Vienna is the national capital, largest city, one of nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's most populous city, with about 1.9 million inhabitants, its cultural and political centre. It is the 6th-largest city by population within city limits in the European Union; until the beginning of the 20th century, it was the largest German-speaking city in the world, before the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the city had 2 million inhabitants. Today, it is the second-largest German-speaking city after Berlin. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations, OPEC, the OSCE; the city is located in the eastern part of Austria and is close to the borders of Czechia and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2017 it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.

Additionally to being known as the "City of Music" due to its musical legacy, Vienna is said to be the "City of Dreams", because of it being home to the world's first psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Vienna's ancestral roots lie in early Celtic and Roman settlements that transformed into a Medieval and Baroque city, it is well known for having played a pivotal role as a leading European music centre, from the age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque palaces and gardens, the late-19th-century Ringstraße lined with grand buildings and parks. Vienna is known for its high quality of life. In a 2005 study of 127 world cities, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the city first for the world's most liveable cities. Between 2011 and 2015, Vienna was ranked second, behind Melbourne. In 2018, it replaced Melbourne as the number one spot and continued as the first in 2019. For ten consecutive years, the human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Vienna first in its annual "Quality of Living" survey of hundreds of cities around the world.

Monocle's 2015 "Quality of Life Survey" ranked Vienna second on a list of the top 25 cities in the world "to make a base within."The UN-Habitat classified Vienna as the most prosperous city in the world in 2012/2013. The city was ranked 1st globally for its culture of innovation in 2007 and 2008, sixth globally in the 2014 Innovation Cities Index, which analyzed 162 indicators in covering three areas: culture and markets. Vienna hosts urban planning conferences and is used as a case study by urban planners. Between 2005 and 2010, Vienna was the world's number-one destination for international congresses and conventions, it attracts over 6.8 million tourists a year. The English name Vienna is borrowed from the homonymous Italian version of the city's name or the French Vienne; the etymology of the city's name is still subject to scholarly dispute. Some claim that the name comes from vedunia, meaning "forest stream", which subsequently produced the Old High German uuenia, the New High German wien and its dialectal variant wean.

Others believe that the name comes from the Roman settlement name of Celtic extraction Vindobona meaning "fair village, white settlement" from Celtic roots, vindo-, meaning "bright" or "fair" – as in the Irish fionn and the Welsh gwyn –, -bona "village, settlement". The Celtic word vindos may reflect a widespread prehistorical cult of Vindos, a Celtic God who survives in Irish Mythology as the warrior and seer Fionn mac Cumhaill. A variant of this Celtic name could be preserved in the Czech and Polish names of the city and in that of the city's district Wieden; the name of the city in Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian and Ottoman Turkish has a different Slavonic origin, referred to an Avar fort in the area. Slovene-speakers call the city Dunaj, which in other Central European Slavic languages means the Danube River, on which the city stands. Evidence has been found of continuous habitation in the Vienna area since 500 BC, when Celts settled the site on the Danube River. In 15 BC the Romans fortified the frontier city they called Vindobona to guard the empire against Germanic tribes to the north.

Close ties with other Celtic peoples continued through the ages. The Irish monk Saint Colman is buried in Melk Abbey and Saint Fergil served as Bishop of Salzburg for forty years. Irish Benedictines founded twelfth-century monastic settlements. In 976 Leopold I of Babenberg became count of the Eastern March, a 60-mile district centering on the Danube on the eastern frontier of Bavaria; this initial district grew into the duchy of Austria. Each succeeding Babenberg ruler expanded the march east along the Danube encompassing Vienna and the lands east. In 1145 Duke Henry II Jasomirgott moved the Babenberg family residence from Klosterneuburg in Lower Austria to Vienna. From that time, Vienna remained the center of the Babenberg dynasty. In 1440 Vienna became the resident city of the Habsburg dynasty, it grew to become the de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire in 1437 and a cultural centre for arts and science and fine cuisine. Hungary occupied the ci

The Rhysling Awards are an annual award given for the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror poem of the year. Unlike most literary awards, which are named for the creator of the award, the subject of the award, or a noted member of the field, the Rhyslings are named for a character in a science fiction story: the blind poet Rhysling, in Robert A. Heinlein's short story The Green Hills of Earth; the award is given in two categories: "Best Long Poem", for works of 50 or more lines, "Best Short Poem", for works of 49 or fewer lines. The nominees for each year's Rhysling Awards are chosen by the members of the Science Fiction Poetry Association; each member may nominate one work for each of the categories. The nominated works are compiled into an anthology called The Rhysling Anthology, members of the Association vote on the final winners. From 2005 to 2011, the Awards were presented in July at a ceremony at Readercon. While the "Best Short Poem" category allows short poems to be entered the SFPA has the Dwarf Stars Award, for poems from one to ten lines.

In 2005, the SFPA published an anthology of the winning poems, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase. 1978: Gene Wolfe, The Computer Iterates the Greater Trumps 1979: Michael Bishop, For the Lady of a Physicist 1980: Andrew Joron, The Sonic Flowerfall of Primes 1981: Thomas M. Disch, On Science Fiction 1982: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Well of Baln 1983: Adam Cornford, Your Time and You: A Neoprole's Dating Guide 1984: Joe Haldeman, Saul's Death: Two Sestinas 1985: Siv Cedering, A Letter from Caroline Herschel 1986: Andrew Joron, Shipwrecked on Destiny Five 1987: W. Gregory Stewart, Daedalus 1988: Lucius Shepard, White Trains 1989: Bruce Boston, In the Darkened Hours. Simon, Variants of the Obsolete 1997: Terry A. Garey, Spotting UFOs While Canning Tomatoes 1998: Laurel Winter, why goldfish shouldn't use power tools 1999: Bruce Boston, Confessions of a Body Thief 2000: Geoffrey A. Landis, Christmas 2001: Joe Haldeman, January Fires 2002: Lawrence Schimel, How to Make a Human 2003: Charles Saplak and Mike Allen, Epochs in Exile: A Fantasy Trilogy.

Kopaska-Merkel, The Tin Men 2007: Mike Allen, The Journey to Kailash 2008: Catherynne M. Valente, The Seven Devils of Central California 2009: Geoffrey A. Landis, Search 2010: Kendall Evans and Samantha Henderson, In the Astronaut Asylum 2011: C. S. E. Cooney, The Sea King's Second Bride 2012: Megan Arkenberg, The Curator Speaks in the Department of Dead Languages 2013: Andrew Robert Sutton, Into Flight 2014: Mary Soon Lee, Interregnum 2015: F. J. Bergmann, 100 Reasons to Have Sex with an Alien 2016: Krysada Panusith Phounsiri, It Begins With A Haunting. J. Bergmann, "Eating Light" 2009: Amal El-Mohtar, "Song for an Ancient City" 2010: Ann K. Schwader, "To Theia" 2011: Amal El-Mohtar, "Peach-Creamed Honey" 2012: Shira Lipkin, "The Library, After" 2013: Terry A. Garey, "The Cat Star" 2014: Amal El-Mohtar, "Turning the Leaves" 2015: Marge Simon, "Shutdown" 2016: Ruth Berman, "Time Travel Vocabulary Problems" 2017: Marge Simon, "George Tecumseh Sherman's Ghosts" 2018: Mary Soon Lee, "Advice to a Six-year-old" 2019: Beth Cato, "After Her Brother Ripped the Heads from Her Paper Dolls" Official list of Rhysling Award winners SFPA Rhysling Anthology The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase

Harold Cressy was a South African headteacher and activist. He was the first Coloured person to gain a degree in South Africa and he worked to improve education for non-white South Africans, he co-founded a teachers group. Cressy was born at the mission at Rorke's Drift on 1 February 1889 to Mary Cressy, he first attended the school at the local mission. He moved to Cape Town at the age of eight, where he qualified as a teacher at the Zonnebloem College in 1905. With his new qualification he was able to teach at the Dutch Reformed Church mission school at Clanwilliam in the Western Cape. At the same time he furthered his own education and he passed his matriculation meaning that he could, in theory, enter a university. Cressy was determined to get a degree and despite gaining funding he was rejected for racial reasons by two other universities before a Cape Town city councillor, Abdullah Abdurahman, applied pressure to the University of Cape Town. Abdurahman's influence resulted in Cressy being accepted onto a graduate course.

He graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was the first Coloured person to achieve this distinction. Cressy married Caroline Hartog in 1912. In 1912 he was appointed to be the Principal of Trafalgar Second Class Public School in District Six of Cape Town; the following year he had the pleasure of announcing the first black girl to pass her "School Higher". The girl was Abdullah Abdurahman's daughter; the report on this success praised Rosie and the school, but it gave no credit to the Cape school board as the school was still poorly supplied. Cressy continued to work with Abdullah Abdurahman. With Abdurahman's encouragement he and H. Gordan founded the important Teachers' League of South Africa and Cressy was appointed president of the organisation in 1913 as well as editing the groups influential publication, the Educational Journal. Cressy died in Kimberley in 1916 from pneumonia, his wife died only a few years in the 1918 flu pandemic leaving their daughter, Millicent, an orphan.

Cressy's name was chosen when Cape Town Secondary School was renamed in 1953 to be the Harold Cressy High School. In 2014, HCHS was declared a Provincial Heritage Site under the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999, with a commemorative plaque unveiled on Heritage Day, 24 September; the Teachers League of South Africa, which Cressy created, became a powerful group. In the 1950s the organisation organised political resistance by South African teachers to the emergence of Bantu education based on apartheid ideals. In the 1950s Benjamin Kies, a teacher at Trafalgar High School, was banned from teaching for life for being involved with the TLSA. Foliart, Lauren. "A Short Life with a Long Reach into the Future: Harold Cressy". Weekend Argus. Adhikari, Mohamed. Against the Current: A Biography of Harold Cressy, 1889-1916. Cape Town: Juta. ISBN 978-1-919895-85-7