Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 38

Tuesday Quick Notes

I think Oliver finds my new novel scary. See?



You can buy it here. Supposedly, some orders actually will be processed via amazon as well.

The Last Weekend was a long story. Actually, four years ago yesterday I showed readingthedark my one-page synopsis for it, inspired by RJ Sevin's idea to have a George Romero-themed imprint. Too bad George Romero didn't like any of the book ideas Sevin solicited. Then it was off to the races with my agent, during the days of zombie novels as every third submission. Finally, Marc Gascoigne of Angry Robot looked at the sample—I'd approached him individually—and he suggested PS Publishing. I got a quick yes in December 2010, handed in the book in Sept 2011, and then of course the economy continued to be in the pits and small presses are always overburdened so the idea of a early 2013 release ended up becoming a late 2013 release (in time for the World Fantasy Convention!) and ultimately a March 2014 release.

Which is fine, of course. A WFC release would have slammed this expensive import right up against the release of my eight-dollar Love Is the Law, which is still widely available.

Oh boy, and today's Greek Independence Day! First thing, I have to get down to McDonald's to have a Spartan Shake. They're tinted blue and lots of people say it's just food coloring but I swear I can taste a little anise in the mix. Then off to the bar to have some blue-and-white beers, then I have to wear my KISS ME, I'M GREEK t-shirt with non-matching fustanella and get down to the parade and start fistfights when people shout at me, "Nice kilt! Go back to Scotland, fag!" Finally, in a stupor, I'll be buttonholed by some guy who is obviously not Greek telling me about he's pretty sure one of his great-great-grandmothers is from Crete. Ah, what a holiday!

In dayjob news, here's a teaser trailer for Edge of Tomorrow. The next full trailer hits at 10am. I'll come back and post it then:



I have no idea why trailers need trailers, but such is the world in which we live.

ETA: Aaaand, FULL TRAILER:

In other literary news...

I believe that this sack



contains my author copies of The Last Weekend.

I decided that I won't open it till I get home because I want pictures of me on the BART to be tweeted.

NEXT TO NOTHING—Keith Banner

He whispers, real sexy with closed eyes, smiling without showing any teeth: "Pepsi Edge. Pepsi Edge. Pepsi Edge."

—from "Queers Can't Hear"

Next To Nothing can mean a a number of things. It could be a reference to the Carveresque minimalism Keith Banner occasionally goes for in his stories of mostly younger queer working people. (Raymond Carver? More like Gaymond Carver, amirite?) Or it could refer to what these members of the neoliberal precariat own, or have to look forward to. In the title story "Next to Nothing", the narrator tells us, "I don't get sad." He's closing down a Ponderosa Steakhouse. Coffee and caffeine gum are his homebrew anti-depressants. He has a crush on his sister's loser husband. They like to get high together—"the Sick Fag and the Low-Achieving Husband." Neither of them has health insurance, we find out, after hubby tries to kill himself and is hospitalized. But "Next to Nothing" isn't an Issue Story or an examination of how The Other(ed) Half Lives—it's a breezy, conversational narrative.


Let's go hang out in the parking lot of the abandoned Wal-Mart and get high.

Most of the stories in Next to Nothing are. Mostly first-person narrators, working in stores and restaurants, eating at cheap family restaurants and getting hurt, filling their prescriptions at Walgreens, having sex during commercial breaks, trying to navigate domestic worlds dominated by angry straight women. There are few pleasures left in the world, but here's one people don't talk about much—coming home from work, frazzled and smelling like work, and actually being home. Home to get high, or watch TV, or have sex, or enjoy air conditioning and music, all without having to still be mentally at work thanks to one's laptop, or cell phone, or ambition to be in a band or an MMA fighter, or to get a 4000th Twitter follower. Banner's characters still struggle against the laws barring smoking in most workplaces and restaurants. There's rough stuff too; in one story a kid gets gay-bashed and in addition to being horrible, it's also terrible—the kid didn't even have a boyfriend.

Is that all? Why, do you need more? Some of the stories in this collection were previously published in literary journals and anthologies like Lodestar Quarterly and Keeping the Wolves at Bay: Emerging Writers—the milieu in Banner's stories are as foreign and strange to whomever reads those venues as post-human colony under a dome floating on the methane oceans of Titan are. They just assume without knowing that these stories are pitch perfect, and they are. "How To Get from This to This" spells out it all out though in the narrator's epiphany:

"This is the secret nobody ever tells you: there is so much happiness when you finally give in, a kind of happiness you can't imagine until you hit the very bottom. It's a magical pond you slip into headfirst, drowning quickly, though you take your time. There's quiet, and then there's not even quiet, It's just like that. And you're grateful."

There's a tiny revolution, right there. Carver and a generation of epigones would write about these existences as though they were lives of quiet desperation. But Banner's character here is happy. Most of them are happy, after a fashion. It is extremely difficult for realists not to write about sad people who have some sad realization like, "I am sad, and I guess my parents were as well. We're all sad, aren't we? Yes, yes we are."

Well, actually, we're not. Buy this book.

Radical Fiction?

Yesterday, I was part of an event, run by PM Press (the publishers of Sensation) on "radical fiction" last night. The idea was, that as the Anarchist Book Fair is tomorrow, people would be in town, and come.

Shockingly, people did not come:



Ultimately, there were five panelists and nine audience members, and that is if I include the spouse of a panelist. I guess the highlight is that my friends Sean and Sean came, as did some guy who reads this blog and his companion. So four out of nine came for me! Sold two, count 'em, two books as well.

My radical reading was to read this pan of my book from Publishers Weekly, followed by the first sentence of Love is the Law ("I am a fucking genius.") and the last sentence of Sensation ("We are.") inviting the audience to write their own mental novel to fill the hypothetical sixty-thousand word gap/opportunity space between those sentences. Radical!

Then there was a semi-interesting Q/A. Perhaps the Qs were more interesting than the As. I suppose I'm actually writing this blogpost to distance myself from some of the answers! There was an attempt to make a distinction between radical fiction (I brought up the idea of radical form vs. radical content) and socially conscious fiction*, which is what most of the other panelists were writing. And there was this idea presented that people are dumb/uneducated and/or simply don't respond to data or rational arguments, so the emotional appeals of fiction are more suitable for propagandizing. One panelist pretty wisely brought up the idea that small anarchist presses (or HUGE anarchist presses, like PM) aren't going to reach a mass audience—and that's why he also turned his book into a forty-minute one-man theater piece. Well, he was on the right track for a little while...

Anyway, I don't believe that people are dumb or uneducated or are immune to rational argument. I would say that people's experiences, rather than either emotional appeals or rational arguments, are what lead them to adopt various political positions. Few people become conservative or radical or whatever based only on some encounter with theory or ideas.

Happily, the conversation soon turned to sex, as there was a comment from the audience that successful radical fiction (Burroughs, Delany, etc.) often have a lot of sex in them. Correct! Though the radical examples were also mostly published prior to 1970. There's plenty of sex in regurgitated fanfiction such as Fifty Shades of Grey, after all. Sex may finally be exhausted as a taboo, or at least as a taboo that can become popular because of its radicalism. Housewives are reading about anal beads now; relatively few people are reading Delany's current sexualized novels about eating snot and dog semen. FOR SOME REASON.

Virtually everyone was writing genre fiction, or at least fiction with genre elements (e.g., a "love story"). So that question came up. I've always felt that the genres of speculative fiction have a high potential energy for radicalism, even if it manifests as extreme reaction. SF is by definition about something other than the status quo; even fantasies of hierarchy and divine rights and chosen ones almost always have a taste of fin de siècle about them—after the chosen one, the deluge. In Tolkien's terms, we're up to the Sixth Age of Man or something by now. And horror is all about the return of the repressed, which is necessarily a critique of repression. We never quite return to the status quo ante in these books, even if we wish to. Most of the others were interested in the underdog, for which noir is helpful genre, or were looking for a story arc in order to present politicized stories. Crime fiction is always good for this, as the plots are already set for the most part.

My own reason for writing radical fiction, whatever that is, is simply because it's what I find interesting. The potential audience is still fairly large—say, ten percent of the 2,882,955 people who voted for Ralph Nader for President in 2000 would be as good an estimate as anything. The problem, if there is one, is that the publishers interested in this material are not ones that can actually reach even ten percent of that ten percent: how do you find that 28,830 people who would really into a particular radical fiction title—and that hasn't already purchased their two books a year? Big publishers are often happy to sell thirty thousand copies of a trade paperback, but they do it by smearing eighty thousand copies across bookstores and hoping for the best. Small radical presses can't manage that, so if we end up with ten percent of that ten percent of that ten percent, we're doing pretty well.

So, haha, I'm doing pretty well. No wonder almost half the people at the event came out to see meeeee! Radical!



*Militant liberalism? Nostalgia for radicalisms past? Who even knows, man.

Lucius Shepard

I don't have much to say about Lucius Shepard except that he was always nice to me and I was sad to hear of his passing. He'd been ill for quite a while, and certainly didn't appear to be in the physical shape needed to bounce back from his illnesses. We met a couple of times, but mostly our acquaintanceship was online—he was a holy terror on the old Night Shade Books bulletin boards, back when bboards were a thing. (There was an early infestation of disgruntled would-be right-wing SF writers who just couldn't stand that Lucius a. was published frequently and b. knew a lot about Central American politics. Conspiracy! Bitches! Communism! You know the type...) I was very pleased to review his novel A Handbook of American Prayer during that brief time I was reviewing books for Spex, a German music magazine. It turned out that my review was the German review.

A few years later, I was very pleased when he agreed to look at my book Sensation, which he was happy to blurb. I was flipping through it yesterday in preparation for last night's event and thought to myself that I'd better get on FB to see how Lucius was doing as I hadn't seen an update lately. When I did get on, there was a private message from Robert Urell telling me that he had some news he didn't want me to find out from Locus...

One very interesting thing he wrote, which I've not seen mentioned in obits yet, is what would now be called a #longread—he had a great piece of reportage in Spin back when that magazine existed on paper, about the FTRA and hobo life in general. It was collected along with some rail fiction in Two Trains Running, which is is well worth seeking out. So get seeking if you can.

Art! And! Poetry!

So I have a poem—"Landmark (After Hitchcock)" in the second issue of Voices of Hellenism Literary Journal, and I arranged for my family to get a copy. (They're Greek, you know.) My sister reports back:

I walked with Buddy [the dog] to the mailbox & pulled the book & we went straight back to Dad. I showed it to him.
He tells me to put the rake away do we can go read poetry.
He's looking at it as he's walking to the house.

Pop: Why did they have to put a naked man on the back?
Me: It's art.
Pop: A naked woman is art; this is homosexuality.
Me: If a woman made the magazine she might prefer the naked man.

We go in.

Mom: Where'd you get that?
Pop: Teddie gave it to me. Read Nick's poetry.
Mom: Okay let me find it.
Pop: Stand on the table to read it.
Mom: No. Oh he's first!
Pop: Stand up and read it loud.
Mom: I'm not standing up. This is a long poem.
Pop: Read it loud.
Mom: * reads first line*
Pop: Oooohhhh.
Mom: * finishes poem*
Pop: That's right.

Dark Dungeons: A Poll

Have you seen the trailer for the film Dark Dungeons



...which is an adaptation of Jack Chick's seminal religious tract about the Satanic evils of paper-and-pencil role-playing games?



According to the FAQ associated with the film states that the movie is neither parody nor satire. Dark Dungeons is a faithful adaptation of the Christian comic—a warning against D&D and other games that lead to suicide, Satanic magic, the Necronomicon and worse!

This, apparently, is sufficient to get segments of greater nerdom up in arms over the imminent Burning Times that shall again engulf the RPG hobby. So now, a poll.

View Poll: Why Don't Nerds Understand What They Are Looking At?

Let me know what you think!

First review of THE LAST WEEKEND

...comes in from Seattle Geekly. Among other things, it says: This is definitely not a casual read. It’s only 224 pages, but seems to take more brain power than a typical zombie book. Again, maybe that was the point.

On the plus side, they found that there is an amazon link for the book, though I can't guarantee that orders there will be filled, depending on pre-orders and how quickly the book sells out from direct orders. Anyway, it is here.

Tuesday Quick Notes

I got the sig sheets for The Last Weekend last night. See?



You can pre-order the signed edition, or the more reasonably priced unsigned hardcover

Meanwhile, I was alerted to yet another Kickstarter offering pay-to-play tiers for publishing fiction and illustrations and intervened on Twitter. Here's the Storify: Mamatas Among the Shitbags: A Chummer Magazine Tale. Needless to say, if I see you in this fucking magazine, I shall be very cross with you.

White Man's March

Did you hear about the White Man's Marches scheduled all over the world for Saturday? Maybe, though you certainly didn't see any. This was the white supremacist version of slacktivism, and appeared mostly to exist on its own Twitter hashtag, where various Nazis, boneheads, and fools spewed their propaganda—often canned, occasionally even via spambot—to anti-racists using the march's publicity tags. Most "marches" were just individuals with banners or a sign snapping a picture in a public place and then quickly scuttling back under their rocks. Cincinnati managed a demonstration of ten fools, which is not really a surprise given how racist that city is, and the ongoing KKK presence there.

Among the many distressing and hilarious things about this "march" is the number of historical non-whites targeted for recruitment. It was even positioned on Saint Patrick's Day Weekend, to take advantage of what the organizers saw as an opportunity to intervene in a manifestation of white people on the streets. (Among the people I blocked on Twitter this weekend was someone with the word "Celtic" in his or her handle.)

It is interesting that both the march organizers and some of the anti-racists on Twitter conflated white supremacy with the minor-league grousing one finds on the Internet about Affirmative Action; the former hoped to provide a revolutionary spark to what it saw as widespread (I almost wrote "whitespread"!) discontent, the latter didn't quite seem to get that the WMM was a class apart from the usual rhetoric of privilege. Luckily, nothing really came of the event, but we need to develop some real anti-fascist politics if this sort of activity continues so openly.

For now though, Saint Patrick's Day is safe. So safe that for the tenth year running, I say...


Kiss me, I'm Irish!