History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

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 […]

Fun for Friday: Weird (and Spooky) October Science

| October 3, 2025

Time for more weird science to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! With this month being October, I thought it might be fun to focus more on spooky science, and the internet provided! The U.S. Department of Energy has a list celebrating spooky science from last October, which gives some brief summaries of […]

Fun for Friday: Weird September Science!

| September 5, 2025

Time for more weird science to inspire your writing or maybe just pique your curiosity! For this month, I’m starting out with September Thinkers and Tinkerers from Getting Nerdy! This article has September birthdays and inventions from the world of science. Next up is Scientific American’s Science History from 50, 100, and 150 years ago, […]

Joyful Science Fiction

| August 26, 2025

I’ve published several collections of science fiction stories and poetry, ranging in topics and moods. Droplets from the Universe is where I collected the most joyful, humorous, and often hopeful stories of possible futures. This collection has a heavy concentration of poetry, and those poems include spacefaring people reminiscing about life on Earth, as well as […]

Fun for Friday: Weird August Science!

| August 8, 2025

Welcome to my new monthly Fun for Friday theme, weird science! (Not to be confused with the movie of the same name.) Toward the beginning of each month, I’ll share some links to articles about unusual discoveries, inventions, and other science facts. If you’re a sci-fi writer, perhaps one of these items will give you […]

Review of The Transitive Properties of Cheese by Ann LeBlanc

| 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 […]

Fun for Friday: Epic Sci-Fi Prompts

| July 25, 2025

If you’re looking for some sci-fi story ideas, look no further than ScreenCraft’s list of 101 epic sci-fi story prompts! They’ve got a ton of interesting possibilities, and some of their ideas might be better suited for a longer work, while others could work as inspiration for very short fiction or poetry! Because they’ve got […]

Sci-Fi Reads in New Moons Under Which to Sleep

| May 29, 2025

New Moons Under Which to Sleep, is one of my shorter collections, containing six short stories, three flash fiction pieces, and six poems. And though it’s quite short, it has a few pieces in it that I absolutely loved writing. The inspirations for the pieces are widely varied and include a repurposed limestone mine in […]

My Latest Sci-Fi Publications

| May 20, 2025

Since my last post about sci-fi publications, I’ve had a couple of poems and a short story published, plus some self-published pieces in Weathering Youth! My poem “An Alphabet of Forty-Two,” which is about language in a sci-fi setting where different species are in contact with one another, appeared in the October 2024 issue of […]

Review of North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher

| May 7, 2025

North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher (Neon Hemlock, 2024) is a collection of six linked sci-fi short stories that span 400 years, but with all but one of the stories taking place in a 100-year span. Featuring queer characters occupying a vast star-faring culture, the stories stand alone but also contribute to the larger storyline. […]