Never Was Magazine

[Never Was Magazine]

Storm Front

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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[Never Was Magazine]

Nazi Flying Saucers

The Nazis (probably) didn’t built flying saucers, but they appear everywhere in #dieselpunk

Often, but not always, paired with Nazis in Antarctica and Nazis on the Moon is the Nazi UFO or flying saucer trope.

The trope has a tenuous basis in reality. The Nazis really did develop strange aircraft, including a flying wing, and Allied pilots did claim to spot “foo fighters” over the skies of Germany near the end of the war. This was when Hitler was banking on his “wonder weapons” to…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Ghosts of War

American soldiers, a French chateau and the Nazi supernatural. Dieselpunks can rejoice in Ghosts of War

I finished my review of Overlord, the fantastic 2018 World War II zombie movie, with a call on Hollywood to be so bold as to green-light more movies like it. I was greatly pleased when I encountered Ghosts of War, a 2020 World War II horror film that seemed to be following in Overlord‘s footsteps. I’m an alternate historian, and so I’m a sucker for anything that mashes up history and the…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Hollow Earth

Ancient supermen, dinosaurs, Nazis - they all tend to show up in #dieselpunk version of Hollow Earth

The idea that the Earth is hollow has been disproven for centuries, but that hasn’t killed the idea. It keeps coming back in the form of myth, pseudohistory, fiction and hoax, most recently in the Hollywood movie Godzilla vs. Kong, where Hollow Earth is home to all sorts of monsters.

The Ancient Greeks and early Christians placed the underworld or Hell in the interior of the Earth. Ancient…

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[Never Was Magazine]

Overlord

Overlord is a genre mashup done spectacularly well

When I first learned of Overlord, I thought that it sounded like something out of the Alien Space Bats subforum of alternatehistory.com. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen threads with the exact premise of this movie: zombies in World War II. What studio executive green-lit this?

Pay close attention to the film, though, and you will see it has antecedents. It has a whiff of Inglorious Basterds and the…

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[Never Was Magazine]

In and Out of the Reich

A British journalist travels through Nazi-ruled Europe in the 2010s in “In and Out of the Reich” #dieselpunk

One of the most compelling things about any Axis victory alternate history, when done well, is the all-consuming sense of dread that pervades the entire enterprise. How could it not be? The very conceit is the triumph of one of the most bloodthirsty, sadistic regimes this world has ever known. There is something that sends a chill down my spine when reading the details of Generalplan Ost, the…

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[Never Was Magazine]

The Man With The Iron Heart

Review of Harry Turtledove’s The Man With The Iron Heart

One of my theories about Harry Turtledove is that, for all times he’s been labeled “the master of alternate history,” he never had the most enthusiasm for the genre.

It goes like this: Turtledove wanted to write Byzantine/Eastern Roman-themed fantasy, but after The Guns of the South(1992), alternate history became the money-making niche that he was stuck in. Turtledove would be neither the…

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