Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 18

Sasquan Report

This will be a quick one. I was booked at a new hotel in downtown Spokane, about a mile from the convention center where Worldcon was held. It was a very odd hotel with a safari/no-tell motel theme. For example, a piece of furniture from my room:



There were also headboard mirrors in the front of the bed. So, waking up at 4am and looking up gives one this sort of impression:



This year, Haikasoru had a table in the dealer's room and we did very well, selling over sixty copies of Taiyo Fujii's Gene Mapper, which we started calling "the first cyberpunk novel about rice." Fujii was a guest at the convention and has pretty good English—he made many friends, did well on his panels, and basically rocked the house. I'm having daydreams of a Gene Mapper Hugo nomination next year. We also sold a couple hundred units of our backlist titles.

Being at the table meant that if there was drama on panels, I missed most of it. I did attend the Hugos as an acceptor for Edge of Tomorrow, which placed third behind two Marvel movies. The little lagniappes were a wooden asterisk—I presume both a symbol of the unusual Hugo ballot, and a a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's use of * to mean "asshole"—and a pair of BBQ tongs, dry rub, and an oven mitt provided by next year's Worldcon, which will be in Kansas City, MO. The pre-party was extremely tense; it felt like a dentist's waiting room. The post-parties were much more fun. My favorite part of the Hugos was at the first loser's party, when I asked the bartender to put some vodka in the remains my limeade and she filled the solo cup nearly to the brim. Publishing is glamour, let nobody tell you otherwise.

Naturally, Puppy Partisans are upset that their candidates mostly finished under No Award. Which means that it is time for the Second Mamatas Challenge. All one need do is this:

1. Select one Puppy Candidate from each category this year.
2. Explain why it deserved to win
a. with specific references to the text if a work, or
b. specific references to their efforts in 2014 if a person
but without
c. references to the number of nominating votes received, presumed sales of the work, achievements prior to 2014, or anything outside of the remit of "Best of 2014."
3. in an essay of 100 words, exclusive of quoted material.

I'll note that I did not automatically No Award puppies, and indeed voted for two of them. I also No Award frequently, and No Awarded two categories that actually did have winners this year. So if you have some sort of canned speech about SJWs, remember to go fuck yourself, early and often.

Moving on, I liked Spokane. I guess it looks like every other small-city-in-decline between the Mississippi River and California. Low brick buildings of several stories, interspersed with half-empty glass and steel office buildings. There was a river, some neat elevated train tracks moving freight at all hours, a tiny boho section with food co-op and art cinema and comic shop, a line of bars, and a convention center that really must not see very much use. Usually, Worldcon vanishes into the halls of the centers in which it is held—this time both the Hugos and the Masquerade used a ticketing system because the venue was about the right size for number of attendees. I noticed a fair number of locals, many of whom were young in fannish terms—late teens, 20s, 30s. I wonder now if Worldcon should aim for second-tier cities more often, as since there is nothing else going on most weekends, locals will try out Worldcon. In Chicago, Denver, San Antonio etc., there is always something to do.

Also, I was ambitious and did an informal push-hands club every morning right in front of the convention center.First day, seven people came. The next day, two. The third day, one. (Genevieve Williams is mighty!) You can tell from the people who didn't come back that we had decent levels of contact without blending into sanshou sparring. None of the people who demanded I say various awful things to their faces showed up to try me, shockingly enough. I was pleased to meet a number of friendly people at the table and in various bars, but I did not spend a lot of time at parties or barcon this year. Spokane was covered in smoke from the horrific wildfires burning around the town, and that knocked the wind out of me after mornings full of exercise and afternoons full of work. But overall it was pretty fun, and I am looking forward to Kansas City.

What did you do in the Puppy Wars, papa?

Here's my Sasquan schedule. I'll also be wherever Taiyo Fujii is, so go where he goes if you also want to see me:

Horror/Paranormal: What's New
Thursday 17:00 - 17:45, Spokane Falls Suite A/B (Doubletree)
Found anything scary...or scary and somehow, well, romantic? A look at current paranormal writing, trends for the future and is the current spate of horror & paranormal on TV helping or hurting the genre?

Joshua Bilmes, Nick Mamatas, Christie Meierz, Laura Anne Gilman

Writers Workshop section 14
Closed session.


SpoCon Presents: Sub-Genre Games
Saturday 16:00 - 17:00, Grand Ballroom: Salon III (Doubletree)
Are you deep for dystopia? Crazy for cyberpunk? Feverent for urban faerie? Soft on steampunk? We're pitting ten sub-genres against each-other to see which should shed its "sub" prefix and become a fully-fledged genre alongside the towers of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Does YOUR favorite sub-genre have what it takes to stand alone?
Jessica Rising (M), Taiyo Fujii, Caren Gussoff, Frog Jones, Nick Mamatas, Christie Meierz, Steven Silver, Alan Smale, Kaye Thornbrugh, Dan Wells

I'll also be at Hugo events, representing Edge of Tomorrow for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.


Haikasoru will also have a table in the dealer's room, so I'll be there much of the day as well. Follow @haikasoru on twitter for updates, table signings, and "happy hour" when we'll accept rubber checks.

Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!

Hey locals, Gene Mapper author Taiyo Fujii is in town and will be reading at Borderlands Books this Sunday along with author Michael J. Martinez at 3pm.

Please come!

Bring money.

Monday Notes

In a very unusual turn of events, someone I voted for once—Bernie Sanders—is in the news. I will not be voting for him now as he has joined the Democratic Party. Sanders has always had problems as the Vermont's socialist party, Liberty Union, will tell you ("Bernie the Bomber" wants to get re-elected, and he voted identically to Hillary Clinton over 90 percent of the time while both were in the Senate) but let's just say that there is very little to do in Vermont, especially when I was living there, and voting and going to a town meeting was actually a weird little trip.

The #blacklivesmatter campaign made an intervention at one of Sanders's speeches and while Sanders handled it with some aplomb, the vulgar left followers—nearly all white people who have never even been to Scandinavia but have heard that it is really neat—went apeshit. Nothing is more terrifying to a white pseudoleft than the vision of a black woman yelling at him. At him! Anyway, Sanders made a good move—he had his staff write this pretty good page, with plenty of SEO-bait, on racial justice. Of course, adding copy to a web page is one thing, actually doing something is quite another. But it was interesting to see a little bit of the ol' left instinct kick in despite decades of selling out: acknowledge the polemic, make a change. Stay tuned next week for the next sell out though.


In shorter notes, Skyhorse has product pages for my two 2016 novels:

The Last Weekend, with author's preferred text, comes out in January.

I am Providence, my first murder mystery, comes out in early August.


Another thing I've been pretty interested is the fallout over the inspirational romance about a Nazi, For Such a Time by Kate Breslin. The critiques have been coming in from all over, and most of them are spot-on. The book, which loosely retells the story of Esther, features a blonde-haired blue-eyed Jewish woman falling in love with the Nazi concentration camp administrator who basically owns her. (If she disobeys, it's back to Dachau.) Thanks to the help of a magical Bible that inexplicably appears when our heroine needs some inspiration, she convinces the Nazi to rig an escape of some sort and thus save some of her people. Jesus and his story of sacrifice features prominently, though I don't believe that the main character converts to Christianity as some reports have claimed. The book was on nobody's radar until it was nominated for a pair of RITA Awards.

So, what's going on? Well, basically, evangelical Christianity is going on. EC's believe that Christ is active in history—hell, EC's believe that Christ is active in helping them find a parking space at the mall if they remember to ask for one in advance with a pre-ignition prayer—and yet here we go with the big problem of evil. (Western Christianity in general ties itself in knots over theodicy, as they are all heretical devils.) So the solution in this case is basically to rewrite the Holocaust. It's Inglourious Basterds for pew-renters. Find Christ somewhere in the Holocaust narrative, and the anxieties over the question of evil—and the thorny issue of what to do, theologically, with the persistence of Judaism—resolves itself emotionally for a few minutes. This dovetails very nicely into the "requirement" that romance have a happy ending for the romantically-linked couple, but is pretty tasteless.

Of course, romance, as it demands a happy ending, just isn't very fertile ground for huge spiritual questions of agency and the metaphysics of history. And the writing is awful: at one point the heroine frets over the possibility of having to eat pork at a fancy Nazi dinner party, which "her people considered traif." It's unintentionally hilarious, and the traif line shows how alienated the writer is from her own character.

Ultimately, the question of the book is a religious one. It can be as bad as it wants to be, so long as it relieves the anxieties of its evangelical readers for a few minutes. Mission accomplished. Much of the criticism of the book involves how offensive it is to Jewish readers and secular readers. But what does that criticism boil down to? "This evangelical Christian book isn't a secular pluralist book!" Indeed it is not. The romance genre is limned with political and cultural reaction, but it is often pluralist reaction, so there is some level of detente.

But some of the criticism seems off-base. One claim I saw was that book doesn't qualify as a romance because there can be no consent—except that dubious consent and non-consent utterly litters the romance genre. Any genre where the lines are so strict—it has to have X and Y in A and B mode—except that the lines can be ignored if it's hot enough, is going to have massive political problems (What does a crime novel need to have? An SF novel?)

Why can't the book just be a bad romance written for an audience with a peculiar subset of culturally powerful (and formerly dominant) anxieties? I'm not much for "culture war" narratives, but this controversy is the best example I can remember of an actual front in the culture war.

Monday Quick Note

The August issue of Locus Magazine contains appreciations of the late Tom Piccirilli by Brian Keene, Ed Gorman, Linda Addison, Jack M. Haringa, and me.

Link leads to product page. Content isn't online. I'll post my appreciation here at the end of the month.

Roddy Piper, RIP

What can you say about Roddy Piper? A fantastic performer. How many people can be seventy pounds lighter than their babyface opponent (Hulk Hogan, now erased from history, it seems) and still come off as the menacing heel and legitimate threat? Who can so it just a year or so after this sort of babyface angle down south?



Who could possibly be booked in a match like this, even in a squash? Perhaps a 400-pound "monster heel"/wildman.



A few days later McGraw coincidentally died, and many kids were sure somehow this match caused it.

As an actor, he wasn't much of one, but what 1980s action star could have made this scene work?



In the 1990s, he made a comeback, as lots of wrestlers did. In the 2000s, he made a comeback, as most wrestlers shouldn't have. Just a few months ago, he was put to work on a fun angle with Rusev. Strange, given that Piper was always booked as being from Glasgow and was actually Canadian, that he was eager to make the "Bulgarian brute" embrace the United States, but somehow it worked.

Also...Celebrity Wife Swap.



Pipe was 61. Though never huge, he did use steroids and painkillers as did many wrestlers when the promotions went national and play-to-get-paid was the norm. He had cancer about ten years ago and reportedly died of a heart attack, which can certainly happen to former athletes whose bodies have been through a lot. But this wrestler death feels a bit less like a tragedy than many. Piper did it all, almost. (No world title push.) He'll be remembered for a very long time.

RIP.

New Story: "Anti-Fragile"

I have been in rural Florida all week, where places of business started displaying Confederate flags in response to the recent movement to have them pulled from government facilities. So, it's fairly remote, as you can guess. My father turned 70, so there was a big party.

Anyway, to tide you over, here is a link to my latest story Anti-Fragile, in the dystopia issue of a newish culture magazine called Trigger Warning. The now traditional Indiegogo campaign continues.

More later.

Busy, but here's a dayjob book!

Too busy to do anything, really. Traveling starting at 2am. Laundry and medical records and the last 1500 words of my novel and and and...and to keep you busy, check out the cover of my latest dayjob anthology with Masumi Washington, Hanzai Japan: Fantastical, Futuristic Stories from Crime From and About Japan!



And the table of contents:

Genevieve Valentine “(.dis)”

Yusuke Miyauchi “Sky Spider”

Libby Cudmore “Rough Night in Little Toke”

Ray Banks “Outside the Circle”

Yumeaki Hirayama “Monologue of a Universal Transverse Mercator Map”

Brian Evenson “Best Interest”

Jyouji Hayashi ” Vampiric Crime Investigative Unit: Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department”

Naomi Hirahara “Jigoku”

Carrie Vaughn “The Girl Who Loved Shonen Knife”

Kaori Fujino “Run!”

S. J. Rozan “Hanami”

Violet LeVoit “The Electric Palace”

Setsuko Shinoda “The Long-Rumored Food Crisis”

Jeff Somers “Three Cups of Tea”

Chet Williamson “Out of Balance”

Hiroshi Sakurazaka “The Saitama Chain Saw Massacre”

What's Happening

...in Greece? Forbes of all places, and a Forbes columnist of all people has it right, I think: The Eurozone leadership stopped short of sending tanks onto the streets of Athens, but who needs tanks when you control a country’s banks? The only chance for sovereignty without fascism now is Tsipras out and SYRIZA's left flank tanking over, rejecting everything, and biting the bullet of Grexit on its terms.

...in publishing? No, not that garbage Harper Lee trunk novel. The Mammoth Book of DieselpunK, which includes my novelette "We Never Sleep" is out today.

...with me? Not much. I see the end of a novel just over a hill—64.5K of around 72.5K, but damn if I can never bring myself to start writing until 11:30PM each night.

Tom Piccirilli, RIP

I never re-read books, and I only rarely re-read shorter pieces, but two I often return to are both by Tom Piccirilli, who died today, after a second encounter with brain cancer. I was extremely pleased to publish both Fat Burglar Blues in my magazine The Big Click's inaugural issue. It showed everything that Pic was great at: a dark mood, universal empathy, and humor. He was a regular columnist until his first cancer robbed him of his abilities. Thanks to the care of his undefatigable wife Michelle Scalise and some ace medical treatment, he bounced back and gave me The Ghost Room. Read them.

When I first came onto the scene fifteen years ago, Tom Pic was The Man. Do you know what it means to be The Man? It means you're good, in a time when virtually everything and everyone was bad. It means that when your novel appears in a supposedly high-quality limited edition and the cover art literally depicts a sweaty ass, people buy it anyway and rave about the book and give it an award because it deserves one. I remember when Pic won the Bram Stoker Award—often derided as the "strokers" for the amount of log-rolling going on—for The Night Class, everyone at the ceremony was pleased and even relieved that the best book won. Kelly Laymon turned to me and said, "Pic is going to have a Stoker Village at his house." (The Stoker award is a statuette of a haunted house, called "the Usher." If you have a bunch of them, you can set them up under a Christmas tree along with a model train set for a little holiday comedy.)

And speaking personally, as someone with a Southern European surname, like Pic, and who is from the non-fancy area of Long Island, like Pic, seeing someone who is kinda like me, and excellent, and "successful" (horror writers just aren't successful) was massive. A lot is made about representation and diversity and such, and for good reasons, but "white" isn't quite the totalizing construct some would have it. When I saw shelf after shelf of Anglo names all in red or orange letters with black spines, I thought there was no place for me. Then, on the last shelf, with just a book or two on the shelves at the time, two's c's, one r, two l's. Piccirilli. (I still spell my own name out to people M-A-M-A like Mama T-as-in-Thomas A-S all the vowels are As.) And oh thank God he was good. He was friendly with my early writing friend Joi Brozek, another Long Islander. He reached out to people, not with avuncular advice or self-serving mentoring, but just good writer to good writer. He wrote fan letters to people nobody had ever heard of, which someone that good doesn't need to do for networking purposes.

Here's how good he was. A couple of years ago, I left a copy of The Coldest Mile on a bus in Seattle when Olivia and I in town for the Locus Awards. I had used my Virgin America boarding pass as a bookmark. I got a Facebook message from a stranger who found the book and said he'd like to send it back to me. It was a cheap mass market paperback, not the sort of thing anyone would miss or have a sentimental attachment to, but when this guy found the book, he started reading it, and was hooked. And he knew, because of the bookmark, that I hadn't finished and that I needed to. So he contacted me and mailed the book back to me at his own expense, then filled his Kindle with Tom Pic.

Here's how good he was. When the cancer came, a young relative of his launched an online fundraiser. She had no idea how much we loved her uncle Pic, and set the fundraiser goal to $500. It ended up being 4,823% funded.

Pic was too good for horror. He shifted, slowly but surely, to crime, often crime with a supernatural element or two. He struggled there, no longer The Man but obviously someone good enough to be The Man. He'd escaped the small, muddy, sump of Leisure paperbacks and the collector's press, sweaty asses and all, for the big time, and was struggling, but with his last couple of books he had found his footing commercially. He was too good to be dropped, too good not to give another chance with a hardcover, even in these days of Editor Spreadsheet. The Last Kind Words and The Last Whisper in the Dark were too aptly named, as along came cancer, and nearly ruin.

I don't want to overstate how close we were. We met once in person, only briefly, as in my hungry days I didn't travel much, and our email exchanges were mostly professional, only sometimes personal, but Pic was naturally just so friendly and supportive. When I started The Big Click it was really because of Pic and what he was doing. Of course he was the first writer I reached out to and the first to say yes. An instant, enthusiastic, utterly professional yes, of course I'll write you a column. He had to stop when the cancer came, but it looked like he was going to make it. He wrote me an email once, semi-shocked it seemed. While he was concentrating on his fight, two other horror writers of his generation had died suddenly. He asked me what he was still doing here.

He was being great, of course.

But cancer is pernicious. Pic was only given something like a 2 percent chance of survival the first time around, but he did it. The cancer was gone from his brain! But really, cancer is almost never gone, it is only mostly gone. There was a cold spot found in his brain again, recently, so recently that he had to announce that he was skipping the World Horror Convention where he was to be a guest of honor. That was just this spring. This morning, he died.

The world is a little colder now.