Never Was Magazine

Alternate Presidents

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 12:01:34 +0100

Review of Mike Resnick’s Alternate Presidents

Every four years, American voters get the chance to elect a new president. The choices voters, and sometimes the House of Representatives, made on those occasions have been a rich vein from which alternate-history writers have drawn to tell stories. The late but prolific writer and editor Mike Resnick certainly thought so, commissioning a volume with more than two dozen such tales. Published as…

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1898: Our Last Men in the Philippines

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 11:48:07 +0100

1898: Our Last Men in the Philippines shows the great bluff that is imperialism as Spanish men die ingloriously abroad for nothing

Many of us in the Western world might think of Southeast Asia as a dense jungle where white people go to die. The French and the Americans died in Vietnam. The Dutch died in Indonesia. The British died in Malaya.

The Philippines are often overlooked. Americans may remember the islands played a role in World War II. They will speak of Corregidor (properly with a rolled “r” and a “g” pronounced…

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Flying Wings

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 11:42:59 +0100

A century after they were first imagined, flying wings still look futuristic

Nothing says future of aviation like a flying wing. A century after they were first imagined, they still look futuristic. Probably because so few of them have flown.

Dieselpunk loves to stock the Nazi air fleet with flying wings designed by the brother Walter and Reimar Horten, but they weren’t the only pioneers in the field. America’s Jack Northrop, founder of the Northrop Corporation, was…

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Basil’s War

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 11:56:44 +0100

A fun spy adventure in Nazi-occupied France: Our review of Stephen Hunter’s Basil’s War

Even as we pass eighty years since the days of Spitfires and Messerschmitts, Britain’s fight against the Nazis maintains an heroic luster. To many Britons, it was their country’s finest hour as people came together to withstand the German bomber fleets. Even many Americans like myself have had such feelings, for it is a seemingly obvious episode of pure good versus pure evil.

Here we will…

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The Art of Arthur Radebaugh

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 12:10:42 +0100

The atomic-era art of Arthur Radebaugh

Arthur Radebaugh (1906-74) was a prolific midcentury illustrator, perhaps best known for his “Can You Imagine” and “Closer Than We Think” series, which were syndicated in newspapers across the United States in the years after World War II. The usually one-panel comics predicted various future scenarios, some of which, like remote working and electronic home libraries, came true!

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Free State of Jones

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 12:25:19 +0100

Review of Free State of Jones

Much has been written about how much of the American South was complicit in the institution of slavery. Historian Ira Berlin wrote in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (1998) that the South wasn’t just a “society with slaves”; it was a “slave society”. Chattel slavery was the institution around which life in those states revolved.

Slaves tried to break the chains…

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Storm Front

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 11:08:53 +0100

Chris Nuttall’s Storm Front is a flawed but readable story about a world in which Germany won WW2

Chris Nuttall is a prolific writer of various genres, including alternate history.

In Storm Front, the opening of a series, he writes in that well-worn area of alternate history, the “Nazi Victory”. It’s 1985, and the United States is one of two major world superpowers (this may sound slightly familiar). The other is a German Third Reich which stretches into Africa and the former USSR, now named…

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All Time Travel Authorities Look the Same

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 11:42:57 +0100

All time travel authorities look the same

I finally watched Loki on Disney+ (it’s hilarious) and one of the things that stood out to me was the aesthetic of the show’s Time Variance Authority (TVA). Brutalist with a mix of midcentury graphics and 1970s decor, it reminded me of the Fallout video games as well as Counterpart, the most underrated science-fiction series of recent years. The Office of Interchange in that show also uses…

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The Fall of Rorke’s Drift

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:13:54 +0100

What if the British had lost the decisive battle in the Zulu War? Review of The Fall of Rorke’s Drift

Ideas are cheap. Most people can come up with a thousand concepts for books. The skill is in the execution. In bringing that vision into life, putting the idea into words. And yet there is still a value in a good concept. There are hundreds of well-written, well-executed books that hold no interest to me because the concept is one I don’t care for. The world’s best-written story about the innate…

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Judas and the Black Messiah

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 11:57:46 +0100

Alexander Wallace reviews Judas and the Black Messiah

Sometimes I think it was a miracle that the American civil rights movement didn’t lead to open civil war. We remember the resistance as nonviolent, but there certainly was violence, the 1963 Birmingham Baptist Church bombing being an infamous example.

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered for advocating nonviolence. Not all African Americans agreed with him. Malcolm X called King and his followers…

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The Art of Shusei Nagaoka

Sun, 29 Aug 2021 16:44:05 +0100

The retro-futuristic art of Shusei Nagaoka

Japanese artist Shusei Nagaoka gained renown in the 1970s and 80s, when he illustrated album covers for artists like Earth, Wind & Fire, Electric Light Orchestra and Jefferson Starship.

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Fatherland

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 14:13:30 +0100

Review and reflection on Robert Harris’ famous alt-history novel Fatherland

What are the best works of alternate history? Are they the ones with the richest, most detailed and most plausible histories described? Or are they the most engaging stories that happen to take place in a timeline different from our own?

Fatherland, by Robert Harris, by the latter definition, might just be one title that can be counted among the greatest works of alternate history. Through its…

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For All Mankind

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 11:10:58 +0100

Our review of For All Mankind

The first time I gave For All Mankind a try was not long after I’d seen Altered Carbon, and another ten episodes of Joel Kinnaman’s pent-up anger was a little too much for me.

I still find it off-putting, and his character in For All Mankind shows almost no growth over two seasons. But the rest of the series makes up for it.

It starts with the Soviet Union beating the Americans to the Moon and…

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1917

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 13:55:33 +0100

Our review of Sam Mendes’ 1917

More than a century removed from Versailles, where that armistice for twenty years was signed, we in the English-speaking Atlantic world tend to think of World War I as a static conflict. This is because we are mostly presented with the Western Front in fiction, where endless rows of trenches are bombarded with tear gas and brave men and foolhardy officers who go over the top are flayed by…

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Back in the USSA

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 12:04:08 +0100

Back in the USSA: A world in which the roles in the Cold War were reversed

In some respects, alternate history is an examination of irony. There are many examples of serious alternate history. There are moments when characters reflect on how our own history is implausible or unthinkable. For something more tongue-in-cheek, Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman took the United States, capitalist and democratic and emerging victorious from the Cold War, and pasted the…

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The Art of Chris Moore

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 11:29:24 +0100

The sci-fi art of Chris Moore

Chris Moore is a British artist who has illustrated everything from (science-fiction) novels to LP covers.

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Countdown

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 11:14:01 +0100

Review of the 1968 alternate Space Race movie Countdown

The 1960s Space Race saw the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an ever-evolving game of oneupmanship. One that saw them leaping from first satellite to the first man to the first woman and first multi-person crew to, thanks to President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 declaration before Congress, to putting someone on the Moon first. That goal was reached in July 1969, when Apollo 11’s Neil…

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All Quiet on the Western Front

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 11:53:45 +0100

All Quiet on the Western Front: Review of the 1979 film adaptation

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is widely acclaimed as perhaps the finest antiwar novel of all time. It is a book that exudes the despair and hopelessness that we commonly associate with the Great War (if any war can be “great”). It has codified how we think of the War to End All Wars (if any war can end war). It is little wonder, then, that it was adapted to film…

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The Art of James Nichols

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 10:53:37 +0100

The UFO art of James Nichols

James Nichols is an American science-fiction artist who specializes in ufology. Many of his works depict actual UFO stories and myths, from aliens visiting Ancient Egypt to Nazi flying discs to the crash at Roswell to Area 51.

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The Dandy Medium

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:53:27 +0100

Our review of Dez Schwartz’s The Dandy Medium

The Dandy Medium is a gaslight-era adventure novel mixing good old-fashioned detective work with the supernatural and paranormal. And does a great job of it too!

Author Dez Schwartz takes the best elements from the genres he mixes, including a detective duo that can easily measure up to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, but also more contemporary teams, such as Castle and Beckett, with excellent…

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