[Thanks to Steven H Silver for the story.]

The nominees for the Sidewise Awards for alternate history fiction published in 2008 are:

Short Form

• “A Brief Guide to Other Histories,” by Paul J. McAuley (Postscripts #15)
• “G-Men,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
• “Night Bird Soaring,” by T.L. Morganfield (Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Autumn/08)
• “The People’s Machine,” by Tobias Buckell (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)
• “Poison Victory,” by Albert E. Cowdrey (F&SF, 07/08)
• “Sacrifice,” by Mary Rosenblum (Sideways in Crime, edited by Lou Anders, Solaris)

Long Form

• The Affinity Bridge, by George Mann (Snowbooks/Tor, 2009)
• The Dragon’s Nine Sons, by Chris Roberson (Solaris)
• Half a Crown, by Jo Walton (Tor)
• Nation, by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins/Doubleday UK)
• Swiftly, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

The 2008 Sidewise Awards will be presented at Anticipation, the 67th Worldcon, to be held in Montreal, Canada from August 6-10, 2009. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate history fiction.

The winners are selected from a panel of judges that currently includes Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Jim Rittenhouse, Stuart Shiffman, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven H Silver.

For more information about the Sidewise Award, visit http://www.uchronia.net/sidewise, or contact Steven H Silver, the Award Administrator, at [email protected].