Schulich Alumnus Wins Prestigious 2023 Sidewise Award
Eric Choi (MBA, 2006) has won the prestigious 2023 Sidewise Award for best short form alternate history for his story “A Sky and a Heaven” which appeared in his short story collection Just Like Being There (Springer Nature) and the anthology Other Covenants (Ben Yehuda Press).
Alternate history is the literary genre that explores what might have come to pass if historical events had happened differently. In “A Sky and a Heaven”, Choi explores what might have been done to save the crew of the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
“Believe it or not, there are actually links between science fiction and my time at Schulich,” says Choi. “The 1951 novel Foundation by Isaac Asimov, which has been adapted into a series on Apple TV+, postulates a fictional discipline called psychohistory that is supposed to be able to make general predictions about the future of human civilization. Probably the closest real-life disciplines to psychohistory are organizational behaviour and macroeconomics, which might be why these were my favourite courses at Schulich!”
The 2023 Sidewise Awards were presented on October 27th at the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. The judges for the 2023 award were Eileen Gunn, Matt Mitrovich, Olav Rokne, Kurt Sidaway, and Steven Silver. Choi shares the 2023 short form award with Nigerian writer Wole Talabi for his story “A Dream of Electric Mothers”.