Sidewise Award for Alternate History

The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History were established in 1995 to recognize the best alternate history stories and novels of the year.

The awards take their name from the 1934 short story "Sidewise in Time" by Murray Leinster, in which a strange storm causes portions of Earth to swap places with their analogs from other timelines.

The awards were created by Steven H Silver, Evelyn C. Leeper, and Robert B. Schmunk. Over the years, the number of judges has fluctuated between three and eight, including judges in the UK and South Africa.

Each year, two awards are presented, usually at the World Science Fiction Convention. The Short-Form award is presented to a work under 60,000 words in length. The Long-Form award may be presented to a work longer than 60,000 words, including both novels and complete series. At their discretion, the judges may also elect to recognize an individual or work with a Special Achievement Award in recognition of works that were published prior to the award's inception.

Alternate history

Alternate history or alternative history, sometimes abbreviated as AH, is a genre of fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical events occur differently from reality. These stories usually contain "what if" scenarios at crucial points in history and present an outcome of events alternative to historical record. The stories are the product of conjecture, but are sometimes based on scientific fact. Alternate history can be seen as a sub-genre of literary fiction, science fiction, and/or historical fiction; different alternate history works may use tropes from any or all of these genres. Another term occasionally used for the genre is "allohistory" (literally "other history").

Since the 1950s, this type of fiction has, to a large extent, merged with science fiction tropes involving time travel between alternate histories, psychic awareness of the existence of one universe by the people in another, or time travel that results in history splitting into two or more timelines. Cross-time, time-splitting, and alternate history themes have become so closely interwoven that it is impossible to discuss them fully apart from one another.