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.
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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, revised edition 2002) 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.