Nick Mamatas's Blog, page 5

A Desperate Plan to Save 2017!

Minor in the grand scheme of things, but if Trump is driving you to both distraction and to drink, you should pre-order my latest book, the anthology Mixed Up: Cocktail Recipes (and Flash Fiction) for the Discerning Drinker (and Reader), co-edited with Molly Tanzer.

Coming this October, with:


Maurice Broaddus "Two Americans Walk Into a Bar" (Pimm's Cup)
Selena Chambers "Arrangement in Juniper and Champagne" (French 75)
Libby Cudmore "One More Night To Be Pirates" (Dark 'N' Stormy)
Gina Marie Guadagnino "In The Sky She Floats" (Manhattan)
Liz Hand "Eat the Wyrm" (margarita)
Cara Hoffman "I've Been Tired" (Negroni)
Jarett Kobek "Wes Anderson Uses A Urinal" (champagne cocktail)
Carrie Laben "Take Flight" (aviation)
Carmen Machado "There and Back Again" (corpse reviver #2)
Nick Mamatas "The End of the End of History" (vodka martini)
Jim Nisbet "Mint Julep Through the Ages" (mint julep)
Benjamin Percy "Bloody at Mazie's Joint" (Bloody Mary)
Dominica Phetteplace "Gin is Stronger Than Witchcraft" (orange blossom)
Tim Pratt "But You Can't Stay Here" (fin de siècle)
Robert Swartwood "Dinner with the Fire Breathers" (Smoking Bishop)
Jeff VanderMeer "Marmot Season" (Moscow Mule)
Will Viharo "Hot Night at Hinky Dinks" (mai tai)


plus many more cocktail recipes!

March + Punch

We went to the Women's March in Oakland. I put up some pics on a rare Facebook post (a number in the comments). Check them out here.

I am a big fan of punching Nazis and was very pleased to see Richard Spencer punched. The best remix is here, even if it may accidentally lead to a Phil Collins comeback.

The Most Important Thing in the World

My 2010 poem, originally published on this LJ, has new life as a one-post Wordpress, since people often ask for it. Under the Trump regime, I'm likely to be asked for it even more often, so here it is:

The Most Important Thing in the World

Inauguration Links

Over at the Jewish Mexican Literary Review, I have produced a shopping and lifestyle guide for the Trump years. Check out Consume!


You may have seen the inexplicably viral poem written for Trump's inauguration. (Yes yes, I know it's not an inaugural poem. I've not seen one person who thought it was.) You may not have seen Scottish author Hal Duncan's poetical response, which also rated a Vimeo reading:



Good luck out there!

What year is it?

Did lots of traveling with little ability to do anything but tweet. Anyway, what year will 2017 be?

It'll be the year where everything will be worse than you think.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is an awful movie receiving good reviews and kudos from fans because it is much like fan-fiction or a role-playing game in the visually spectacular setting of the series. Fans are most of all always fans of themselves. It is a marginally better film than the awful The Force Awakens but only because of how it ends.


And how does it end?


Oh, everyone dies.


So! The crux of this film is that the bizarre design flaw in the Death Star, so ably exploited by Luke Skywalker in the 1970s, was actually an act of sabotage by an unwilling weapons designer. He, some fifteen years after being snatched up by the empire to build the damn thing, slips a message to a pilot who is keen to leave the Empire and help the Rebellion. The idea is to send the message to a radical splinter group led by some asthmatic guy who lives on a desert planet (presumably to help his asthma?). But that the message got out—though not the content of the message—is also known to the mainline rebellion, so they bust the designer's grownish sexy daughter out of sexy prison so she can talk to the radical rebel and maybe get to hear the message, and anyway, this takes a whole lot of time and visits to four or five different planets or space stations and the message is basically, "Stick a banana in the tail pipe. For more information on the tail pipe, check out the big library on Well-Known Popular Library World. PS: you don't have a library card."

The problems are obvious. Why is the information not in the message in the first place? As Well-Known Popular Library World is well-known, why didn't the rebel alliance get spies in there—they have spies and even reprogrammed Empire robots—years ago, in case the Empire was working on something interesting, like, say, a Death Star? And of course, my old favorite, why—if spaceships can communicate to planets instantly and even while in hyperspace—is everyone using space-bike messengers to send hard copies of stuff across the galaxy?

Anyway, it gets worse. Chickie-poo and Rebel Spy gather a bunch of helpers to go to Well-Known Popular Library World. They find a blind guy who is not quite a Jedi, but who is very much every fortune cookie cliche; another guy who carries a big jar of laser juice on his back; a reprogrammed Imperial robot who is constantly under suspicion by the rebels thanks to his design and colors and constantly being asked to provide his bona fides by Empire stooges thanks to him being out of place (someone who raises a red flag with everyone he encounters—definitely the droid you want on a mission of infiltration); the upset pilot; and a bunch of others. There's some nutty business where most of these guys have a big fight against scrubs and then get arrested and put into the sort of prison where nobody is searched for lock picks and you can definitely stick your whole arm between the bars and mess around with stuff because nobody is watching either. But since even the official sexy prison Chickie-poo was in allowed for mascara pencils and collagen lip treatments, there's probably some implied plot point being made.

Oh, and papa gets killed off, thanks to a bizarre imperial HR protocol where people have meetings outside in the rain. In fact, one of the major themes of Rogue One is that imperial human resources is a total mess. The heavy in this film is basically a middle-management type who really really wants to secure a promotion, but he can't, because he's a dick who has hit the limits of his competence. He gets to meet Darth Vader at his house, and interrupts him during his daily hot tub session, so it doesn't go well. (Vader is a lot more sarcastic here than he is in the original trilogy.) It's like someone skimmed the Wikipedia article for Eichmann in Jerusalem and was like, "Bam! That's a character now!"

The radical asthmatic guy is no help because for no particular reason he decides that he's tried or running and/or fighting so he just stands there as his city gets Death Starred to...well, not rubble, as it already was rubble. And not sand, because it already was sand. But anyway, he dies because I presume the film only booked Forest Whitaker for five days and so all his scenes take place in the same room.

If all of this sounds nonsensical, it is. And it's worse than it sounds as there is exactly ONE type of beat in this film. One or more of the goodies are cornered and menaced somehow and then suddenly the menacing baddie is attacked by someone right off screen-left. This happens at least a dozen times in the film. It'll be part of a drinking game with the Blu-ray comes out, I guarantee.


So then the movie picks up a bit as it goes from random index cards filled with ideas for scenes (and some that just read "Character Development Here? Maybe???") to...

Not to be spoilery or anything, but ROGUE ONE is basically about the difficulty of checking a book out of a poorly organized library.

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) December 20, 2016

But this isn't just ANY poorly organized library. See, there needs to be a switch thrown, and also another switch thrown, and a door opened, and then closed, and a ladder climbed, and a pair of waldoes to be manually operated, and as luck would have it, the particular book is named for Chickie-poo's childhood nickname, "Stardust." As in what the Death Star turns planets into. That's nice. Thanks, papa.

So, Chickie-poo. Interesting thing: doesn't need to be in the film. Doesn't really do anything—the message from her father wasn't sent to her, but to someone else. The Spy guy does most of the work of building the team, and her own speech to the rebellion makes little sense—she was never a part of the rebellion, and has no political reputation. (There's also no reason for the rebellion not to invade Library World before it's too late, so no need for a speech.) The pilot does most of the piloting and most of the moral hand-wringing, and even utters the titular line. This film has a titular line!



Chickie-poo doesn't even shoot Mr. Banality of Evil at the end. The Rebel Spy does it instead.

There's a lot of space battling and explosions and whatnot, and a lot of stunt work, and even the sort of obstacles that were mocked in Galaxy Quest nearly twenty years ago. The big battles are all understood as a distraction to allow the book with the plans to be checked out of the library without a library card. And the battles are a distraction, but for the audience—there is no third act. The action and the stakes do no rise toward a climax. Rogue One is Freytag's Trapezoid.

And then everyone starts to die. Kung Fu dies after throwing a switch. His friend dies after getting sad, and not even in the obvious fun way—shoot him in his barrel of laser juice! (Did I mention that his laser rifle is also pump action?) The robot gets blown to hell while guarding a locked door that doesn't even matter because the bad guy just takes an elevator to get to the Important Place anyway. The pilot dies after fucking around a bit.

Oh, then the Empire decides to blow up its own library, which given the events of the film we must believe contains originals of all sorts of important documents of which there are zero other copies. But it's vitally important because Chickie-Poo and Rebel Spy need to die too.

Darth Vader shows up and kills a bunch of scrubs who are passing along the compressed file of the book like it's a track and field baton. He just misses it and certainly expends zero effort afterwards on either trying to find out what was in the book or what the widely known and fairly closely explained flaw in the Death Star actually is. And he certainly doesn't just go apeshit with the Death Star to blow up as many rebel planets as possible before the plans are widely distributed. (In this film, the Death Star can zip into hyperspace like any other ship.)

There's been a lot of talk online about whether there are romantic feelings between the Chickie-poo and Rebel Spy. The evidence is primarily that they are a man, and a woman, both fuckable-looking, and in a film. They make it out to the beach, and the sky is bright and yellow, as if the sun is beginning to set. In another sort of film, they'd head off into the sunset. In this one, the sunset heads into them as it's the big blast from the Death Star.

Why did people like this movie? For the same reason they liked various bad iterations of Star Trek, and the tie-in novels of any number of science fiction "properties", and other junk. It's a military story with lots of spectacle, and some pretend profundity because everyone died, even the *sniff sniff* protagonists. It's what comic book companies sell to tweens by stamping "Mature Content" on the covers of their magazines. It's full of phony sacrifices made in order to carry out easily made decisions, and with the "cool" sort of characters they can whip up in twenty minutes with a handful of dice. Greasy kid stuff, but in 3D!

Year In Review

On the last day of 2015, I tweeted:

May 2016 finally be the year you get what you deserve.

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) January 1, 2016

Well. Sorry about that, everyone.

My own year was mixed. The most important thing that happened to me was the death of my dog Kazzie halfway through the year, after fifteen and a half years of life with her. (She even predated this journal.) The last few months were a strain of constant urination and forcing her to eat pills. We nearly put her down on May 1st, but she rallied during our farewell trip to a park. When she stole my son's bagel and ran off with it, I knew she wanted more life. And she got another good three weeks, and the one terrible week, and we had to put her to sleep, finally, on June 1st.

Other than that, my son became very chatty and interesting this year. He was Spider-Man for Halloween and bravely walked up to doors to ring their bells and ask politely for candy.

I released two novels this year: the first US edition of The Last Weekend and I Am Providence. TLW got a very nice review in The San Francisco Chronicle on New Year's Eve, which I foolishly took as a bellwether for the whole year. TLW also was released as an audiobook by Audible.com. IAP came out in August and was widely reviewed, including starred notices in Booklist and Shelf Awareness. It was reprinted three weeks after release, and is my most successful novel thus far.

I wrote a lot of short fiction this year, but only three stories were published:

"Every Ghost Story is a Ghost Story", a noir about a secret society, appeared in the electronic-only anthology The Beauty of Death in July.

"The Great Armored Train", about Trotsky's Red Army train and an encounter with the supernatural during the Polish-Bolshevik war, appeared in issue #35 of Dark Discoveries in July.

"Tom Silex, Spirit-Smasher", a realist story about the inheritor of the copyright to an obscure pulp hero, appeared in issue #18 of New Haven Review (opens PDF) in November.

There was also "Last Night at Manscape", a pornographic mythic story, which will be officially published next May in the anthology Friends of Hyakinthos. It was distributed privately to members of Lethe Press's Patreon as an award in August.

Three stories were reprinted:

Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep was adapted as an audio podcast by Pseudopod in April.

Der Kommisar's In Town was published in #46 of Nightmare in July.

I also received a Russian-language edition of the anthology Lovecraft's Monsters, which includes a translation my story "That Of Which We Speak When We Speak of the Unspeakable", in October.

Some editorial bits of note:

I was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Anthology for my day job book, the crime/SF hybrid Hanzai Japan, which was nice.

Also on the day job front, we released an e-mostly mini-anthology called Saiensu Fikushon 2016, which you should totally pick up. Paperback copies were available at World Con in Kansas City, and also at a con in Japan this autumn, but otherwise it is ebook only.

I did some anti-editing by ending my crime fiction magazine The Big Click after three years, in March. Honestly, after Tom Piccirilli, who so inspired me and the magazine, died last summer, I had mentally checked out of the zine anyway. The archive is still up, so check it out.

But crime fiction did play a role in my other editorial project. I curated the initial seed of crime/mystery/detection stories for Great Jones Street, an app for short fiction. I corralled over 100 writers and nearly 300 stories in my assigned genres between August and October, which meant many happy writers getting small checks and me getting a pretty big one. (I also had three SF stories reprinted on the app itself, but chose not to count them above because apps still seem strangely surreal to me.)

Two pieces of non-fiction appeared.

"The People of Horror and Me" was the H-Word column for #48 of Nightmare Magazine in September.

A personal essay about fishing as a child on Long Island, called "Unsound", appeared in the non-fiction anthology Taut Lines: Extraordinary True Fishing Stories in August. So far, the book is only available in the United Kingdom, but it was nice to flex my creative non-fiction muscles again, and the volume is a handsome one.

I also spent this year as President of the Mystery Writers of America's Northern California branch, and helped reinvigorate the moribund chapter by holding meetings on search and rescue dogs, public libraries, and writing historical mysteries, and by having a booth at the Bay Area Book Fest. I also moderated a panel on fantasy fiction at the same festival.

I took a lot of airplanes this year and went to a number of conferences: AWP in LA, Edgar Award Weekend in New York, ICFA in Florida, Locus Award Weekend in Seattle, Worldcon in Kansas City, and Bizarrocon in Portland. I hope to take many fewer airplanes in 2017.

I did not blog much at all. Most of my "Hey there, look at this dumb thing I found!" type commentary migrated over to a friends-mostly Facebook account. I did break 5000 followers on Twitter if you are desperate for more me. Between my day job, which I can not blog about, and my son, which I choose not to blog about, and my spouse, who does not wish to be blogged about, I've simply had little reason to blog. I've also been very busy—I've written 5000 and 10000 words of two new novels this year, finished about twelve short stories, taught at three different places, and had a full slate of books to edit at work as well. I've gotten to the point where I can do fifty pull-ups and fifty burpees in twenty minutes as a morning warm-up, and my blood pressure is down to 110/60. Livejournal is on a low ebb, of course, but I still check in as a reader regularly. To those still putting up diary entries every few days, I salute you and wish I could join you.


Next year will see the release of Mixed Up, a hybrid fiction anthology/cocktail book I am editing with Molly Tanzer, and stories in several anthologies, mostly small press stuff, so I won't name them yet unless they really come out in 2018 or 2019 or 20Never. My first book, Kwangju Diary, will be re-released by The May 18th Memorial Foundation, and distributed for free, in perpetuity.

Like many people, I found politics fascinating and revolting in equal measure this year. I take a long-term view of events as best I can, but the worrisome thing about the phrase "This too shall pass" is that it ultimately refers to life as we know it as much as it refers to anything else.

So good luck out there, everyone, and stay strong.

Five Books I Loved This Year, And One I Hated

The now traditional list of five books I read this year that I loved, plus one I really disliked. These are books I read this year, not necessarily ones that came out this year (though several did).

Stay Crazy by Erica Satifka. I blurbed this one! "Had Philip K. Dick lived through riot grrrl and the collapse of the America's industrial economy, STAY CRAZY would be his memoir. Erica Satifka is a prophet." I think this book was hilarious, telling, and raw. It definitely worked hard to avoid crazy-person-is-magic cliches at the same time. Plus, after the largely unexpected election result, the United States will become more and more like the town in Stay Crazy. I'd said that Satifka was a prophet before Trump won the election—I hate to be a prophet myself, but...

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn. I loved the Patrick Melrose books a few years ago, and this...was not the same. Lighter, but funnier and a real page-turner, which one would not expect from the theme of the jurors of a major UK literary award and the ridiculous writers whose books are in contention. St. Aubyn casually shows off his utter mastery of everything by producing several paragraphs from this or that book, like a commercial thriller and that the supposedly gritty Glasgow realism of a novel called wot u starin at. I usually read during my commute, but sometimes my phone is more interesting. Not this time, it was book book book, to the point where one day I forgot the book on my desk and realized it as the train was pulling out of my station. I got off at the next stop, walked back to my office, and collected the book to read.

The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band by Michelle Cruz Gonzales. I don't even like Spitboy all that much.


They weren't great.

And the book, a slim volume, read like a series of blog posts. But the story was still immensely compelling to me, as was the look at an already forgotten moment in music history. I do like a memoir that chugs along, with political asides about race and gender and music and the usual. This is a good one of those. It was ultimately much greater than the sum of its parts, perhaps because the writing was effortless and read like reportage rather than memoir. Think of it as an extremely interesting conversation with someone you just met who did a lot of fun, and some scary, things as a teen while you were just sitting home playing video games during those years.

Heart of the Original by Steve Aylett. If you haven't ready Aylett you're...like most people. Too bad! I think he's a wonderful writer, a bon mot generation machine. Heart is non-fiction, a work about creativity. Or rather, it is a work that attempts to rewire your mind in order to help remove the obstacles to creativity you face: society, countercultural ideas, bipedalism, that sort of thing.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. Sometimes a writer deserves to be a best-seller. Flynn, she dirty. Man, this is a rough book, and creepy as shit. It was the first book I read this year. Due to a problem with a SuperShuttle, I ended up accompanying my wife and kid to the airport via the Long Island Railroad after spending New Years with my folks, only to get right back on the train and travel two hours back out. My phone was dead, so I bought this book as it was The Only Acceptable Title at the Walgreens across from the Jamaica LIRR station. I would have missed my stop, but it was on the end of the line. Flynn is a master of punching you into unconsciousness, and then when you wake up you realize that she sliced off your nose and replaced it with your toe, forever, while you were out. A year later, I still remember every horrifying moment.


And now...

Diary Of An Oxygen Thief by Anonymous. Molly Tanzer once told me, "All your favorite books are the same—some asshole is a wreck for 80,000 words." That's accurate. But I still didn't like this book, about some asshole from Ireland who emigrates to the US, works in advertising, is a wreck even after he stops drinking, and meets a girl who makes fun of him a bit at some gallery opening. There was a lot of rhetorical build-up from the narrator about a whole lot of nothing. I have fond memories of worse relationships than the ones this guy is whining about so giddily. It's the worst example I've ever encountered of my favorite book; it's what people who are very suspicious of books about the low life think books about the low life are actually like. As the President-elect likes to say: Sad!

MIXED UP table of contents reveal

Here is the complete table of contents for the fiction element of MIXED UP: COCKTAIL RECIPES (AND FLASH FICTION) FOR THE DISCERNING DRINKER (AND READER), which I am co-editing with libations editrix Molly Tanzer, for a release by Skyhorse in October 2017.

(n.b. There are more cocktail recipes in the book than there are stories.)

Maurice Broaddus "Two Americans Walk Into a Bar" (Pimm's Cup)
Selena Chambers "Arrangement in Juniper and Champagne" (French 75)
Libby Cudmore "One More Night To Be Pirates" (Dark 'N' Stormy)
Gina Marie Guadagnino "In The Sky She Floats" (Manhattan)
Liz Hand "Eat the Wyrm" (margarita)
Cara Hoffman "I've Been Tired" (Negroni)
Jarett Kobek "Wes Anderson Uses A Urinal" (champagne cocktail)
Carrie Laben "Take Flight" (aviation)
Carmen Machado "There and Back Again" (corpse reviver #2)
Nick Mamatas "The End of the End of History" (vodka martini)
Jim Nisbet "Mint Julep Through the Ages" (mint julep)
Benjamin Percy "Bloody at Mazie's Joint" (Bloody Mary)
Dominica Phetteplace "Gin is Stronger Than Witchcraft" (orange blossom)
Tim Pratt "But You Can't Stay Here" (fin de siècle)
Robert Swartwood "Dinner with the Fire Breathers" (Smoking Bishop)
Jeff VanderMeer "Marmot Season" (Moscow Mule)
Will Viharo "Hot Night at Hinky Dinks" (mai tai)

Pre-order and cover reveal soon!

Home again

I went to BizarroCon in Portland, and then New York for a week, and boy is my brain tired.

While I was gone, this happened. That is, my first book publication, Kwangju Diary, which fell out of print a decade ago, is being republished in South Korea by the May 18th Memorial Foundation to be distributed freely in perpetuity to English-language readers who wish to learn more about the Kwangju Uprising.

Monies were exchanged. Oh boy were they.