Interview with Nick Mamatas

Shakespeare, the tech set, the publishing biz

I love reading works that riff on other works, so I was really excited to read Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, the latest novel from veteran writer Nick Mamatas. Out with Clash Books! Read his Wikipedia page! Nick has a great body of work and the admiration of many in the lit community. We had a back-and-forth over email where he shared his thoughts about the future for writers and readers, along with insights about his novel, in which the Caliban character is an ordinary (even extraordinary!) human, while his oppressors are mostly tech. Needless to say, this puts our friend Kalivas at a disadvantage.

In your Acknowledgments, you explain part of your motivation for meddling with The Tempest. Namely, the essay “Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare” by Marcos Gonsalez in LitHub and Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982). But your version of Caliban (Kalivas) is not a wholly sympathetic character who enacts a stark revenge against colonial overlords. Instead, you maintain a sense of murkiness. How did you feel about this character while writing him?

In the play, Caliban is amazing; he is supposedly sub-human, but of course he speaks with the same Shakespearean dialogue all the human characters do. So in a post-human moment, when there is one organic “free-range” human in a world of powerful cyborgs, what should he be like? He would see himself as subhuman in certain ways, and of course he also grew up in isolation with nothing but his mother’s machines and memory for company. But the machines tell him stories, even if he is so culturally isolated he sees any sort of emotional experience in media as a kind of pornography.

And yet he is human, fully human, with a sharp intellect and a strong body. In our world, he’d be some sort of celebrity scholar-athlete. So in the situation he is in, surrounded by superhuman sociopath tech bros, he has to be a little more careful, a little more thoughtful, and he has to tell himself the story of himself in order to find a way to succeed in being human.

I loved the irony of this version of Caliban being (a stronger version) of us, while the characters who see themselves as his superiors are posthuman. It’s disorienting to live during a time when we see machines expanding into every inch of human territory. At the same time, these machines have the potential to solve a wide variety of human problems. How does Kalivas! explore some of your own hopes and fears about the current state of technology?

I set Kalivas! on the Farallon Islands, which are a short if rocky boat ride away from San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area, ground zero for dot coms, apps, web3, NFTs, and now AI. One of the things I’ve noticed about the tech set is their abject view of the body. Soylent, Huel, and other meal-replacement drinks were sold in this ridiculous way: “You mean I have to set a fire in my house and lay a corpse next to it to stay alive?! Not anymore! I drink leaded goop!” And of course, in the old days, rich people would support museums and the symphony—but these days, a few bazillion bucks were invested in anime titty princess money and autogenerated cartoons of monkeys by this crowd, and other collections of pixels and information that only someone with attenuated sensory organs could enjoy. Even sex lives are managed via Google calendar and smart contracts. No more softballs games, just orgies with bleating strangers. So it’s pretty rough, frankly. The technology is secondary to the dead culture in its shadow. I’m thrilled to read that AI may be able to translate whale song or read charred papyri scrolls. But...write emails because that’s hard? Generate pictures of Yoda and Harry Potter sharing a milkshake with a heart-shaped crazy straw? C’mon, people! Do your own dirty work.

A crazy straw is always a nice touch. Yes, speaking of arts and entertainment, movies and TV shows (or as he calls them, “pornographies”) play an important role in Kalivas’s development. Since his mother dies when he’s so young and he’s on this abandoned island, the screen raises him. Tropes and stock characters inhabit his life in increasingly interesting ways (I don’t want to spoil anything!). This was both beautiful and terrifying to me. What are some of your thoughts on this?

If it was beautiful and terrifying, it worked! I started writing Kalivas! in late 2019, but really started focusing on it during the COVID shelter-in-place period. I’ve published enough books that I don’t need to finish a book in order to sell it...if I am patient. So it was a couple of years of rejections, and in that time, LLMs and “AI” art and video had emerged, so it made sense to me that Kalivas wouldn’t just have an archive of videos, but that the videos would potentially interact with him, if he knew how to get them talking.

I’ve also been online for a long time— since 1989. My first exposure to the internet was with tinyMUDS, a chat-based system that also suggested a kind of topology as there were different “rooms” one could traverse. I haven’t logged on to any in years, but they did inspire my posthuman spacecraft in my novella The Planetbreaker’s Son, and also the AI in Kalivas!. I always wondered, even when they were active, what a MUD would be like after almost everyone left. Would it still be running or slowly fall apart? Would the little virtual toys and objects and very primitivw” ‘bots on there keep on keepin’ on? (The answer is “No”, as it turns out, though these days you could run a MUD from your watch instead of stealing space from a university’s server.) But what if little AI programs, bundles of tropes and such, kept at it even after everyone was gone?

And of course, I grew up on screens. I was a TV kid, though now I hardly watch TV other than pro wrestling and streaming movies. My son is growing up with an ipad screen—so we put him in soccer and basketball, got him drum and guitar lessons. Anything to get away from screens! So perhaps in some way, Kalivas being raised by a screen is the least science fictional, least Shakespearian, and most realistic thing about him.

I googled tinyMUD, and I’m intrigued. So much lore has been developing online for longer than most of us appreciate! I wonder how a youth spent absorbing all these now-buried stories has affected our current sense of storytelling. And it’s interesting that our generation, raised on TV, fears the impact the current set of screens will have on the next generation. I don’t have kids, and I can only imagine all the fears involved. Do you think these kids are in more danger than we were?

I think so. In our era, screens were broadcast only, so we received corporate messages, leavened with psychologizing from non-profit forces—all aiming toward conformity or consumption (which is just conformity with dollars). So in a cartoon such as Dungeons & Dragons, the contrarian character of Eric was shown as being wrong one hundred percent of the time—only the collective could be right and the only obedience was the correct course of action. With deregulation, TV for kids was simply commercials. The show He-Man and the Masters of the Universe only had two plots: a new character (read: toy) is introduced and integrated into the setting, or the characters engage in a Trojan Horse scheme by hiding in a vehicle or device (toy) to enter some large building (toy) and carry out a rescue of some sort. Naturally, these shows would tag on some little message at the end, one not even integrated into the plot, to deflect criticism that they were just selling toys. So twenty minutes of selling toys, and ninety seconds of warning children that being molested, or littering, was bad.

The early internet was horizontal communication. People met one another on IRC, on TinyMUDs, various chat programs, later blogs, you name it. It was freaky and weird and of course there were dangers to being too online, such as convincing yourself that you were an elf or dragon. I wrote the first national news piece on the Otherkin phenomenon back in 2001. Interestingly, a few months later, after the terror attacks of 9/11, a number of these people who in August insisted that they were not human and actually belonged in and to fairyland, revealed themselves as patriotic, even jingoistic, Americans, and filled their blog posts with all sorts of flags and bald eagles with tears in one eye, as demands for the annihilation of whatever Middle Eastern or Central Asian country was on the news that morning.

Now, with social media, we have the worst of both worlds—haphazard horizontal communication controlled by a corporate algorithm and with tons of state interference. Corporations and even governments are communicating via “memes” and nobody can even bring themselves to be embarrassed by images of Donald Trump in Warhammer armor.

Interesting that all my examples are about using fantasy! Ah well, The Tempest is fantasy too...

That’s fascinating! I hadn’t heard of the Otherkin. I’d rather be a gnome cobbler than a regal elf, but I guess you don’t get a choice. To pan out a little, what’s your writing history like? Where did you come from, where are you going? How do you split your time between fiction and nonfiction? And while you’re at it, could you link us to some more of your work online?

I started calling myself “a writer without adjectives” recently. Or at least I did it once and got a grunt of recognition in response, so I’ll stick with it. I used to do a lot of journalism about digital culture, radical politics, etc. back when it was possible to do so. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it wasn’t all that difficult for a small magazine to pay a few hundred dollars and the larger ones fifty cents to a dollar a word. Then came the jab, cross, hook of the recession of April 2001, the events of 9/11, and the rise of Craigslist of all things. Tons of magazines started failing along with the economy, and it was very difficult to monetize the web during the dot.com bust. I lived right across the Hudson on 9/11 and flaming pieces of paper from the offices in the World Trade Center landed on my roof.

Over the next month, any number of magazines claimed that the checks they’d been waiting for were in the postal hub under the buildings, and so had to go out of business. Craigslist destroyed classified ad revenue and thus the alternative weekly papers I often wrote for. There were still the top-tier magazines, such as Vanity Fair or Esquire, but to be perfectly blunt I lacked the provenance to ever break in. Working-class background (father a longshoreman, mother a homemaker and then a cashier), immigrant family from a less-sexy country (Greece) plus a diploma from the local state university as a commuting student rendered me all-but-invisible to the upper echelons of New York despite me being a New Yorker born and raised.

Around the same time, I started selling short fiction to online science fiction/fantasy/horror magazines—from fifty cents a word to five, or even three! And fiction was far more competitive than non-fiction. I love genre fiction and especially short stories, but this market is also self-limiting. Why publish in non-paying literary journals? One reason is to demonstrate that you don’t need money, which ironically is what can open the doors to working with the larger big-money literary fiction imprints. Even the big SF/horror imprints are poor relations to their literary cousins. Genre/literary is often just a way to signal one’s class position. Me, I had to eat. Times were tough. I wasted years as a term-paper artist and was called “whorish” on NPR when my personal essay on the topic went viral. (I’ll say that “The Term-Paper Artist” has appeared in several textbooks since then, sometimes paying as much as $1000 for the reprint rights. So it ain’t all bad!) I got a day job in publishing, working with translators for Japanese novels and later, manga. Actually having a day job made me far more prolific as a novelist and anthologist as I didn’t have to chase short-form fast money (never good money!) to pay rent every month as a freelancer.

I also have an interest in the counterculture and independent publishing—that is, small publishers interested in stuff too good for the mainstream, not the “indie” publishing of putting poor imitations of commercial novels up on Amazon for ninety-nine cents—and had a little underground cred. My first novel, Move Under Ground, which combined Kerouac and Lovecraft, was widely reviewed in genre circles, in alternative papers and zines, and in the occasional avant-garde journal. Not too many books were reviewed in both Fangoria and American Book Review, but MUG was. It didn’t sell very many copies, but like the Velvet Underground’s first album—almost nobody bought it, but everyone who did started a band—everyone who read it either became a writer, or got a job in publishing, or started a small press. Twenty years later, I can still get published partially thanks to people who read that book or my once-popular Livejournal. (Yes, this is all a roundabout way of describing how old I am.)

And then there is the Japanese stuff—I can’t say I’m a huge Nipponphile, unlike many of my co-workers. I ended up working in the field of translated fiction and now manga by accident. With a friend, I edited a translated Korean text about the thrilling Gwangju Uprising and the subsequent massacre, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age. Between that and my Greek-American background, I have a knack for “fixing” English translated from other languages.

About fifteen years ago, I got very interested in the noir/confessional underground fiction and started writing crime stories, one of which got into Best American. My novel I Am Providence combines crime and horror (Lovecraft again!) and the personal-confessional and that novel was in its small cult way a hit. I started co-editing a series called Outspoken Authors for the anarchist publisher PM Press. So: journalism, translation, science fiction/horror, crime, “underground” sensibilities, radical politics, and the very occasional comic book script. Better to be a writer without adjectives.

A lot of my stories and essays are online, though the internet can be forgetful and links rot and die. One I was pleased with appeared in ONE, an annual publication of a single short story. You can read “The Net” on the net!

Interesting! The publishing business is hard to understand, and it’s changed so much. Do you think it will become increasingly difficult for people to support themselves through writing and editing?

It changes with the economy and how publishing works. So Edgar Allan Poe, despite his genius and hustle, could never make a real living as a writer and editor because when he was active the American publishing industry was simply too small to support anyone full-time. By the 1880s, however, there were huge numbers of magazines, because they became easier and cheaper to mail, and there were plenty of writers doing well—even if most of them have been forgotten.

Same with the twentieth century. Short stories in major magazines paid as well as film scripts do today...and then television became popular. Pulp fiction writers could do okay too, if they wrote a couple books worth of stories every year, and perhaps a pornographic “stroke” book or two as well. Then came VHS and even better-slash-worse, home-video cameras. Journalism and culture writing hung on until the twenty-first century. However, today there are plenty of writers who are doing very well, and many of them are self-publishing. The Kindle solved the distribution problem for self-publishing as there is no need for bookstores for these authors, and Kindle also solved the quality problem by allowing for much lower prices. So one can write a book (or, more realistically, four or five books a year!) that is only one tenth as good as something by a best-selling author, but sell it for a thirtieth of the price! So as a ratio of quality to price, someone’s garbage 99-cent novel is a great bargain!

You just have to invest money rather than receive money, write very quickly, write in the “best-seller” style (which many failures also do), and spend your days analyzing sales and altering your prices in order to please the algorithm. So if you work the equivalent of three full-time jobs, maybe you can be a Kindle superstar until Amazon changes the rules again or the readers move on to another genre.

I know a large number of full-time writers and editors working with the traditional trade publishing industry or in periodicals. Editors, of course, generally just have day jobs in this or that editorial department, and the pay is relatively low and expenses high as publishing is centered in New York, and secondarily Boston, but work is work. For writers, we should probably unpack the question a bit. Yes, you can make a living writing, absolutely! But what is much harder is to do what people often mean when they ask the question: “Can I experience an upper middle-class lifestyle by writing the books I daydream about writing and doing nothing else?” Yes, but that is much more unlikely to happen. It’s a lightning strike. Plenty of full-time writers work in technical communications or write speeches or teach not-fun college classes such as freshman composition or self-publish instaromance on the side under pseudonyms or dance and sing for their suppers on Patreon or Substack or or or...

And then there are those that do mostly just write the fiction or whatever else they wish to write. Many of them benefit from partner privilege—lots of full-time writers are just not otherwise employed—or an inheritance in the form of a home without a mortgage. The rest make as much money as their neighbors. Those neighbors are Walmart cashiers, certified nursing assistants, security guards, non-union factory workers, medical office clerks, warehouse employees, Starbucks people, you name it. The median individual income for employed people in the US is $40,500 a year. Can someone make that writing and editing? Yes, as long as they are prolific, write all sorts of things from books to newspaper articles to substack posts to comic book scripts, or if they edit on a freelance basis for all sorts of clients or have a job at a small publishing house or magazine or newspaper. They likely will not have very good health insurance in the US, but neither do their neighbors.

The difference is that for a few days a year, that writer might give a reading at a bookstore, or be a guest at a conference or convention, or give a talk at the local public library, and can seem to be famous.

This is a great overview! You have a broad sense of the industry. Yeah, on this subject, I always think of Midnight Cowboy, where Joe comes to the conclusion - “I ain’t no kind of hustler. I mean, there must be an easier way of making a living than that.” Plus, if one writer basically wins the lottery, it does nothing to help the vast majority who will continue to struggle, so it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. But anyway! Do you feel a sense of optimism in general about the state of things? If so, where does it come from?

During COVID, when everyone was doing Zoom events, I watched a panel of “anarchist science fiction writers”, which meant they were anarchists and their fiction was ideologically anarchist as well. At the end, they all decided that they wrote in order to give their readers “hope.” And I thought to myself, Hmm, I don’t do that at all. So I telephoned a friend, who is an anarchist thriller writer and she too thought the hope thing was silly—she said she wrote so that her audience could “be prepared.” And I liked that better; it has the ring of truth to it. So, in proper anarchist fashion, I shoplifted it, the whole idea, from her. I write so people can be prepared!

I am pretty optimistic. The political situation, the climate situation, etc. is very chaotic, but we’re all political and social agents, and panic never serves anyone’s end but the enemy’s. Writing and reading fringe SF isn’t going to save the world; if either could, the world would have been saved decades ago. I think we can be political and social agents, and even hopeful about it, without fetishizing “hope”, which is what mass media does. Inevitably in a Hollywood film there will be something about hope as the story breaks into the third act, often with the word entering the dialogue explicitly since producers often just skim scripts. Even in pro wrestling, there is a “hope spot”, in which the wrestler fighting from underneath gains or regains the initiative. And don’t get me started on “hopepunk”, which is usually neither. But...be prepared!

What would you like to be asked? Please answer!

Why did you write a play?

Well, after a couple of decades a writer who is fairly prolific decides either to write a children’s book to please one’s grandchildren, or writes a play to have something to do in the evening. I have no grandchildren, and I like going to a local 45-seat black box theatre under a local pizzeria to see plays, so I was inspired. “The Failure of the Century” is a one-act—H. P. Lovecraft meets “A Christmas Carol”—I wrote last year during a playwrighting workshop I took. It was an interesting experience to be a student again after teaching many workshops myself. The other students were very confused as to whether or not the story was a dream (who cares?!), and one even asked me if I’d met Lovecraft (1890-1937). A change is as good as a rest, and I am mercenary enough to choose a theme I’m already associated with so I won’t have to start in a new field at the very very bottom—the good news is that I have a staged reading on the London stage happening on December 13th, 2025, and I hope I can get a full production sometime. I’ll also be producing a chapbook with the play and an essay and Leon Trotsky, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lovecraft, and me.

The London stage sounds very fancy, and it isn’t just a 45-seat black box in the basement of a pizzeria...the venue is a fifty-seat black-box in the attic of a pub! Baby steps, baby steps...