To read a Nick Mamatas novel is to encounter literary references and pulp storytelling smashed headlong into one another, then recombined in eminently compelling ways. His latest book is the novel Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, which transposes elements of a certain Shakespeare play to a post-human California. I asked Mamatas some questions about the novel’s genesis, what drew him to The Tempest, and some of his other unlikely literary cross-pollinations.
The Tempest is frequently read as a parable of colonialism, and that’s certainly present in Kalivas!But, as you mention in the novel’s acknowledgements, you also found a way that this resonated with the Greek immigrant experience. How did all of those elements combine, and when did the futuristic and post-human elements of this novel come into play?
I discovered The Tempest as a kid thanks to Paul Mazursky’s 1982 modern-dress adaptation starring John Cassavetes, Raúl Juliá, and Molly Ringwald. I saw it on VHS when I was ten or eleven and really loved it. My parents weren’t big into culture—they’d rented the film because it took place partially in Greece. (My father is a Greek immigrant; my mother a Greek-American.) And Juliá’s “Kalibanos” with his big mustache and sleeve white undershirt and somewhat darkish skin and convincing accent was the first time I’d ever seen anyone on TV at all like my relatives. So it was a big deal as well as a good movie, plus it hinted at fantastical elements. I even tried to read the play in my mother’s great big Waldenbooks version of the complete Shakespeare, but did not get far. So for me, The Tempest was always a bit Greek. I did read that some scholars believe Caliban comes from καλύβα, which is “hut”, and the surname Kalivas means that someone’s great-grandfather probably lived in one.
I’m from New York—Brooklyn, actually, and Long Island—but now live in the Bay Area. I’ve seen the skyline change, neighborhoods hypgentrify and then collapse again into a doom loop, and the entire region be transformed by the incoherent libertarian-reactionary Big Tech and in particular by techies who confuse the posthuman with the anti-human. There’s no reason to drink Soylent unless eating actual food reminds one too much of being a mere animal. Something is being colonized out here, even if it’s not colonialism in the classical scene.
As far as genre concerns, given that fifteen years ago a billion people gained the ability to carry the Library of Alexandria/movie studio in their pockets, and five years ago a plague swept the world and eighteen months ago our phones started talking back to us like an eager pet simpleton, it seems impossible to write bourgeois psychological realism without at least accidentally committing science fiction. Kalivas! is definitely a tech bro/COVID/LLM/ohmygodno book.
When writing a book that’s informed by an earlier work, how do you decide what will and won’t be – for lack of a better word – canonical from that earlier work? Was the process you used for Kalivas! at all similar to the way you wrote Move Under Ground?
Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci had a little routine about the five-minute university. Five years after school, what college graduates remember could be taught in five minutes. So I depend on that; what I remembered of On the Road or The Tempest from earlier readings informs the bones of the plot. I feel very free to make changes, combine characters, streamline or invent incidents, and the like. And it works. When I finished Move Under Ground, I was telling the details to someone who asked how Jack Kerouac was going to “fight Cthulhu” since he was a pacifist. I quickly went back to the manuscript and was relieved to see that Kerouac in my book always refused to fight, threw down a gun he had in hand, and the like.
With Kalivas! one question I had to deal with is the existence of Shakespeare’s plays. Should the story take place in “our” future, that is one in which Shakespeare would be known to most speakers of English? If so, would the characters remark on the similarities between the events of the book and the events of the play? Well, maybe not. But Kalivas the character does have a huge database of media his mother had provided for him, so I do have him watch one of his favorite “pornographies”—the 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The pornographies! I’d been curious about that; it took me a little bit to realize that Kalivas wasn’t simply watching adult films all the time and that, at this point, the definition of the word in question had broadened. How did that bit of linguistic drift come about?
Some of what was left behind in the databases he had access to was porn, of course, and it was of the most interest to him. But he’s also alone in the world for much of his life after his mother passes, so anything with any level of emotional intensity is arousing and beguiling to him, and almost all media seems quite decadent as well since he living in a state of extreme privation. He has a home and a few gadgets of his mothers to help him live, but he’s essentially a Robinson Crusoe with access to maybe a zettabyte of information, and some processes that could achieve self-awareness…ghosts or maybe fairies in the machine.
How did you end up deciding on the Farallon Islands as the setting for this book?
Partially I wanted to set the book here in Bay Area, which has seen immense changes over the years. I lived here twice—in 2004-2005, after the first dot.com boom receded, and then I moved back in 2008, just as the whole economy was collapsing. Then apps took over and even the skyline changed profoundly with Salesforce Tower and other huge buildings popping up (it’s amazing that people think San Francisco doesn’t have a working class! Do skyscrapers come from planted concrete-and-steel seeds?) and the social world changing utterly. For a while it was simply impossible to arrange a social gathering without Facebook. Now one needs any number of apps. It’s easy to meet people who are convinced that not only are they not ever going to die, but that they deserve to live forever and in the best possible quantum universe.
And yet, just a few miles away are the Farallons, which one cannot visit unless one is a scientist, but there is a tour boat one can take to circle them. So it’s a case of so close yet so far, and the islands and what has been left on them is well-documented, so easy to use as a setting. I was concerned that the choppy waters around the islands would make Kalivas’s family’s travel there—the posthuman mother swims, pulling a couple of rowboats, Jack LaLanne-style, behind her—unrealistic, but in 2024, as the book was being laid out, a 55-year-old woman named Amy Appelhans Gubser, swam the thirty-mile span, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the islands. She wasn’t dragging boats behind her, but she was also a mere human and well into middle-age.
Structurally, this novel ends with a play, which is not something I think I’ve ever encountered before. How did you arrive on that as the way to bring this narrative to its conclusion?
A few reasons! The first is that many of Shakespeare’s plays have a play or some sort or performance spectacle embedded within it, and I wanted to honor that.
The second is that I’ve been online for a long time—in the 1980s/1990s, before the Web, I was on tinyMUDs and IRC and such, and I often wondered about the long-term survival of specific MUDs, the bots within the MUDs or channels, etc. Would they keep buzzing away, as does the automatic house in that famous Ray Bradbury story, if nobody ever logged on again. The rise of LLMs during the writing of Kalivas! also suggested to me that Kalivas’s storehouse of media might be interactive and able to evolve a bit, so some characters who appear as character-types we all know (the Little Tramp, a Blonde Bombshell, etc.) might emerge long after poor mortal Kalivas passes away.
The third is that I’ve always been interested in experimental/innovative literature, and I like genre literature best when it does something that violates typical narratives. The reality is, though, that in the US, it requires a certain provenance—the correct school, demographic etc.—to actually make a go of writing experimental fiction and getting it published as such, and I lack those requirements. Whenever I read some excellent novel-destroying novel I feel as though I’m just spinning my wheels with Freytag’s Triangle and psychologically coherent characters, so I push against it when I can.
The play also is related to events subsequent to The Tempest. The Tempest is often described as Shakespeare’s last play, but it is not. He co-wrote several with John Fletcher, including the now-lost Cardenio, which is based on an episode from Don Quixote. Supposedly, some lines from it survive in a play called Double Falsehood by a playwright named Lewis Theobald. The play is awful; the few lines that are Shakespeare’s (Theobald found some pages of a Cardenio script, or so he said) stand out because they’re good! The play that ends Another Tempest is the one-act “Triple Falsehood”, is another riff on the Cardenio story and hints at layers of fictions.
I’ve also gotten interested in writing plays recently, and putting a play in a novel was a way for me to get paid to train. I did have a one-act, “The Failure of the Century”, a bioplay of sorts about H. P. Lovecraft, get a staged reading in London, which sounds very impressive until I explain that it was in a pub theatre, but it’s still very cool, I think.
Has anything in particular prompted that interest in writing plays? And do you find that it’s had any effect on your prose?
One of my first books, the novella Under My Roof, is also based on a play—The Acharnians by Aristophanes. I’ve always liked going to see plays—not Broadway, just anything with a crooked and too-small chair—and I happen to live in a college town where I am spoiled for choice. My favorite local theatre is a forty-seat basement black box under a pizzeria, and the pizza upstairs is also high quality. I go to see every show they put on, and thought to myself a couple of years ago “I can do that.” Not act, of course! But write a play. A play is also like a short story in that one needs to be very disciplined and parsimonious, and I enjoy writing short stories. So a change is as good as a rest. Finally, it was always very interesting to me that a play in a small venue can still somehow make a splash and then spread like a plague or a meme. I suppose COVID brought back the idea of the living room or chamber play, and I can’t help but stick my nose in.