dawn.vogel | April 22, 2026
I thoroughly loved Clara Ward’s Be the Sea, so I was excited to read their novella, Dream the Deep (Atthis Arts, 2026). Set on a near-future Earth that the wealthy and privileged have fled, it takes place over a few days and features a number of people who are being left behind. Ren is a non-binary […]
dawn.vogel | April 8, 2026
The Dead Withheld by L. D. Lewis (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a queer, gritty, urban fantasy novella that I absolutely flew through once I started reading it. The worldbuilding is fantastic, as are the characters inhabiting that world! Dizzy Carter is a private investigator and deadwalker, a type of witch who can communicate with the […]
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 | 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 | 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 | September 10, 2025
Caitlin Starling’s The Oblivion Bride (Neon Hemlock, 2025) is a gorgeous science-fantasy novella with some Gothic and surreal elements worked into an incredible world. Lorelei is one of a very small number of members of her family who hasn’t been killed by the family curse, which no one has been able to figure out. In order […]
dawn.vogel | August 11, 2025
During the WriteHive Online Conference a few weekends ago, I was the moderator for a panel on LGBTQ+ History in Publishing. This was a fantastic panel in which the panelists talked about the history of queer authors and publishers, as well as publication of books with queer characters. Our panel description read: “While recent years […]
dawn.vogel | July 30, 2025
The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann LeBlanc (Neon Hemlock Press, 2024) is a sci-fi novella featuring duplicated consciousnesses and a cheese heist with wonderful character development and worldbuilding bundled within its pages. Millions Wayland has focused all of her attention on making cheese, after an incident when some of her duplicated consciousnesses rebelled against […]
dawn.vogel | June 18, 2025
Aether Beyond the Binary (Duck Prints Press, 2024) is an anthology of speculative short stories with gender diverse characters, all revolving around a concept of aether, a semi-magical substance that has properties as different as the stories in which it features. Each of the 17 stories has a listing of “tags” at the beginning of […]
