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About the Awards

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.

To be considered, a work must have either first English-language publication or first American publication^* in the calendar year prior to the year in which the award is to be presented. In other words, awards announced in 1997 honored works published in 1996 and were called the "1996 Sidewise Awards". Two awards are usually given each year.

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.

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 at such time as the final volume is published.

In addition, at the discretion of the judges, a Special Achievement Award may be presented to honor a specific work or for a significant body of work which was published prior to the inception of the award; i.e., before 1995. Only three Special Achievement Awards have been announced, and none since 1999.

* In practice, the qualifying year for non-U.S. works is the earliest publication year for which all of the Sidewise judges obtain copies of the work. Thus, about one-third of the alternate history works first published in the U.K., Canada, and Australia are not considered until they later receive publication in the United States. This is, for example, why Stephen Fry's Making History was considered for the 1998 awards (on the basis of its first U.S. edition) rather than the 1996 (its first U.K. and world edition).

Exemptions to the first-year-of-publication rule may also be granted when a work's first publication was extremely limited and/or obscure. For example, Howard Waldrop's "You Could Go Home Again" was considered for the 1995 awards even though its first publication was a 1993 Cheap Street chapbook, of which only a few hundred copies may have been printed.

Home | About the Awards | Past Winners	Uchronia