Never Was Magazine

[Never Was Magazine]

Empires of Sand

David Ball’s Empires of Sand is a deliberate throwback to the adventure fiction of the nineteenth century

I have often talked of the strange places where I have discovered strange things to partake in, be they YouTube recommendations or Netflix algorithms or /r/FreeEbooks. Here I shall sing of yet another such way: anthologies.

I discovered the work of David Ball through Rogue, an anthology dedicated to the titular archetype edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

(Side note: any anthology…

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[Never Was Magazine]

The Times of Scrooge McDuck: The Raider of the Copper Hill

Annotations to The Times of Scrooge McDuck: The Raider of the Copper Hill

By 1884, the heydays of the cattle trails were coming to an end. As accurately depicted by Ken Don Rosa in the fourth of the original twelve chapters of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, the American West was becoming less wild. Fenced-off farms were taking the place of the great open-range ranches of the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming.

In this volume, Scrooge quits the employ of cattle baron…

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[Never Was Magazine]

V-S Day

Allen Steele brings the Space Race into the #dieselpunk era in V-S Day

The Space Race is a fascinating time; it’s one of superpower competition and cutting-edge technology that ended up transforming the world by way of escaping its gravitational pull. Reading about it, and the big personalities that drove it, feels almost like standing there in that crowd in Cape Canaveral, sensing the quaking ground brought on by blazing rocket fuel.

World War II, as us alternate…

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[Never Was Magazine]

The Devil’s Alternative

Review of Frederick Forsyth’s The Devil’s Alternative

Frederick Forsyth wrote the outstanding Cold War thrillers The Day of the Jackal (1971), which was made into one of the best spy movies of all time (our review here); The Odessa File (1972, our review of the film adaption here) featuring an underground organization of former Nazis; and The Fourth Protocol (1984, our review here), about a Soviet plot to kick Britain out of NATO.

He demonstrates…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Hitler’s Peace

Philip Kerr forgot the cardinal rule of alternate history in his book Hitler’s Peace

Good alternate history sticks close to real history. Philip Kerr forgot that cardinal rule in Hitler’s Peace.

The novel starts off promising enough. Kerr references real-world events, including Heinrich Himmler’s peace overtures to the Western Allies and the German plot to kill Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference in 1943.

But he tries to do too much…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Adventureman

Adventureman is the graphic novel pulp-loving readers were waiting for

Adventureman is the graphic novel pulp-loving readers were waiting for.

It has grand adventures (obviously), dashing heroes, ghosts, magic, science and interesting villains. It’s a perfect combination of a forgotten past and a remembering present, and never have I ever seen a title “The End and Everything After” that was both so self-explanatory and giving away nothing at the same time.

At…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Lady Mechanika, Volume 5: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Lady Mechanika returns for another magnificent adventure in Volume 5: La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Lady Mechanika returns for a search into her mysterious past. This time, she finally has a few resounding clues thanks to the help of her close friends and allies, Archibald Lewis and Inspector Singh. As was to be expected, the search is difficult at best and perilous at worst. To top it all off, Mr Lewis finds himself in a spot of mortal trouble.

The chronological sixth volume in the series…

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