William Sanders (writer)

William Sanders (April 28, 1942 – June 29, 2017) was an American speculative fiction writer, primarily noted for his alternate history short fiction, and was the senior editor of the online science fiction magazine Helix SF. He twice won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History and was a finalist for other honors including the Nebula Award.

Life
Sanders was born in 1942 in Arkansas, the son of Cordell and William N. Sanders. Sanders graduated from the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He served in the U.S. Army from 1963 to 1966 and was a Vietnam War veteran.

Sanders and his wife Phyllis lived in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Sanders died after a prolonged illness on June 29, 2017.

Writing
Sanders started his literary career in 1973 by writing books and magazine columns focused on sports and outdoor subjects. Among his later speculative novels are Journey to Fusang (1988), The Wild Blue and the Gray (1991) and The Ballad of Billy Badass & the Rose of Turkestan (1999). The first two are alternate histories with a humorous bent while the last is a fantasy novel.

He also wrote a number of mystery novels, including a series featuring Western writer Taggart Roper beginning with The Next Victim (St. Martin's Press 1993), as well as novels marketed by the publisher as Action/Adventure, beginning with Hardball (Berkley Jove 1992). In an author's afterword to his short story "Ninekiller and the Neterw", included in the Roger Zelazny tribute collection "Lord of the Fantastic", Sanders credits Roger Zelazny for talking Sanders into returning to writing SF/F stories with American Indian themes.

Sanders, a former powwow dancer, is best known for his use of American Indian themes and his dry, often cynical sense of humor. His most-anthologized and perhaps best known work is "The Undiscovered", an alternate history in which Shakespeare is transported to Virginia and writes "Hamlet" for the Cherokee tribe. The story won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 1997. Sanders won a second Sidewise Award for his story Empire in 2002. Sanders said that he considers his best story to be Dry Bones.

A stickler for detail and accuracy, Sanders studied history, which led to the publication in 2003 of Conquest: Hernando de Soto and the Indians, 1539-1543, a book begun some two decades earlier and researched by travelling extensively in the southeastern quarter of the US, by motorcycle and small boat and on foot, retracing de Soto's probable routes.

As a non-fiction writer, he wrote numerous books on bicycle racing, kayaking, and backpacking. As Sundown Slim he wrote a humor column for "Competitive Cycling", a bike racing magazine in the mid-1970s. He also contributed to Bike World Magazine in the same period.

Helix SF magazine
From 2006 until the final issue in 2008, Sanders was the editor and publisher of the online quarterly magazine Helix SF. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Helix SF was "generally praised for the quality of its fiction and poetry." The magazine was also noted for having almost half the published stories written by women, perhaps the only genre magazine of the time to do this.

In 2008, Sanders wrote a rejection letter in which he called Muslims "sheet heads", "worm brained" and "incapable of honesty." Sanders would later deny that he was referring to Muslims as a whole. However, the controversy ultimately resulted in several authors asking to pull their stories from the Helix archives after they found out Sanders had offered that option to N.K. Jemisin. As a result of the controversy, Sanders shut down the magazine and deleted its website, preventing any of the magazine's archives from being read.