Nick Mamatas

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this science-fiction revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kalivas lives in solitude on the Farallon Islands, until the Master and his daughter M colonize his lonely realm.

Kalivas, the last free-range human, is pressed into completing dangerous and menial tasks on the Master's behalf. The new regime is disrupted when a great storm brings more cyborg mainlanders to the island shores. Can Kalivas finally break free and reclaim his islands, or show more will his affection for M keep him tied to the Master forever?

Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest reframes the drama as an anticolonial fantasia through futuristic gizmos, a broken continent, and a one-act play invoking the theater of the absurd. Told by the Bard's least civilized and most human creation, Nick Mamatas crafts a micro-epic for the modern era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love this description: "Nick Mamatas crafts a micro-epic for the modern era."

Exactly. This precisely delineates this reading experience. Caliban, from Shakespeare's version of The Tempest, starts us (as Kalivas) in the direction Author Mamatas wants us to go. He is, need I mention, not-quite human; he is Us-but-Other. Kalivas is the last fully human representative of our lineage after Apocalypse compels most to seek non-human augmentation. The Master (Prospero) has a "posthuman" as they're now called child, M (Miranda), with whom Kalivas is infatuated.

So, M is repelled but fascinated by Kalivas? So The Master is umitigatedly cruel to Kalivas? But who plays Stephano's part?

Y'all know better than that. The squalling hordes of banshees in the Spoiler Stasi make it impossible for me to tell. I can say that the nature of The Tempest is strongly present in this anticolonial reimagining, I will say that there is a lot more examination of the ways and means of Othering, I'd like you to know that the most common downfall of the retelling...losing sight of the central reason to retell a story in the joy of creating one's own...is entirely absent. As Kalivas hits the beats, the camera of our readerly attention is a few feet off its original mark; we see from a new perspective the way the stories meet, merge, diverge, and if one's paying attention, the why of it all. show less

I'm conflicted about this book. Mamatas is a writer with many gifts, an avowed leftist with a deep background in horror who ably mixes classic imagery with premonitions about the future. His writing is Extremely Online and Extremely Correct. And yet, a lot of it was just okay.

The stories are at their best when he does alternate history, imaging a past of steampunk and dieselpunk wonders inhabited by Engels and Trotsky. And there are a few more intimate psychological studies, of Greekness and show more fatherhood, and of the psychology of pain, that really worked. But about half of the book was filler, a kind of late-Gibson "welcome to you cyberpunk present" without the deep estrangement that makes Gibson so great (it just clicked that my favorite Gibson is "The Belonging Kind"). Without that kind of cutting insight, the scifi was just glib. And the finale story, an antiwar fable about micronations and a telepathic kid, failed to move me entirely.

I appreciated the biographical notes at the end of each story, a sad tale of publications shuttered, of nominations to awards lost, of the quiet desperation of a 'full-time writer' in the 21st century. Mamatas is perhaps best known for a practical book on writing, Starve Better, and this stories are plenty hungry. But the conclusions felt like the first answer to the premise. Mamatas comes up with fascinating ideas, but the workings through of those ideas are all too often predictable, a dish without the necessary ingredient of surprise. show less

The Second Shooter is a fast-paced and darkly funny novel that carries readers along like a storm surge, twisting and turning around ever-changing plot points and perspectives. It's a great send-up of America's contemporary culture of conspiracy theorists and the media figures who engage with and encourage them for the sake of the show, as well as a biting critique of everyone who benefits from public tragedies. I found it both entertaining and eerily believable.

The main drawback of this show more novel, for me, was that I had some difficulty finding the main character engaging. Everything that happened to and around him, and everyone he encountered, was much, much more engaging, which saved the book and ultimately resulted in a satisfying reading experience. I think it might have been a five-star read had there been just a bit more to Mike Karras, though perhaps his essential lack of, well, pretty much everything was important to the plot. At any rate, though his characterization was a flaw for me, I still enjoyed the book quite a bit.

I'd recommend The Second Shooter to anyone looking for a slightly paranormal thriller that's short enough for a fast reader to blaze through in an afternoon. Fans of the X-Files, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson alike should find plenty of thematic satisfaction here, but Mamatas's take on familiar themes of omnipresent surveillance and vast conspiracy is individual enough to offer most readers something new to think about.

I received a free e-ARC of this title from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my review. show less

Content warning for violence, and for several uses of the N-word. A murder mystery, wherein a writer is murdered at a literary convention. The killer has to be one of the small circle of people at the convention - right?

Many there are who might take issue with the word "literary" here. The Summer Tentacular is a gathering of fans - and haters, the categories overlap - of the late [[H. P. Lovecraft]] (1890-1937), snob, racist, anti-Semite, and crafter of stories of cosmic horror, stories show more notable for their bad prose which have nonetheless caught the imaginations of generations of readers and writers. New writer Colleen Danzig is attending this Providence, Rhode Island weekend for her first time, meeting the longterm fans and professionals who have been coming for decades while nurturing friendships and - more commonly - grudges. The more normal of these folks could be called quirky or eccentric. Others...well, established, and widely detested, writer Panos Panossian has turned up dead in the laundry room, his face sliced off. He had had in his possession a valuable book bound in human skin, and that tome is missing. Will Colleen leave the detecting to the Providence police department? Of course not; she sets out to discover who in this small world has done the deed.

Later writers have produced numerous novels and stories set in Lovecraft's imagined "Mythos". Stephen King, Charles Stross, and Catherynne M. Valente are among the much better artists working with HPL's basic insight: that the universe is vast and old and utterly indifferent to humans, and we are perhaps better off not seeking too deeply into forbidden knowledge.

These real professionals do attend conventions, but the Summer Tentacular is Mamatas's invention, populated with a much less successful cohort, many of whom lead extremely marginal lives, earning little from their work. Most would have reasons for killing Panossian. Mamatas knows his milieu. His satire is not that much more extreme than the reality of actual science fiction/fantasy/horror conventions, filled with successful writers and editors and fans, but also with some who have nothing else in their lives.

The book is also a work of cosmic horror. Half the chapters are narrated by Panossian as he lies dead in a drawer in the morgue. Death, he learns, takes longer to complete than doctors understand. He follows the progress of his case by overhearing conversations among the witnesses who view his body, and recalls his hungry, angry life over the weekend, as he feels his brain decay toward a final oblivion. His fate will be shared by everyone whose brain is not destroyed at death; you, too, are a character in this story.

The horror is leavened with humor, e.g.: "the horror small press rule of thumb is this—the fancier the physical object, the worse the actual text between the covers..." or: "Now the stuff he produced wasn't very good, but if you're a fan and just want to consume nothing but Cthulhu all day while waiting for Cthulhu to come consume you, then it was fine." We're cosmically doomed, but that's no reason not to have a chuckle sometimes.

I don't read much Lovecraftian fiction, but in my limited experience Mamatas is uniquely interesting. show less