Sidewise Award for Alternate History Nominees: UPDATE - We Have A Winner!

...And we're super proud of Matthew Kresal.

The nominees for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for calendar years 2019 and 2020 have been announced, and we couldn't be more excited as one of the longest contributor's to this site is among them.

The Sidewise Awards have been presented annually since 1995 to recognize excellence in alternate historical fiction. The awards were postponed last year because of... well, you know, so it's a double length list with the winners to be announced during this year’s Worldcon, DisCon III, to be held in Washington, D.C. from December 15 to 19.

Among the 2020 nominees is a short story by Warped Factor’s own Matthew Kresal. Titled Moonshot, and part of the Alternate Australias anthology, it is about a world where a joint British-Australian effort sends a mission into space intending to land the first men on the moon...

"This story is one brimming with tension as a bold venture into the cosmos goes awry, one whose electrifying danger leads to a satisfying conclusion."

UPDATE (Dec 18th 21): And HUGE congratulations to Matthew who won his category, the 2020 Sidewise Award for Short Fiction, for his story Moonshot.

2020 Sidewise Award Short Form: @KresalWrites "Moonshot" #SidewiseAward #DisCon

— Sidewise Award (@SidewiseAward) December 18, 2021

Here are all the nominees, starting with the 2019 Short Form category (UPDATE - The Winners, announced on December 18th 2021, are highlighted in bold.)

• Seanan McGuire: “Any Way the Wind Blows,” Tor.com, 6/19
• Christopher G. Nuttall, “Drang Nach Osten,” Trouble in the Wind, edited by Chris Kennedy and James Young, Theogony Books, 2019
• Christopher G. Nuttall, “The Kaiserin of the Seas,” To Slip the Surly Bonds, edited by Chris Kennedy and James Young, Theogony Books, 2019
• William Stroock, “The Blue and the Red: Palmerston’s Ironclads,” Those in Peril, edited by Chris Kennedy and James Young, Theogony Books, 2019
• Harry Turtledove, Christmas Truce, Asimov’s, 11/19

2019 Long Form

• K. Chess, Famous Men Who Never Lived, Tin House, 2019
• Jared Kavanagh, Walking through Dreams, Sea Lion Press, 2019
• John Laband, The Fall of Rorke’s Drift, Greenhill, 2019
• Annalee Newitz, Future of Another Timeline, Tor, 2019

2020 Short Form

• Andrew J. Harvey: “1827: Napoleon in Australia,” Alternate Australias, edited by Jared Kavanagh, Sea Lion Press, 2020
• Matthew Kresal: “Moonshot,” Alternate Australias, edited by Jared Kavanagh, Sea Lion Press, 2020
• Sean McMullen, “Wheel of Echoes,” Analog, 1/20

2020 Long Form

• Dennis Bock, The Good German, Patrick Crean Editions, 2020
• Junior Burke, The Cold Last Swim, Gibson House Press, 2020
• Mary Robinette Kowal, The Relentless Moon, Tor, 2020
• Charles Rosenberg, The Day Lincoln Lost, Hanover Square, 2020
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Doors of Eden, Pan McMillan, 2020

In addition, several of the judges wanted to call attention to Elektra Hammond’s 2019 short story “O-Rings,” which appeared in the anthology Alternate Peace, which is ineligible for nomination since Sidewise Administrator Steven H Silver was the anthology’s editor.

The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were conceived in late 1995 to honor the best allohistorical genre publications of the year. The first awards were announced in summer 1996 and honored works from 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.

Congratulations to all the nominees, and all four winners. For more information, see the Sidewise Awards website.