History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Review of Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor

| April 24, 2024

Loving Safoa by Liza Wemakor (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a novella featuring Black lesbian vampires, with aspects of vampirism that I haven’t seen in many stories featuring vampires. But this approach is interwoven into a story that spans centuries and locations. Cynthia begins the story as a mortal woman who is very close to changing […]

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To, April 2024

| April 10, 2024

Reading: Books for review and occasional game books, as I realize I need to learn more about some of the games we’re playing now or in the future! Watching: Not a whole heck of a lot, because most of our TV time has been spent on watching K-pop things. We did watch Spin Me Round for […]

Review of Finding Echoes by Foz Meadows

| April 3, 2024

Foz Meadows’ novella Finding Echoes (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a secondary-world fantasy story packed with great characters (queer and otherwise) and worldbuilding, plus a whole load of feelings. Snow has the ability to speak with the dead, getting information from them and sometimes helping them move on. When his ex-lover Gem shows up in need of […]

Kickstarter Recommendation: Neon Hemlock’s 2024 Novella Series

| March 13, 2024

I backed last year’s Neon Hemlock novella series Kickstarter, and I’m looking forward to this year’s as well! From last year, I’ve reviewed Hybrid Heart and The Killing Ground, along with Suzan Palumbo’s Skin Thief, a collection including short stories and a novella, and I’ve got more of these on tap to review! If you’re curious to […]

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To: March 2024

| March 6, 2024

Reading: Books to review, including some anthologies and some stand-alone books. Watching: Not much recently other than K-pop related things. Listening To: Recent additions to my list have been Boy Story (which is actually a Chinese group, trained in the K-pop system, and now making a Korean debut) and Just B. The latter is because […]

Review of The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie

| February 28, 2024

The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Henry Herz (Blackstone Publishing, 2023), is a speculative fiction anthology that blends historical fact about Marie Curie’s life as a young woman and fantastical, science fiction, and horror elements to present new and intriguing experiments a young Marie might have undertaken. Most […]

Review of Darkling Dreams by Addison Smith

| February 21, 2024

Addison Smith’s Darkling Dreams (Shacklebound Books, 2024) is a collection of drabbles–stories of exactly 100 words. The themes in these stories are often dark and sci-fi, but they show an incredible mastery of the drabble format in their breadth and scope of approaches to this tricky length. I was familiar with some of Smith’s drabbles through […]

Kickstarter Recommendation: Bikes in Space 11!

| February 14, 2024

The Kickstarter for volume 11 of Bikes in Space has launched. I’m a fan of this series from Microcosm Publishing, and I’m pleased to announce that my story, “The Storyteller,” will appear in Bikes, the Universe, and Everything! The theme for this volume is bikes and books, so I wrote a post-apocalyptic story in which bikes […]

What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To, February 2024

| February 7, 2024

Reading: Continuing to read things for book reviews, though I’m chomping at the bit for a break so I can finish reading my borrowed copy of A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. Watching: Since my last of these posts, we finished Our Flag Means Death season 2. We watched a handful of movies over the holidays (especially […]

Review of Be the Sea by Clara Ward

| January 31, 2024

Clara Ward’s Be the Sea (Atthis Arts, 2024) is an amazing sci-fi novel filled with found family, lost friends found again, stories, and dreams. Set in a world where climate change has occurred but been mitigated in places, it has a fairly cozy storyline and an eclectic cast of queer and disabled characters. Wend, a marine […]