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.

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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.

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.

Nicholas Kaufmann: How did you manage to land self-proclaimed literary teen idol Zoe Trope, author of Please Don’t Kill the Freshman (HarperTempest), for the introduction to 3000 MPH?

Nick Mamatas: Actually, I think the HarperCollins mass mind-control apparatus proclaimed Zoe a literary teen idol. I found her on livejournal, actually, as we shared a mutual lj “friend” in horror/indie author Jemiah Jefferson. I started reading her journal, and made some pithy comments in it, then we started corresponding.

One of the more odious-to-me things about the small press is the practice of slightly bigger names writing introductions for small fries in an attempt to scare up some sales. The intros are usually too short to be anything other than a rip-off, and vapid too, along the lines of “I met Nick Kaufmann at a convention. He was nervous and lonely-looking, but at least he didn’t smell of rancid bacon fat like everyone else. Then I read his stories and they were the most thrilling tales ever, except for the 500 authors I wrote introductions for last year.”

Zoe’s introductory love letter to me is a literal one (“Dearest Nick, Will you make out with me…”) and thanks to publishing’s fascination with youth and the aforementioned mind-control devices, she actually is going to be ridiculously famous by the end of the year. But she’s a zinester, too, and she keeps it real, so I can’t help but be very pleased.

Nicholas Kaufmann: There’s a lot of smart humor in your stories, such as when Socrates kills Zeus and goes through his purse in “The Birth of Western Civilization.” Your non-fiction, on the other hand, is often very serious. “Brother Theodore is Dead,” for example, is a sad and touching remembrance of the underground New York performance artist. Is this indicative of any sort of mindset, a belief that the real world is too serious, too important, for the lens of humor?

Nick Mamatas: Brother Theodore died after being crippled and nearly immobile for years. He was still pretty funny, but he wanted to die, then he did. That’s just naturally sad to me. I don’t think all my stories are “funny” in the yuk yuk kind of way. Satires can be dark. And some of my essays are pretty funny, according to readers. The fact that real life is absurd is what fuels the humor in both the essays and fiction.

Nicholas Kaufmann: In “Old Boilers and Old Men,” you talk a lot about the strange competitiveness between you and your rather obstinate father, as well as some observations about being Greek that you definitely won’t find in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” How do you think your background affected you as a writer and as a person?

Nick Mamatas: Well, like many Greeks, I’m an egomaniac and obsessed with philotimo, an untranslatable term that usually gets translated anyway as “love of honor.” It really has to do with personal independence, a rejection of arbitrary authority, personal generosity and loyalty to friends, hostility toward various asswipes rather than feigned politeness, and an embrace of contradictions. All good things for a writer, I think.

Nicholas Kaufmann: “Joey Ramone Saves the World,” an alternate future story where Brazil invades the U.S. and Joey Ramone leads the resistance, is an obvious love letter to the fallen punk rocker. How big an influence would you say the Ramones, and Joey in particular, had on your life?

Nick Mamatas: Immense. All of punk, really. In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I grew up, you were a coke-addled, Camaro-driving, muscle shirt-wearing illiterate, or you were nothing. Punk was an alternative culture. The Ramones, being New Yorkers, being funny, and doing what they felt like doing in that crude, primitive, but very powerful way, were like a minaret—they called to the freaks every Friday. Songs without guitar solos, that used words like “cerebellum,” and referenced Zippy The Pinhead and sniffing glue at the same time, that was the mirror of my life. I saw a documentary about the group recently, and one of the folks interviewed was amazed, saying, “I couldn’t believe that these songs were based on actual events.” Well, I can.

Joey, of course, was the best Ramone. Johnny is an idiot Republican, and Dee-Dee a horrible rapper and scenester. The drummers (Marky, Tommy, Richie) were unremarkable. But Joey was a guy who could walk down the street, be recognized by everyone, and not be mobbed by fans because everyone already knew him. They didn’t have to meet him, he was their ol’ pal already.

Nicholas Kaufmann: Next year, Night Shade Books will be publishing your novel Move Under Ground, in which Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs fight a Cthulhu cult. What influenced you to fuse H.P. Lovecraft with the 1950s/60s Beat movement?

Nick Mamatas: Well, I was struck by the similarities between the two authors. Both had a circle of fellow writers they worked with. Both had oddly co-dependent relationships with older relatives. Both were compulsive correspondents. Both had a very bizarre relationship with the sentence. Both had intriguing artistic and filthy political opinions one would not normally expect from non-traditional individuals (Kerouac later in life). I would actually posit that Lovecraft was a pseudo-Beat. There is a connection between the Lovecraft circle and the Beats, with Burroughs having been a student of Barlow.

In writing the book itself, I wanted to appropriate the Beat style for horror. Kerouac did a bit of fantasy, and many of his descriptions were phantasmagoric, for example, the glowing red eyes of Chicago in On the Road. We won’t know if the experiment is a success till next year when people actually read it, but I’m happy with the preliminary result.

Nicholas Kaufmann: This winter, Prime Books will be publishing an anthology you edited, The Urban Bizarre. Tell us about it. I understand it had a bit of a rocky road to publication.

Nick Mamatas: The Urban Bizarre was an idea I had while procrastinating with Move Under Ground. I like SF, I like zines, and I like transgressive pornographic fiction, so I wanted to have an anthology with all those styles together. I approached Eraserhead Press and got an informal acceptance in a day. Then heard nothing for months. I solicited stories and held on to them for months, and heard nothing from EP.

Then, finally, I was told the project was going forward and that EP was expanding. Then, when I finally demanded a contract over a year since getting that informal acceptance, I was told that “expanding” actually meant “shrinking.” Luckily, Prime picked up the book right away, though it wouldn’t pay the rate I had already agreed to pay my writers. I’m a big believer in staying true to my word, so I’ll be paying the writers out of pocket, rather than doing what many micropress editors in my position do, which is whining and making excuses about how Big Daddy Publisher won’t pay the allowance after all.

What I’m trying to say is please pre-order the book at Shocklines, because I really need the money!

Nicholas Kaufmann: What are your thoughts about the future of science fiction and horror writing? Are there any new writers out there you are enjoying? Do you have any long-time favorites?

Nick Mamatas: The future is bright. Frequently we hear that the genres are dead and that they need to borrow from contemporary American realism in order to be reinvigorated. I’d say that this time around, the exact opposite is happening. Realism has hit the brick wall of the bourgeoisie’s own end of history. I recently went through the list of New York Times Notable Books for 2002 and 55 of them take place in the past, with many of those being either in the 1970s or just as the Cold War ends. Some take place long before. “Nowness” is missing, except in “shopping and fucking” novels that depend on detailing the up-to-the-minute consumption habits of the narrators, or in novels where technology and globalizations have to be addressed. And they’re being addressed increasingly using fantastic, horrific, and speculative tropes.

New writers? Zoe, of course. Tim Pratt, I like. Daphne Gottlieb writes amazing poetry, and all the “horror poets” out there should buy her book Final Girl to see how it is done by someone who actually knows poetry. Douglas Lain is very good. Sarah Langan is an excellent writer. Paul Tremblay is good. Ann Sterzinger has more energy per story than entire dubious “movements” in SF do.

Long-time favorites? Eh, the same folks all the other Fantastic Metropolis readers like.

Nicholas Kaufmann: Any last words you’d like to leave us with before I put this electric drill through your skull?

Nick Mamatas: Put on your smock first, bubbeleh.