Happy 2023 from the team at Never Was!
We published 80 stories in 2022, starting with Alexander’s review of Hostile Participants and ending the year with his review of Carolina de Robertis’s The Gods of Tango.
Alex also took over as editor of the Sea Lion Press blog. Sea Lion is the world’s only publishing house exclusively devoted to alternate history, and a Never Was partner. If they’re not on your reading list yet, make sure to add them!
Hilde interviewed Victoria Yeates and Mark Williams, known for their roles in the Harry Potter movie franchise, and she visited Brussels Manga, Comic Con Brussels and the Hotel New York in Disneyland Paris for us.
We republished another of Dale Cozort’s alternate World War II histories, “What if Poland Stopped the Blitz?” and Gary Oswald’s rumination on the role of war in alternate history.
Christopher Smith argued for an anti-brutalist, anti-fascist, anti-industrialist and anti-militarist attitude in “Re-punking Dieselpunk“, calling on fans of the genre to draw inspiration from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War.
I wrote about the genre trope Underwater Worlds and the designs of Raymond Loewy.
“Lost Empire of Tartaria,” published in October 2021, continued to be our most popular story into this year. Judging by the comments (and I didn’t even allow the craziest), many readers are unfortunately under the impression that this isn’t fiction.
We updated our look with a slightly customized version of Anders Norén‘s Miyazaki theme for WordPress and added Steam, Diesel and Atomic welcome pages to help new readers familiarize themselves with alternate history in those eras and to help longtime readers explore our archives, which go back to 2008.
The Never Was Lounge went dark in December. Unfortunately Vanilla, our forum software, hasn’t released a version for PHP 8 yet. If one doesn’t come out soon, I’ll have to look for an alternative. Please be patient. Transitioning a message board from one software to another can be an arduous task!
