Nick Mamatas Interview
In SF too, my formative experiences were slicker. I didn’t read the digests or Heinlein as a kid, but I did end up with a subscription to Omni magazine as an eight year-old. They advertised on TV at the time, and my grandfather’s sister got me the sub as a Christmas present. Luckily, the ads didn’t mention that the magazine was full of deviant sex, weird science, and mind-blowing fiction. My early inspirations were Omni stories like “God Is An Iron,” “Outer Space Rock-n-Roll,” and “Amanda And The Alien.”
Starting from that base, I think my stuff can blend in to a lot of different markets, because people can read satire more easily than SF that “really means it”. A lot of zinesters actually like SF, especially the gonzo stuff, like Philip K. Dick.
The “mainstream” is an amorphous borderland. Is stuff like McSweeney’s (not that I like McSweeney’s) your standard contemporary American realism? No. But it is in the mainstream, even though its stuff takes formal chances and examines oddball subjects and characters. I do that too. I’m not one of these fringy “slipstream” or “interstitial” types, I write in the Lakatosian hardcore of my genre.
I just am not sure what that genre is yet.
Nicholas Kaufmann: Your new collection, 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once (Library Empyreal), is an unusual hybrid: It alternates between short stories and selected articles/personal essays you wrote for places like Wide Angle NY and The Village Voice. What made you want to mix fiction and non-fiction in a single volume? What has the feedback been like?
Nick Mamatas: Harlan Ellison is a writer whose non-fiction I enjoy more than his fiction. I had the experience, reading the abortive White Wolf omnibus edition of all his stuff, of opening the books at random and not knowing whether I was reading truth or lies for the first few paragraphs. I wanted to offer the same effect with the collection.
Also, the fiction and non-fiction are connected. Historically, SF is not supposed to be personal, that was considered “cheating” for a long time. But the seeds of the potential futures in the stories can be found in the personal anecdotes, and I wanted that to come across, too.
One thing that amazed me is the number of people who read collections in order. I always read from shortest piece to longest. Even though the pattern is non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction, a number of readers still expressed that interesting confusion when starting a new piece, not picking up the pattern until they were nearly done.
As far as who likes what, geeks like the stories better, and neurotic women like the essays better. I haven’t sussed out any other patterns of preference yet.
