Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 14

STAR WARS, EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS

There is a lot of enthusiasm about the new Star Wars film, and on some level it's understandable—the new film isn't as horrifyingly embarrassing as the prequels, but The Force Awakens is still a bad movie.

Like any Star Wars film, it makes little sense. I'm not even talking about the inexplicable political economy of the galaxy that has both intelligent robots and people hanging out in tents with dirt floors, or the horrifying reactionary theme of an entire galaxy being held a prisoner of fate by about a dozen closely related individuals. I don't even mean how the Force is supposed to work. Nor how the Republic fell apart so quickly; where the new post-imperial baddies, now called the First Order, get their funding; or why dogfights in space or sending ground troops to blow things up when you have spaceships, or anything like that. I mean basic stuff. Like why does Princess Jumpsword, who has a flying tractor, not park closer to the pawn shop? Why, on a planet full of thieves and scavengers, are spaceships left unlocked, fueled up, and with keys in the ignition? Why is every electrical problem solved by pulling out various wires? (Try it at home—wires tend to only be in place when actually necessary!) Why does everything take so long but happen so quickly? How many flashbacks can one person have? Why is the sibling of a living political figure considered a "myth" by many? "Let me tell you children, about the legend of Billy Carter, a mythical hero who some say wandered off into the beer brewery, never to return..."

Anyway, story. So we have a Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword and a new droid who has a magic map with which one can find Luke Skywalker, whose Jedi school went tits-up when a student went Columbine on everyone else. Like any proper savior of the universe who learned a lot about maturity and responsibility over the years, Luke...just fucked off after that. You know, I saved the universe, but now I'm sad. Blah blah ancient prophecies I'm sure it'll all work out sorry nine billion dead people laters babes. And that could actually be very compelling character arc for the next episode, but after this movie, I don't have high hopes.

Oh, there's also another guy, who is like the new Han Solo, but he isn't in half the movie. A not-very-loose paraphrase: "I thought you were dead!" "Nah." But mostly it's Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword.

One big issue is that every dramatic problem in this movie would have been solved had email been invented before FTL propulsion. For whatever reason, there is interplanetary communication and even instant communication between ships and a homebase that are light-years apart, but nobody decides to send the easily agitated baddie Kylo Ren an email with bad news. Instead it's one First Order weaselfuck after another reporting to his office to say "Gosh, we fucked it up again, Coffee-Pot Head" and then he gets angry and uses magic on them. The bad news of course is that Good Stormtrooper and Princess Jumpsword have teamed up to get the Luke map to the Republic and also to the Resistance which certainly isn't the Republic's own regular military but...uh I dunno. There weren't even twenty years of shit novels to explain this.

THE GOOD NEWS is that Kylo Ren has taken a page from the second new Star Trek film and decided that the problem with the Death Star is that it wasn't big enough. So he makes a bigger one, with an ecology (which is actually cool!) and this one works by sucking down "the sun" (not "a star", "the sun") and then spitting it back out at planets it doesn't like. And so Kylo Ren does just that to the planet where the Republic is hiding and the movie is over. No wait, he doesn't do that in the first act because the entire government is...on a secret planet? But that makes no sense! Okay, he doesn't do it in the second act because...he doesn't like genocide? Nah, he ordered a whole village killed four minutes into the movie. But he needs the Luke map! But why does he? Surely, Luke only matters if there's a Republic for him to support and be supported by, right? Even with all his Force powers and shit, he's still just a dude. If Kylo blows up the whole Republic, which he could do at any time because it only takes half an hour to eat the sun and spit it back out at people, he should!

But there COULD BE a reason why! For Kylo Ren is actually Ben Solo(?), the son of Han and Leia. So maybe he has warm feelings for them and doesn't want to blow up his mother? That could have gone a long way to both solve this plot problem and give us a reason to believe that Ren is feeling "seduced" by the light side of the force. Eh, fuck that shit, we'll just have him talk to himself in a room for three seconds to Darth Vader's old hat about some vague pro-light sentiments. You can tell the light side of the Force is good because Luke...oh wait, he abandoned billions of people to their deaths to sit on a rock. Well, I guess that can be seductive.

(The Planet-Killing Planet thing is also an issue for the goodies in the film. If only The Republic had put their intelligence resources toward tracking the First Order's planet-building expenditures instead of Luke!)

Hey, have I mentioned Princess Jumpsword? She's good at everything! Obviously the daughter of Luke and whatever space-skank he seduced and abandoned. Fans have complained that she's a "Mary Sue" character, unlike say, Luke or Han. I guess she lacks the emotional depth and gritty realism of all the rest of the Star Wars universe, eh eh? She's actually supercute. She has that mannish chin I like on a woman and sounds like Downton Abbey. Princess Jumpsword also saw the Luke map, so Ren kidnaps her and tries to Force (haha, get it) the image out of her but she has magic too so it doesn't work. Then there's a lot of fucking around with the Good Stormtrooper and Han Solo—I mean a lot. Many movies wander a bit in their second acts, but this movie is just over two hours long and for a loooong time there isn't shit happening.

But it's all designed to get Han Solo on a catwalk with Ren and Ren kills him. Because we don't believe for a second that Ren is interested in turning good, of course he kills Han and it's not a surprise and it's not interesting. There is an almost good line where he asks Han, "Help me," and it's clear that he's asking for help with committing to the Dark Side. So that was almost all right. Then Ren has a fight with the Good Stormtrooper, who is black by the way, so of course the black guy loses (but doesn't die, so that's good!) and then he has a fight with Princess Jumpsword, and it's a tie.

Meanwhile, there's some spaceships flying at Precinct 47 to blow up the new Death Star Planet Thing. And they do. And there's some nonsense with shield-dropping and whatnot to get Han and Chewbacca down there first, but the whole thing could have been handled with an empty ship filled with explosives. The new Han Solo type guy comes back for this to do pilot things. It is not exciting or interesting because it doesn't involve any of the dozen closely related people around whom the fate of the galaxy revolves. We've also seen it before in the other films.

Are there good things about The Force Awakens? Sure. I liked the Good Stormtrooper—who has no resources, no friends, nothing at all—wandering the huge landscapes and trying to deal with these cosmic political forces. The idea was exciting. But then he got knocked out pretty easily. I liked Princess Jumpsword. She's a pretty good actor, really. I like that Luke Skywalker doesn't say anything because Mark Hamill is a deeply terrible actor, so that was a moment of good direction. The lightsaber fights were almost okay. Kylo Ren stops a laser blast at one point and it just hangs there for a few minutes and that was cute. Adam Driver has dreamy hair. Harrison Ford has good comic timing. I think Big Evil Gollum (Kylo Ren's new teacher) is pretty neat.

Will I see the next one? It hardly matters, because I saw the first three. Next up, Princess Jumpsword gets her hand chopped off! And for the screenwriters, here are two free lines of dialogue for you to use to help lampshade all the coincidences. Any two characters are fine:

A: Isn't it weird how history repeats?

B: Shut up.

Two quicks

My advice for young writers: Be jealous.


Author copies of The Last Weekend came in today.

Out January 5, just in time to use your bookstore gift cards!

Three Books That Disappointed Me This Year

Usually around this time of the year, I write about five books that I loved. But this year, my reading was dominated by award jury duty, about which I'll have a little bit more to say in April. So instead here are three books, all new, I managed to squeeze in, only to be disappointed by.

The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld: this was a satire of the near-future, positing comically the end result of Republican Party rule after the 2008 crisis. So bands of homeless people in SUVs are performing migrant labor, the zillionaire Pepper Sisters and a televangelist control the media and the economy, whales are washing up on shores, and schools are still strangled by PC culture. And yet the whole thing is less than the sum of its parts. It's really hampered by an enigmatic character who ends up able to raise the dead—of course she is also the perfect person who leads a fairly undemocratic commune based on a disused housing development. A big 270-page meh.

Burning Down George Orwell's House by Andrew Erwin. Another funny one with a media critique—an ad exec obsessed with George Orwell uses anti-SUV propaganda to sell SUVs, then after his marriage crumbles hauls off to distant Jura (where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four) to drink himself to death. Naturally, the locals aren't too fond of this American, except perhaps for one young woman... Anyway, though a cliche that didn't bother me as much as this: despite supposedly being obsessed with Orwell, the ad exec makes zero reference to Keep the Aspidistra Flying—which is Orwell's novel about a would-be author who really just has a talent for ad copy. It just struck me as patently impossible that the protagonist would never think about this book while waxing poetic about Orwell.

The Way We Weren't by Jill Talbot. A memoir of, supposedly, an adjunct who finds herself the member of the intellectual precariat, the book is actually mostly about how much she misses the dude who knocked her up and treated her like shit, without a scintilla of self-awareness or reconsideration. There are a few shocking moments of poverty/desperation porn: Talbot drinks a jug of wine a night, and while in rehab tells her young daughter that she is teaching composition in a special residential school and can't come home. The dude is no prize—when the daughter was an infant he'd refuse to change a diaper or hold her, explaining that he didn't want to get too attached to the girl in case he feels like leaving the author. This, for no particular stated reason, did not lead to either his instantly being thrown out, or a frying pan upside his head. He did get a whiny whiny book that basically promises she'll fuck him again the second he shows up at her door. There are thin lines between sympathy and pity and pity and contempt, and this book hopscotched right over to contempt for me.

New story

The Phylactery in Apex Magazine.

Haven't updated this in a while...

Just been too slammed. I'll just say that I agree with everything Ben Burgis says about Trump.

The other thing I have to share is a new blurb for I Am Providence, which I'd also like to encourage you to pre-order.

"I Am Providence is just what I'd expect from Nick Mamatas: sharp wit, biting but humane social commentary, and, for the romantics among us, a faceless narrator decomposing at the morgue."—Matt Ruff, author of Bad Monkeys and Lovecraft Country.



If I haven't mentioned it before, one reason why I am pushing for pre-orders and even linking to Amazon is because I have an escalator clause. If we can ship 5000 units to stores, I get an extra $2000 and I'll also have a higher royalty rate. I certainly don't expect 5000 blog readers and Twitter followers to flood amazon with pre-orders, but every bit helps. Amazon I am not usually a fan of, but they are the most efficient e-tailer when it comes to keeping pre-orders straight, charging the lowest price when the book finally comes out, and not charging until the book ships. So if the book sounds at all interesting, please pick it up now!

2015 Publications

Though much of the first seven months of my 2015 was consumed with finishing I Am Providence (long-time readers may remember a late-2014 post in which I announced selling a novel before writing a word of it), I did manage to publish ten pieces of short fiction this year, along with three reprints.

In January, "Χταπόδι Σαλάτα" appeared in the anthology Shadows Over Main Street , which did well for a while until the small press that published it vanished in the typical manner of no longer answering emails from its authors and anthologists. Supposedly, this will be released again some day.

My novelette "We Never Sleep" appeared The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk in March in the UK, July in the US. Then it was announced that the long-running Mammoth series would be discontinued. In response I put "We Never Sleep" online, because otherwise it would have been "trapped" in an unsupported non-marketed book.

"Black Book of the Skull [Mαύρο βιβλίο του κρανίου]" appeared in the beautiful high-concept anthology The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalog of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time . The wait was long for this book to appear, but it really is something thanks to editor/bookman Nate Pedersen. Amazingly, neither the book nor the publisher immediately found itself in any sort of danger!

"Anti-Fragile" , a 1700-word one-sentence short story appeared in TriggerWarning.US, just after the alt.culture magazine had succeeded in raising tens of thousands of dollars and right before the two principals feuded and had a very public falling-out that continues to this day.

"Yelseesee" was in Gods, Memes, and Monsters: A 21st Century Bestiary , published by Stone Skin Press. This was another high-concept antho, though many of the entries didn't play up the encyclopedia aspect and were just straight fantasy stories.

"Lab Rat", a crime story in dialogue, appeared in the third number of the unfortunately named Lazy Fascist Review . Despite the announcement of a special Lovecraft-themed fourth issue, the magazine was discontinued after the release of this one.

Another crime story, "The Warehouse of Dead Daughters" appeared in the sixteenth issue of the avant-garde magazine Farrago's Wainscot. For my trouble, the story was denounced as not science fiction in its only review.

My occult detective story and Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, tribute, "The Twentieth Century Man", appeared in the small-press anthology Ghost in the Cogs . It's primarily an ebook and was released on Halloween, rather inexplicably. (Usually, in the US, books are released on Tuesdays.) Haven't seen a hard copy yet, but there is a POD version.

Just last week, an avant-garde piece commissioned by China Miéville, "The Person Who Was Followed Around By Men in Pig Masks: A Play In One Act" , was published in the second number of Salvage, a quarterly of revolutionary arts and letters created by former cadre of the International Socialist tendency who left after a horrifying rape scandal a couple of years ago.

And just yesterday, the 79th issue of Apex Magazine went live. It includes my story "The Phylactery", which is in the ebook issue now and will be live on the website by mid-month.

The three reprints were:

"Exit Through the Gift Shop", which was published in Year's Best Weird Fiction, vol. 2 ,

"Eureka!", which lives again on podcast form in the eighteenth episode of Glittership, and

"Work, Shoot, Hook, Rip" , my wrestling noir story, was reprinted in a guest-edited issue of the magazine I co-founded, The Big Click .


I had one book appear under my name this year: the dayjob crime/SF/Japan hybrid anthology Hanzai Japan , co-edited as always by Masumi Washington. It came out on October 20th and has been very well-reviewed so far. In other workplace news, my art direction of the cover of Catherynne Valente's 2013 collection The Melancholy of Mechagirl won a commendation from Communication Arts.

I only published one original piece of non-fiction, "The Man Who Was In Every Story, or The Murdered Darling", which introduced the re-issue of Gerald Kersh's undeservedly obscure short fiction collection On an Odd Note . "How to Find Freelance Work", a bit of my how-to guide, Starve Better, was reprinted in The Australian Writer's Marketplace 2015 . My tribute to the late Tom Piccirilli appeared in the August issue of Locus and as the editorial in the September Big Click.

So, in a way, kind of a lean year. The number of market failures listed above hint at a contraction in short fiction after years of an anthology boom. I am pleased that I've managed to move more into both crime and avant-garde fiction, which was my goal in January 2013 when I announced my "retirement"—you know, one month before Olivia announced her pregnancy and I had to go right back to short SF/F/H to get some money.

But I do have two novels coming out in 2016—the aforementioned Providence in August and on January 5th the trade reissue (with author preferred text!) of my zombie novel The Last Weekend —two stories are to be reprinted in the first three months of the year, a personal essay is to appear in the UK anthology Taut Lines: Extraordinary True Fishing Stories , and we're shopping a strange gift book idea around that has been getting some interesting nibbles, so we shall see what happens.

"The Phylactery" in APEX MAGAZINE #79

The new issue of Apex Magazine is live, at least for ebook buyers. It includes my story "The Phylactery", which will be free online by midmonth. A good thing too, as it is pretty much the exact opposite of last week's story.

But, check it out. It's the last thing I'll have out this year.

The Person Who Was Followed Around in Pig Masks: A Play in One Act

From Salvage.Zone, my first play:

The Person Who Was Followed Around by Men in Pig Masks: A Play in One Act

Intriguing question...

ST Joshi asks, a bit petulantly, I repeat what I’ve said before: Lovecraft will be around a lot longer than any of his current dectractors. Let’s have a show of hands, people, to see who you think will be more remembered in history: H. P. Lovecraft or…Scott Nicolay? Nick Mamatas? Jeff VanderMeer? Daniel José Older? S. J. Bagley? Edward Morris?1


Me.

*cracks knuckles*

Definitely me.

(Note he doesn't ask if one's literary output will be remembered by history.)


I should add that until this controversy reared its head, Joshi seemed to like me fine. He solicited me for several of his Lovecraftian anthologies, one of which I took him up on—my story "Dead Media" appears in Black Wings [of Cthulhu] II. (Black Wings is the original title, "of Cthulhu" was added by Titan Books.) I was also solicited for III and IV and for a gothic Lovecraft anthology, but didn't submit anything for them as I was busy with other things and Cthulhued out. But then he asked me to participate in the non-Lovecraftian Searchers After Horror anthology, which I was very pleased to do. My story "Exit Through the Gift Shop" was good enough to be reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction vol. 2 and was the only story of the several hundred submitted via the publisher's Submittable link to be so chosen.

When I was writing my essay on Lovecraft's racism for the limited edition hardcover of The Damned Highway, I turned to Joshi and he answered my questions quickly and comprehensively.

One disagreement though, and a partial one at that, and now I suck.









1. Also note, speaking of history, that Joshi's blog doesn't have dedicated links to specific posts, so future cyberarcheologists studying my reign of terror, the blog post in question was posted November 19 2015 and is entitled "More Crusades for the Crusaders!"

HANZAI JAPAN reviews!

My dayjob anthology Hanzai Japan got a couple of nice reviews today. One from Dirge Magazine is a total rave:

Every single story is extraordinarily-gorgeously-elegantly-improbably well written while remaining desperately weird and genuinely unnerving often, even sometimes scary. Each story brings a different style, but each also shares a sort of universal fluidity of intricacy and rhythm that makes the collection as a whole flow smoothly, even when the tide of each renewed plot turns off into a new direction. When I try to pick a favourite, I remember all of them. The preposterous sense it all makes, the feel of riotous colour, the liberal and gleeful swearing: all of it makes this collection so much fun to read.

Yay!


Meanwhile, Spinetingler Magazine is doing one of its infamous story-by-story reviews, in which there is one critic and one review for each entry. Check the HANZAI JAPAN tag as reviews are being published across the course of today and tomorrow. Stories by Carrie Vaughn, Ray Banks, Yumeaki Hirayama, Brian Evenson, and others have been covered so far.