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

What an odd and uncomfortable read. Which is exactly what I expect from Mamatas, but I'm currently at a loss as to whether I liked it or not.

The novel is set at a Lovecraft convention in Providence, Rhode Island. It is told in alternate chapters from the point of view of two characters--one who has been murdered, and the other who is trying to figure out who did it. Overall, I think I preferred the sections narrated by the deceased.

To anyone who has attended SF (or horror, I suppose, show more though I don't have any personal experience of them) conventions, much of the setting and the behaviors of the characters will be familiar. We've all met people like that, perhaps even done some of the things Mamatas is skewering. It is familiar and uncomfortable at the same time, as the con culture is described pretty unflatteringly but at the same time quite accurately. Even the characters themselves, who are there voluntarily, are aware of how pathetic they all are.

I often enjoy books that straddle genres, and this one certainly does. It involves Lovecraft and fannish culture, but it's also a murder mystery, and yet again the sections narrated by Colleen had more of a horror feel to me than a mystery. It is sometimes uncomfortable for me to read books in which the protagonist seems likely to do something stupid that's going to make things worse, not better. Colleen pretty much embodies that character type, and it's something I associate with horror more than mysteries, though I am not particularly well-read in the horror field. But there is a certain horror in watching the main character do the wrong thing, and you know it, and it's probably going to go badly, but they don't seem to get it.

This is also one of those books that, at the end, leaves me wondering if it didn't entirely make sense, or if I'm just not clever enough to understand it. (I don't necessarily consider that a problem.) But I Am Providence does feel like a clever book, and sometimes the reader can feel clever along with it for recognizing references in the story. Doubtless there were others that I missed, but the book does reward readers familiar with certain aspects of fannish culture going back 20 years or more. I don't know how well it would work for someone who wasn't.

Overall, though, the book was interesting enough that I read it in one sitting, and I had no idea where it was going, which is a trait I greatly appreciate. So I think this is successful, for me, even if I can't exactly describe my reaction to it as enjoyment. 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

"What if [a:H.P. Lovecraft|9494|H.P. Lovecraft|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1196193667p2/9494.jpg]'s cosmic demons showed up in a [a:Jack Kerouac|1742|Jack Kerouac|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1185997896p2/1742.jpg] novel": this could be a gimmicky lark like the Sherlock-Holmes-versus-Dracula kind of thing various people have done, or it could be the kind of dense historical fantasy that [a:Tim Powers|947|William show more Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1179017891p2/947.jpg] is good at, but Mamatas is on to something different. For one thing, he writes the whole thing as Kerouac, not just mimicking his style but with a real feeling for his character and for the things he cared about. But he's also got a good reason for this particular mash-up, a very ambitious reason - and he lets you know this right off by breaking the first promise such stories normally make, which is to leave something unscathed. It's not just our heroes in a secret skirmish with monsters in the sewer; no, Cthulhu has pretty much taken over the world, America is now a dreamlike hell and we are all screwed. Raise your hand if you sometimes feel like that.

Lovecraft wrote a lot about ultimate evil waiting to destroy our bodies and souls - and he wrote like someone who knew nothing about life except what he'd read in Victorian pulp or in Poe, but he still managed to express, in his verbose and nerdy way, the postwar feeling that the established order had cracked and revealed something rotten at the core. What exactly it would mean for it to crack all the way wasn't something he cared to go into, but, thirty years and another world war later, the Beat writers were part of a shift in attention toward those fractures and what might come out of them. What's destruction, what's insanity, is it good or bad; what's humanity, what's freedom, what's worth keeping?

So, following Kerouac's own tendency to assign mythic roles to his friends, Mamatas uses the Beats for different responses to the question: "What do you do when the status quo seems very very wrong?" [a:William Burroughs|5025|William S. Burroughs|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1222708167p2/5025.jpg] is the best equipped to deal with Cthulhian America: slimy appendages, half-human authority figures and gratuitous cruelty were how he already saw the world, and now he gets to shoot monsters. [a:Allen Ginsberg|4261|Allen Ginsberg|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1206649831p2/4261.jpg] laughs and retreats into private playtime. Jack can't go either way - he's too interested in people, and he's trying to practice Buddhist compassionate detachment, a point of view that doesn't grant any special status to the apocalypse. Mamatas writes very convincingly from that point of view, and it's a startling effect, undercutting the nihilistic horror of Lovecraft and Burroughs with humane bemusement at the ways people fall into illusion and violence. The Cthulhu cultists aren't the slavering savages Lovecraft was afraid of; they're conformist citizens in a late-stage fascist delirium, dancing to entertain children that they forgot they killed. (The oddly warm-hearted tone, within the carnival of atrocities, also lets Mamatas be very funny. In one of several little travelogue scenes that would've fit perfectly in [b:On the Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21E8H3D1JSL._SL75_.jpg|3355573], a small-town waitress snickers at the pretensions of local demon-worshippers, who've "never seen a tentacle" because they're landlocked in the Midwest.)

The plot, if it's a plot, is provided by Jack's unstable friend Neal Cassady, whose descent into even worse behavior gives Jack something to focus on. Neal thinks the breakdown of reality is long overdue, and he's advanced from con-man to sorcerer without getting any smarter. Pursuing him into the ruins of New York allows Mamatas to bring the epic horror story back in touch with the personal one. It's no surprise that Jack's final effort to connect with this damaged guy is directly related to the last hope of the world, but the last scene is still a surprise. The ending, though it seems just right and is written with love, is hard to take for the same reasons that real life is hard to take. show less