History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

“One Book, Never Published” in Dead-Starred Futures

| May 30, 2024

My microfiction story, “One Book, Never Published,” is a brief look at how time-travel to prevent the publication of a book filled with falsehoods might turn out. If you’ve been following my posts about the stories in Dead-Starred Futures, you may already know that the answer to that is “not entirely well.” But despite that […]

Out Now: Bikes, The Universe, and Everything!

| May 29, 2024

The latest of the Bikes in Space anthologies came out last week, and this one includes my story, “The Storyteller”! It involves a post-apocalyptic culture that relies on bicycles for transportation but also a young girl who dreams up stories while she rides and goes about her daily life. You can find Bikes, The Universe, and […]

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 […]

Post-Apocalyptic Stories

| January 18, 2024

My latest post-apocalyptic tales are in my collection Dead-Starred Futures. They include some dystopian and dark sci-fi stories on other worlds and some that take place on an Earth that looks very different after climate change and other things render the planet harder to make our home. In addition to this collection, I have two post-apocalyptic […]

My Recent(-ish) Sci-Fi Stories and Collections!

| December 19, 2023

It’s been quite a while since I did a sci-fi roundup of things I’ve published. So here goes! My poem, “Portrait Day at Zapus Zone 9 Academy,” which imagines a school attended by multiple alien species, appeared in Star*Line in October 2022. My flash fiction piece, “Senchado in Microgravity,” was podcast at Manawaker Studios Flash […]

“Asylum” in Droplets from the Universe

| October 31, 2023

My short story “Asylum” started with the idea of an alien invasion in the past and the people who might resist their alien overlords. The characters wound up being a hodge-podge bunch of humans, none of whom probably ever saw themselves as the sort who might someday save humanity, but when those characters are presented […]

“Raindrops in Indra’s Net” in Droplets from the Universe

| July 25, 2023

My story “Raindrops in Indra’s Net” was one that took a lot of revision to get just right. It always had a climate change, post-apocalyptic setting and piloted mini-mechas for traversing difficult terrain, but a lot of the details within that world were tweaked several times as I wrote and revised the story. In the […]

Dead-Starred Futures Cover Reveal!

| July 18, 2023

My next collection, Dead-Starred Futures, is out August 15, 2023, and it’s time to reveal the cover! This collection is all tiny pieces–flash fiction down to drabbles and poetry, so it will be a quick read but bursting with all sorts of dystopian and post-apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a darker counterpart to Droplets from the Universe. Visions […]

Some Post-Apocalyptic Tales

| May 18, 2023

I have two post-apocalyptic novellas: Barren and Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse. The former is an apocalypse that hit within the main character’s lifetime, but as an older protagonist, she’s lived in a post-apocalyptic world for longer than she spent in the pre-apocalyptic world. The latter is an immediately recent apocalypse, one that hits just […]

Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse is Five!

| February 23, 2023

I released Scenes from a Quiet Apocalypse, one of my strangest and most experimental novellas, five years ago this month. I based the structure on the tarot cards of the major arcana, pulling characters and details of the scenes from the images and meanings of the various cards. The main character, Destiny, is The Fool, though […]