Fantastic Metropolis

Author Nick Mamatas burst onto the radar in 2002 with a surprise Bram Stoker Award nomination. Now, with the release of his new collection, 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once: Stories and Essays, Mamatas is back in full force with his unique brand of mind-bending speculative fiction and provocative personal essays. I tied the normally reclusive Mamatas to a chair, threatened him with an electric drill, and got him talking.

Nicholas Kaufmann: Your novella, Northern Gothic (Soft Skull Press), was published in 2001 and wound up a Bram Stoker Award nominee. But before that, I’d never heard of you. When did you start writing and getting published?

Nick Mamatas: Oh yeah? I never heard of you either, Baldo! Anyway, let’s see. I started writing for a zine run by a pair of liberal comic shop workers in my hometown when I was 17. It was called The Long Island Alternative and was actually fairly tame for a zine—no clip art collages or punk rock manifestos. Well, except for my stuff. My first essay, “Schmucks for World Peace” was an attack on political correctness and middle-class guilt from a position further left than the PC types. A year later, the neo-conservative movement whipped PC up into their all-purpose bête noir to replace the Commies.

I did a bunch of weirdo stuff in the zine scene and for the underground college paper Brainfood, and then wrote some scholarly material in grad school. I started writing seriously when my friend Kapsu Seol and I translated and wrote substantial amounts of new material for the first English edition of Kwangju Diary, a first-hand account of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising against the military government of South Korea. That was published by the UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series in 1999. I occasionally still get mail addressed to “Professor Mamatas” by would-be colleagues who don’t bother to read biographical notes.

At about the same time, I started reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror again thanks to a girlfriend who had lots of paperbacks around the house, and soon I started writing it while also working for Disinfo.com as a writer. I wrote a few stories in 1997 and 1998, and got all the crap out of my system. I also wrote a bad novel. In 1999, I started getting serious and put myself and my own neuroses and interests into stories, rather than just writing what I thought nerds might like. I sold my first story, “You Life, Fifteen Minutes From Now,” six weeks later.

My first published story was published by Talebones in 2000. Northern Gothic was only my second published, but third or fourth sold, piece of fiction. It actually has its roots in one of the shitty 1998 stories. I expanded it into Northern Gothic after a rejection letter from John Pelan described the story as “the first chapter of a kick-ass novel.”

Nicholas Kaufmann: You’ve had short stories published in genre magazines like Talebones and Strange Horizons, but also mainstream glossies like Razor and well-respected underground zines like The Whirligig. How were you able to cross over to these non-genre markets without changing your style or subject matter?

Nick Mamatas: Well, my primary concerns in writing fiction are social satirical rather than scientific or horrific. A lot of people in our generation cut their teeth on Stephen King and The Hills Have Eyes. I light my candle to Ira Levin, and my childhood “scary movies” were the adaptations of his books.