dawn.vogel | February 25, 2026
The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a charming novella that mashes up academia and superheroes with a largely LGBTQ+ cast of characters. Professor Laxman Yadav, who specializes in art history and archaeology, is brought in to examine a recently unearthed artifact, a rare example of a fully intact technology from […]
dawn.vogel | February 4, 2026
The Cellar Below the Cellar by Ivy Grimes (Apex Book Company, 2026) is a folktale-inspired horror novella with a fascinating cast of characters and themes of family inheritance and isolation. While Jane is visiting her grandmother, an extreme solar event wipes out power, communications, and even car batteries, stranding her in the semi-rural location. As […]
dawn.vogel | January 14, 2026
Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books, 2024) is a beautiful collection of speculative fiction stories centering queer characters, Jewish characters, and sometimes characters who have become plants. Standout stories in the collection for me included “And I Entreated,” which features a Jewish woman who has been converted into a […]
dawn.vogel | December 31, 2025
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s collection So You Want to be a Robot (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2024) contains 22 fabulous speculative fiction stories with queer and neurodiverse characters living their lives and dealing with the world around them, which is not always kind. Normally, when I review an anthology or collection, I talk a bit about specific stories […]
dawn.vogel | December 3, 2025
T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead (Tor Nightfire, 2022) is, at its core, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This novella takes the classic tale and puts a new spin on it, lending something of an explanation to the original while taking it in an amazingly cool direction! Rather […]
dawn.vogel | November 19, 2025
ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, edited by Marissa Van Uden (Apex Book Company, 2025), is a collection of previously published stories from a wide variety of venues that look at a variety of issues related to climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, along with other aspects of ecological fiction. A number of the stories in […]
dawn.vogel | October 29, 2025
I’ve mentioned before that I really love music in video games, and as someone who listens to a lot of musical genres, it pretty much doesn’t matter what game it is. That being said, I started listening to heavy metal in high school and never really stopped (yes, even now in my K-pop era). So […]
dawn.vogel | October 22, 2025
Luminescent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, edited by Rhiannon Rasmussen and dave ring (Neon Hemlock, 2023), is a fantastic anthology of speculative fiction stories (mainly sci-fi, but not entirely) featuring queer characters and filled with mecha and other technologies that are deeply integral to the stories. As usual with anthologies, I have a handful […]
dawn.vogel | October 15, 2025
If you’ve watched the “K-Pop Demon Hunters” movie on Netflix recently, you might still have some of the songs from the movie stuck in your head. While the songs on the whole had a bit more English than the majority of K-pop songs do (though there are certainly K-pop artists who have done songs or […]
dawn.vogel | October 8, 2025
Redundancies and Potentials by Dominque Dickey (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a fantastically weird and weirdly touching novella about time travel and sisters. Isadora and Aster are purpose-created sisters with the ability to travel through time. They’ve been told all their lives that they need to practice traveling so that someday they can fix a massive […]
