"The Secret City," my story from the September/October 2018 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, has been named a finalist for the Sidewise Award, which each year honors the best alternate-history stories in both Short Form and Long Form. I'm delighted to be shortlisted for this great award! The story is also included in my recent collection called The Moe Berg Episodes, available in all the usual online places.
The story follows my fictional version of famous baseball player and Word War II spy Moe Berg as he battles fascism by the side of a mysterious time-traveling woman who guides him through mission after mission as they work to stop the Nazis and their allies from developing the weapons to defeat America. In the story, Mexico is allied with the Germans, Erwin Rommel's tanks are rumbling toward the Texas oil fields, and somehow the woman and Moe have to find and save physicist Enrico Fermi, help him build a bomb, and then figure out how to use it before the Nazis use theirs.
Here is the list of finalists for the Sidewise Award for material written in 2018. The winners will be announced in mid-October 2019.
Short Form
• Rick Wilber: The Secret City, Asimov's, 9/10, 2018
• Oscar (Xiu) Ramirez and Emmanuel Valtierra, Codex Valtierra
Long Form
• Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars, Tor
• Hannu Rajaniemi, Summerland, Tor
• Charles Rosenberg, The Trial and Execution of the Traitor George Washington, Hanover Square, 2018
• Lavie Tidhar, Unholy Land, Tachyon Publications
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