History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

Review of So You Want to be a Robot by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

| 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 […]

Review of What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

| 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 […]

Review of ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction

| 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 […]

The Non-Player Review of Video Games: Music from Brutal Legend

| 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 […]

Review of Luminescent Machinations

| 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 […]

K-Pop Demon Hunters and Song Recommendations: “What It Sounds Like”

| 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 […]

Review of Redundancies and Potentials by Dominque Dickey

| 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 […]

K-Pop Demon Hunters and Song Recommendations: “Your Idol”

| October 1, 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 […]

Review of A Fae in Finance by Juliet Brooks

| September 24, 2025

I learned about Juliet Brooks’ book, A Fae in Finance (Orbit Works, 2025), while I was at Seattle’s Worldcon in August, when I chatted with another attendee who was a friend of the author. When said friend explained it as “human trapped in the realm of the fae but still has to work her day job,” […]

K-Pop Demon Hunters and Song Recommendations: “Free”

| September 17, 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 […]