buy my book
LightNews LightNews
banner
nmamatas.bsky.social
buy my book
@nmamatas.bsky.social
3.9K followers 1.9K following 6.1K posts
Buy KALIVAS! OR, ANOTHER TEMPEST from my local bookstore now:

https://www.ebbooksellers.com/item/Hq3ZF19tm0p_ea_Y-YTFdA
Posts Replies Media Videos
nmamatas.bsky.social
I recently got into the duck artist Don Rosa, who does not get royalties for any of his US work and whose magnum opus is being taken out of print for faux-woke reasons, AND the stuff is owned by Disney. Would I pirate it? I might if my library wasn't good. But I got him some dough with this:
One of Rosa's prints where he puts the ducks in a classic comic book cover. This is the debut of the Vision from The Avengers, but instead it is Scrooge McDuck in red emerging out of a mist, and and Donald and two nephews in the foreground.
November 26, 2025 at 4:11 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Pleased that KALIVAS! got a staff shelf-talker at @pegasusbooks.bsky.social
If that is hard to read: Bee Recommends Kalivas Nick Mamatas For an anticolonial rewrite of Shakespeare that deals in millennia and ends in a pretty performable play, Kalivas is hella funny. The titular protagonist is the last "free ange human" stuck on an island with a posthuman Master whose enhancements let him do magic shit and his equally posthuman daughter. All he has is his geodesic dome full of pornographies (which appears to include Peter Hall's 1959 A Midsummer Night's Dream) and an unfortunate desire for the Master's daughter M. I've been a fan of Mamatas since I stumbled on his book Sensation in the Local Authors section over at Bound Together in the City in the late '00s, and I think this book is a great jumping on point for one of the weirder careers I've ever had the pleasure of following. same as prior pic but with more emphasis on blue/black/orange lighthouse cover of KALIVAS
November 25, 2025 at 8:25 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
You're kidnapped. The characters from the last show you watched are coming to rescue you.

OH NO
The Greek news from Antenna--two men in dark blue suits standing on a stage with images of dairy products in the background and between them comically large slices of feta cheese with the word FETA under it. The story is that the price of feta cheese is due to rise soon.
November 25, 2025 at 6:30 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Get you a love who looks at you the way Trump looks at Mamdani.
Trump, seated, smiling up at Mamdani, who seems somewhat pleased.
November 21, 2025 at 10:32 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
If I recall correctly, at least one of the passages was this one from Bleak House and the college students were somehow hung up on whether Dickens was writing about actual dinosaurs strolling down the street. This is not to say that the problem with the test was using Dickens.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
November 21, 2025 at 5:55 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Internal indicia is accurate. I bet the ebook cover was just lazy use of a template.
Indicia “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (ISSN 1095-8258), Volume 147, No. 1, 2 & 3, Whole No. 773, Summer 2025. Double issues published quarterly by Must Read Magazines, a division of Must Read Books Publishing.”
November 21, 2025 at 5:43 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Also, it should be unsurprising that a machine that copies sentences is closer in fidelity than a real writer who is trained NOT to copy sentences.

Though I'm also surprised that the LLM text with "utterly familiar" and "makes you feel like screaming" got high marks for fidelity.
I can't alt text all this but here is a link https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5606570 and the image is of page 50
November 19, 2025 at 3:19 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
My publishing year in review:

m.facebook.com/story.php?st...
Several books and zines plus a laptop open to two tabs on a wooden floor. List of them here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid02W576Z2FEiimB5d8icx9jn3nmr88tP7z6VVAsud2WHnHzhfewzBf6xRhe2CneeTXkl&id=622335384&mibextid=Nif5oz
November 18, 2025 at 1:45 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
I don't normally post Goodreads reviews, but the pomo snobs of the world must learn about Kalivas! somehow:
Five stars from a reviewer with glasses and mask: A clever cyberpunk reimagining of The Tempest for our age of oligarchy, Kalivas! leans hard into the anticolonialist interpretation of the play and gives us Caliban as the last human among augmented gods who can't die. Kalivas is a Weird Little Guy, at once repugnant and compelling. The post-disaster world is sketched just enough for the characters to feel grounded in it despite their stylization and otherness. It ends, naturally, with a play-within-a-play that turned out to be my favourite part because I'm turning into some kind of pomo snob. Highly enjoyable.
November 17, 2025 at 6:28 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Look at this poster
Black and white with grayscale bg, a gestural drawing of a frowning HP Lovecraft with the words HP Lovecraft is (in black) and The Failure of the Century in white in a angular paintbrushy font. Art by Gross and Colorful at bottom right
November 17, 2025 at 4:19 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
If you see this, post a comics cover you love.
Uncle $crooge and Donald Duck "The Universal Solvent" Don Rosa Library V 6 The ducks are surrounded by flame and melting goop; Donald is frightened, Scrooge is trying to hide under his umbrella, and the nephews are awe-struck, scared, and curious.
November 16, 2025 at 6:36 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Okay, here we go. There's this in the 1976 Writing Well:
November 14, 2025 at 5:29 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
I see some Frankenstein defenders are trying to claim that movie dislikers just don't like GDT's Mexican Catholic sensibility (iow "you're racist!") to which I can only say that in Spanish-language Catholic Bibles Genesis is at the beginning, not the middle.
The monster with a big Bible open to the middle as the subtitles read "I read about a man named Adam, and a woman named Eve,"
November 12, 2025 at 8:26 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Convincing you to read my novel with the first few sentences. (No clean break after first sentence, sorry!) Share yours if you want.

KALIVAS! OR, ANOTHER TEMPEST

Why not a @bookshop.org link today?

bookshop.org/p/books/kali...
The Master doesn’t make it rain much anymore, except for when he lets me fish and provides a drizzle to lure my little prey up to the surface of the water. Even the Master can’t keep it from raining naturally though, and so it was raining hard, and inconveniently, and I waited out the lightning storm under a tree, which was a foolish thing to do. I could have died, but the path down to the island’s cliff face was washing away, so I could have died trying to run for home too.
November 11, 2025 at 4:37 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Darn, infinite forgiveness ruined my trolling of the too-cozy-with-Trump archbishop
An insta story of Archbishop Elpidophoros holding up his new US citizenship and my note reading "Carry this at all times in case of ICE, father" An image of the archbishop "liking" my Insta story
November 11, 2025 at 7:52 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Post a bird announcing that Dick Cheney is dead. 🪶
A pestrel maybe regurgitating into the maw of its offspring. Gray and white with yellow beak; the offspring is fuzzy.
November 4, 2025 at 2:51 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Now the world may know! My one-act play "The Failure of the Century"--a bit of a Lovecraftian A Christmas Carol--will have a staged reading as part of the Talos V Science Fiction Theatre Festival!

Dec 13th! The theatre is also a pub! Details:

www.breadandrosestheatre.co.uk/whats-on.html
Cyborphic presents The Failure of the Century (WIP) by Nick Mamatas H. P. Lovecraft is dying to write. But the controversial horror writer cannot bring himself to finish his magnum opus, "The Shadow Out of Time", and it’s eating away at his stomach. Then over one long and shadowy Christmas night, Lovecraft receives three visitors at his tiny Rhode Island bedsit—his younger colleague Frank Belknap Long; then his estranged wife Sonia Greene; and finally the Crawling Chaos himself – the witch-cult king, the pharaonic Outer God, Nyarlathotep! “The Failure of the Century", a blend of Lovecraftian Horror & A Christmas Carol, is the first play by award-winning Greek American writer & Hugo-award nominated editor Nick Mamatas. Nick is the author of instant cult classic Move Under Ground and the Lovecraftian murder mystery I Am Providence. His latest novel, Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, is an anticolonial sci-fi revision of Shakespeare’s play. Presented as part of Talos V Science Fiction Theatre Festival The Failure of the Century (WIP) Written by Nick Mamatas Directed by Kira E. Wiggins Other Cast & Crew TBC Date & Time: Saturday 13th December @1.30pm Running Time: 50mins Content warnings: Age 16+, early 20th century discussions of race & sexuality, mental illness (also black and white gestural drawing of Lovecraft, eyes sparkling/weeping, scratchy title reading H.P Lovecraft is: The Failure of the Century, Art by https://www.instagram.com/grossandcolorful)
November 3, 2025 at 7:47 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Philip K. Dick gets it right again.

Let's hear it for the vague blurs!
From A Scanner Darkly: "Let's hear it for the vague blur!" the host said loudly, and there was mass clapping. In his scramble suit, Fred, who was also Robert Arctor, groaned and thought: This is terrible. Once a month an undercover narcotics agent of the county was assigned at random to speak before bubblehead gatherings such as this. Today was his turn. Looking at his audience, he realized how much he detested straights. They thought this was all great. They were smiling. They were being entertained. An Icegov tweet offering up a photo of new ICE training graduates--"American heroes" with their faces blurred out.
November 2, 2025 at 1:34 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
As far as I know, good Christian widows dress like this, but I do acknowledge that every Protestant is a devil-worshipping monster who craves only misery and sups on blood and tears, so there may be cultural differences.
A bw photo of four women in black, with long dresses and scarves, walking down a road paved in marble stones. If you are a Western devil you may perceive these women as nuns. They are not.
October 31, 2025 at 5:09 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
There are some goofy pulp stories that until just now felt unrealistic because they end with the main character scribbling in their diary, "The monsters are at the door! No no no..."

Until just now.
Donald Trump post on Truth Social dated 10/29/25 and time 9:43: South Carerdddd
October 29, 2025 at 11:16 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
"You may choose one person to tell you the Aristocrats joke"
Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarch. A man in a white beard, with white and yellow robes and a big round crown. He holds a twisted scepter and is on a decorates throne with lots of filigree and leaf.
October 28, 2025 at 2:39 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Don't worry, I've altered the tattoo now so it looks like Laozi.
Caligula! John Hurt in make-up from I, Claudius, blond curls etc.
October 27, 2025 at 4:37 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
If you see this, post a vampire that isn’t Dracula
Cover of the Todd Grimson novel Stainless; vampire woman on right, black clothing and hair and pale outstretched neck, black slits for eyes and red lips. Black and red background. https://www.mcnallyeditions.com/books/p/stainless
October 27, 2025 at 4:07 AM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Last night I must have been visited by the ghosts of Billy and Benny McGuire
two hire scooters parked in parallel on a sidewalk Classic pic of "the world's fattest twins" on motorcycles--cowboy hats huge thighs etc
October 26, 2025 at 3:42 PM
nmamatas.bsky.social
Litcrawl tonight, triple threat match! All three rounds, baby!

Blondie's Bar at 5!
Latin American Club at 6:30!
Dog Eared Books at 8!
5:00pm PDT 01. The World With Different Words (Authors & Performers: Mamatas) Nicholas Mamatas • T. K. Rex • Giovanna Lomanto • Gwendolyn Maia Hicks • Chloe Smith 6:30pm PDT 37. The Fabulist Presents: Strategies Against the Dark Dreams of Empire (Authors & Performers: Mamatas) Nicholas Mamatas • LeeAnn Perry • Cynthia Gómez • Katie Flynn • Khan Wong 8:00pm PDT 52. Write from the Gut: Best Lines (Authors & Performers: Mamatas) Tongo Eisen-Martin • Kim McMillon • Nicholas Mamatas • Sophia Kercher • Alexandra Kostoulas • Kim Shuck
October 25, 2025 at 8:06 PM