David 00:00 Hey, Rachel. Rachel 00:01 Hey, David. David 00:02 What do you call the rebel alliance commander who feels tired? Rachel 00:07 I don’t know, David. David 00:08 General Malaise. Rachel 00:09 Ouch. I guess he puts the fatigue in fatigues. [Opening theme] Welcome to Wizards & Spaceships, the podcast where we harsh your squee. Sci-Fi and Fantasy has always had an optimistic current, whether it’s utopian spaceships, cities, or noble chosen ones vanquishing a dark lord. In recent years, with the popularity of romantasy and cozy fantasy, it’s easier than ever to immerse yourself in a more hopeful world. But, what if instead we made you feel bad? With us to discuss the warring vibes in genre fiction is Nick Mamatas. Nick is an American Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy author and was editor for Haikasoru, a line of translated Japanese science fiction novels for Viz Media. Now he edits manga for Seven Seas Entertainment. His fiction has been nominated for a number of awards, including several Bram Stoker Awards. Most recently, he’s the editor of the anthology, 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. Welcome to the show, Nick. Nick 01:18 Oh, thanks for having me. David 01:20 Yep. Good to see you, again. Rachel 01:22 First question, why do you hate fun? And follow-up question, why do you want us all to suffer? Nick 01:27 I love fun. And, if you’re going to suffer, you may as well have some fun doing it. What I am suspicious of is psychotherapeutic mandated fun and psychotherapeutic mandated alleviation of suffering, especially when it’s done by untrained, unlicensed psychotherapists. That is to say, novelists and fans. And, I would say for the past twenty years or so, or even before that, right before I started in the field, actually, there’s been a really strange folkloric psychotherapeutic current based on fannish folkways and homeopathy and “common knowledge” (within quotes) and a kind of a dubious like, kind of a… an especially dubious, moral collapse of betrayal and advocacy that has made things, first, awful online, and then everyone who learned these things online grew up and entered the publishing industry. Rachel 02:31 Oh, no. Nick 02:32 Oh, yes. That’s right. So, everyone from Fandom Wank now is an editor at a… at a major publishing house. And it’s taken the Fandom Wank website lessons to heart as to what books look like and how they should be promoted and, the dangers and problems of bad books, especially bad books by the bad gender, by which they mean boys. So those are my real issues. That is why I hate fun. Rachel 03:08 Yes. Kind of the… the Tumblr-fication of Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Nick 03:14 Mhmm. David 03:16 So, one thing I wanted to ask you about is because… this episode is… is called “Against Hopepunk.” And I was wondering what is Hopepunk and what is Grimdark? So, if you can just talk about those two tendencies, what they’re about. Nick 03:32 Well, Hopepunk is a part of a long tradition of newer writers trying to publicize their material by making up a… a subgenre. This is a very long-lasting thing. Of course, perhaps most famously for this crowd, China Miéville did it twice… with the “New Weird” was the first one. And he made that up to promote his second, third, and fourth novels, the… the Bas-Lag novels. And if you look at the “New Weird” manifesto, he tries to tie his work and the work of a few antecedents, like M. John Harrison, to what at the time was, the perspectives of the Socialist Worker Party of Great Britain of the UK, which was that the Battle of Seattle was a big deal. The Battle of Seattle, for those who don’t know, which is probably nobody, given this podcast, was the 1999 protest against the World Trade Organization that won, a protest that won and did stuff. The SWP oriented heavily toward this thinking it was going to take off and become a worldwide phenomenon. And anti-globalist anti-corporate globalization was one, but didn’t have the impact that the SWP thought it would have until the occupied movement twelve years later. So New Weird was that. Then he had Noir Weird [Note: Nick pronounces this as “Nu-Ward”] which was, do you remember that one? Rachel 04:42 I don’t. Nick 04:43 Puns, David. What is Noir Weird? No? New Weird plus weird is Noir Weird. Rachel 04:47 Oh my god. I… I think I completely missed that phase. I think… there… he did City in the City. Nick 04:52 Yes. And that was about City in the City, which… which is such a better book than the genre that he’s trying to create that it didn’t matter that he had [unclear], he was bad at this kind of thing. New Weird was a better concept than his books. His books were pretty good. The concept is so interesting. [unclear] Noir Weird, not that interesting a concept, but the book was so good he didn’t need the concept. And this happened in the eighties. Bruce Sterling created Slipstream, which was half mainstream, half fantasy, but included a, a list of books that included Naked Lunch and The Princess Bride. And any list that puts those two books together is not a list that is any way comprehensible. And, Rudy Rucker did this with trans-realism, by which he meant his science fiction. I even asked him one time. I said, Rudy, what… what is trans-realism? Well, I published my first novel. It didn’t really go anywhere, so I thought if I made up something interesting to talk about, people were talking about it. And this is Hopepunk. Hopepunk was created by a writer named Alex Rowland, sometimes bylined Alexandra Rowland, and they wrote what was essentially a manifesto in search of some books or manifesto in search of a genre. And as far as I could, I… Hopepunk boiled down to, we really like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there’s much to like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was like, what if everything was like Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone morally? Because you could have your friends, and you could fight, and you could be kind of cool, and you won’t necessarily win too much because you have to keep fighting. And if you have a victory, you have to make some conclusions about society and, solve some problems, but we can’t do that. So, we just keep at it, and there’ll be these big bads coming every season just like in Buffy. And what do they want? They wanna be bad. And what motivates them? And, can they be more complex? No. Unless it’s Spike, who’s everybody’s favorite. And so, everyone influenced by, one, Buffy, but also by the fan fiction around Buffy, the fan fiction around Harry Potter, the fan fiction around Supernatural, kind of embraced this really incoherent notion of Hopepunk, which is… found families that seem to be fighting back via supernatural powers and they’re semi cool… this is what nerds think is cool type of stuff, against incoherent evils that cannot be defeated, cannot be understood, and should not be thoroughly described in the… so, that you might make a Christian mistake, because Christianity has two moral innovations. One is that everyone can be forgiven, which is terrible, awful, because you can’t forgive people, who are your abusers, that’s you being a sucker at… at best. And two, to love one’s enemy, which is also shitty. You should only love, your found family. And so, you have this very strange reactionary morality that is even more reactionary than far right Christianity combined with a kind of, goofy TV style writing of, like, the Joss Whedon, everyone’s cracking jokes even as the world’s ending and, people are dying, etcetera. So, that’s what Hopepunk is. Grimdark is almost the opposite. And so, there’s also found families, and there’s also, a morality that is more reactionary than even reactionary Christianity. And it purports to some kind of realism, like, oh, well, you know, down in the tents of the of the warriors, when they’re gathering up, they’re definitely gonna fucking piss, and they’re gonna kill. Look at that. Oh my gosh. I imagine killing somebody and then having to look at it and then wiping off your sword afterward. Isn’t that awful? And by awful, they don’t mean isn’t that great? Alright. I will say that Grimdark at least has a wonderful exponent in Joe Abercrombie, whose novels are hysterical in that they’re funny and hysterical in that they are a kind of hysterical realism with fantasy elements. So, they’re the over the top, overcharged sentences and circumstances, which is at least engaging, because he is not part of the psychotherapeutic cult in publishing, unless you’re allowed to experience intense emotions. Rachel 09:12 Yeah. So, what I’m getting from this is that in order to market my books, I should invent a subgenre. Nick 09:17 Absolutely. ColdPunk? You’re in Canada? Rachel 09:21 ColdPunk. Yes. I saw ColdPunk. Nick 09:22 There you go. Right? Yeah. Yeah. SorryPunk? Rachel 09:24 Sorry? Nick 09:25 SorryPunk? Rachel 09:26 SorryPunk. Okay. Yeah. At least… Nick 09:27 At least in America. Canada… Canadians are famous in America for saying they are sorry for everything. Rachel 09:30 Yeah. Nick 09:31 Is that a jump? Up there? Rachel 09:32 We do absolutely do that… Nick 09:34 Yeah. Right. Sorry, for correcting. Okay. Rachel 09:37 No. This is this is happening. I… I need some new marketing strategies. So, yeah. So many people who enjoy escapism argue, and I do kind of agree with them, that in dark times, escape is necessary. And, also, I don’t know. Consuming fiction isn’t the same as doing something about these dark times. Nick 10:02 Yeah. Rachel 10:03 And for me, like, reading or writing optimistic fiction in dark times often feels more like cruelty than escape. So, what’s the relationship between these vibe trends in writing and publishing and what happens out in the real world? Nick 10:25 Well, that’s a good question. So, first, I… I guess we should talk about escapism. And escapism is always that little back and forth people have. Well, escapism is what the jailer wants you to be happy in your cell in your escapism, but you really wanted to do it is escape the cell. But, you know, fiction isn’t necessarily a vehicle for either of these things, or at least it’s only a vehicle when readers make it so and readers can make anything… anything. As a creature of the 1990s, I acknowledge the existence of counter reads, which is part of why I’m very suspicious and skeptical of this claim that certain fictions are bad for you or problematic. It really depends on how you read it. And we can see the obvious example is 1984 by George Orwell, which is explicitly anti-Stalinist being claimed by everyone on earth. Everyone thinks they are the Winston and everyone else is smiling on them, which, of course, is also one of the themes in 1984. But… so, the far right loves 1984 and says, Hilary Clinton was big sister, and we don’t want nobody spying on us. But, also, you wanna do a lot of spying. You wanna go into the IRS and look at your records and that kind of thing. So, these are rhetorical bludgeons left around to society for anyone to pick up. I will say also, the people who… who are most ideologically committed to the idea of escapism are also the most practically committed to the exact opposite, doomscrolling. So, what are they escaping? They are trying to escape, at best, their own other behaviors. I’m doomscrolling all day. I’m always online looking at this or that. And often, they… they are doomscrolling, not even about the broader world, the environment, politics, imperialism. [David: Mhm!] They are doomscrolling about their own communities and finding terrors inside of this community, thus things like, oh, well, you know, boys liking My Little Pony, that’s colonialism. They’ll sit up. They’re colonialist bronies, and… and using this language of, political analysis for things that make zero sense as far as the production, distribution of mass-produced cartoons and things like that. So, sure, I think escapism or… or doing something other than engaging with a totalizing crypto-fascist hyper society is good. Absolutely. But that can happen by doing anything other than engaging with the totality of hyper-fascist society. And it doesn’t need to be… this is escapist and this is not escapist. And certainly, we see this with facts of transgressive fictions. God, man. I am reading that transgressive fiction. It’s so gross and weird and terrible, and, I can take it. I can read to the end of the book. Yeah. Who cares? [David: Mhm!] Good. You can read to the end of the book. My favorite tweet of all time is [from] Manning Krull, [W&S Note: @ManningKrull = “I remember one time we were in my friend Dave’s car and listening to Slayer and my friend Eric said you know what, these guys aren't tough or scary, and I'm gonna tell you why, it's because they're singing a song, and Dave got really mad.”] but it survives as a meme screen cap. And I’ve been trying to avoid meme talk and, trying to remove meme terms or phrase from my mind. It… it is very challenging not to say leopard eating faces in this juncture in The United States. But I’m doing my best. But my favorite meme, which I’ll never give up and will always be in my mind, is about, some guy. He said, like, it’s a memoristic meme. He says, I was in my car with my friend George, and he was listening to Slayer, and I said, these guys aren’t so tough or scary. You know why? Because they’re singing a little song. And George didn’t talk to me for the rest of the trip home, and I always think about that. Oh, look at that guy or that girl. He’s she’s writing her little book. Oh, that’s so transgressive, that little book. Oh my gosh. They’re having sex in the alleyway. Oh, she wrote down the word sex in the alleyway. Oh, that’s transgressive. Alright. Look at them transgressed. So, anything can be a kind of escapism because, you know, any thing that isn’t direct engagement with what the ideological state apparatus wants you to engage with, because right now, the personalities of Donald Trump and the Elon Musk is escapism. But, you can escape with… with anything. You can escape with your “sex in the alley drinking piss” book, or with your, “what if Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked like me instead of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we were in a kingdom” type of book. Both of those are totally acceptable kinds of escapism, and anything can only become escape when we decide to, take whatever we have in our cell with us and make a key. Or make a blood [unclear] before the guard comes into the cell sort of thing. David 14:52 One of the things you’re talking about is, you know, there is the idea of the Hopepunk, but there’s also… this episode is about, “Against Hopepunk.” Shouldn’t… shouldn’t publishers encompass sort of both tendencies? Nick 15:07 Well, on some level, they must because there are only five large ones left. [David: Mhm!] And so, they do, cast very wide nets. But, books work differently than, say, films or video games or TV shows because there are so many more of them. And this is actually a good thing and people often say, oh, I wish my books were marketed like a film. And I think, not me. Because I wouldn’t have any books. And Rachel wouldn’t have any books. I don’t know if you have any books, David, but you still wouldn’t have any. [David: Mhm!] Because there’ll be 500 books a year. And if you like science fiction, well you’ve got two. And if you like a cookbook, you’ve got four. And if you like a book about a sad middle-class man who, has an affair with a freshman and then it comes to the Christmas party at the faculty lounge at the end, and oh my god, his girlfriend and his estranged wife are wearing the same dress. You get three, and that’s it. So, having books where we have half-a-million books a year is actually great for people who like to write and make ‘living in a shack’ incomes, but still enjoy expressing themselves and building an audience and having something to say about society. What publishing does instead of focusing on a few products that everyone’s gonna watch or everyone’s gonna consume is they’re production driven. It’s a nineteenth century, manufacturing business. So, their role is to fill the shelves so that no matter what you buy, Hopepunk, Grimdark, guide to the 50 state quarters, history of Tim Hortons, whatever, it’s one of theirs. This is true to the point where Random House, McMillan, and I’m absolutely sure without even looking at the same in Canada. The major publishers rent their distribution networks to smaller presses. So, even your small radical transgressive press, Random House gets a piece or Macmillan gets a piece or W. W. Norton gets a piece. So, no matter what you buy, you’re buying one of theirs. And the idea of a bookstore having a lot of books is because people wanna walk into a bookstore with a lot of books, even though they’re all buying largely the same 20% of books. The other 80% are there to make the bookstore look nice. Oh, I… I got so many choices. I say as I buy a book about how Trump is bad or a book about how… how carbohydrates are bad or a book about how Jesus is good or a book about how living in a castle is fine. So yes, they do cover everything, but they cover everything for this reason of accumulating capital. Right? That’s what capitalism is. It’s not really about marketplaces [David: Mhm!] or consumerism. It’s about who can get… have the most capital to activate via some means, whether it’s a market meme or a state meme to get even more capital. So… So yeah, they do they do in place both. Fantastic. Yeah. Put it on your podcast. This is all working out. David 17:45 Yeah. I’m sort of not the smartest tool in the shed, but that almost just seems like me, but you guys obviously are already there… is the idea that almost something like a Hopepunk and these kinds of things are just either just specific categories or just a way of marketing something or a place you have something in a bookstore, so you know where to go because I want the Hopepunk books. Well, guess what? They’re all over here because they’re marketing this whole concept of Hopepunk. And if you like this one, you know, that whole idea of, oh, you like this, if you like ‘a swift kick in the nuts’, you also like ‘a slap in the face’, you know, that kind of thing. Nick 18:16 Absolutely. The good thing is that since books are kind of decentralized, there are so many of them, you can still be a little weird on the Internet and create your own genre. And sometimes it’ll take off, like Hopepunk did. Network connections and fan fiction communities and things like that made it make sense. Rachel 18:34 I still remain a little bit disappointed that, of all of the stupid punk subgenres, SalvagePunk didn’t really take off. And I’m like, I like… I thought that one was cool. Nick 18:46 Yeah. Rachel 18:47 And it’s a way less stupid name than Noir Weird, which… Nick 18:51 The Noir Weird [As noted earlier: Nick pronounces this as “Nu-Ward”] Noir Weird. Yes. Rachel 18:52 Noir Weird. [Rachel now pronounces this as “Nu-Ward”] Noir Weird. [Rachel again pronounces this as “Nu-Ward”] Nick 18:54 I said it should be “Weird Boiled.” That made more sense. That was more zingy. Right? Weird Boiled. Hunh? In fact, you can bring it back, Rachel, because your stuff is “Weird Boiled.” Rachel 19:01 Yeah. I mean, somebody… Nick 19:02 Just say it is. Just say it is. I don’t know if it is or not. Just say it. Yeah. Rachel 19:06 Somebody just get me in touch with China Miéville, and we’ll hash this out. Nick 19:12 It’s like in the city of Toronto and there are weird things happening. There you go. [Rachel: Sure!] Toronto has shitty weather? Done. Weird Boiled it is. Rachel 19:22 Yeah. I just finished reading 120 Murders a couple days ago. [Nick: Mhmm] It was wonderful. What do we have to take from dark cynical stories like that? And why should an optimistic reader take that chance to feel bad now and then? Nick 19:42 Well, at some level, what is the escapism? Like, it is the escapism of feeling bad for a brief period when something… nothing bad actually happens to you, or when nothing or none of the bad things that are happening to you are happening to you because something else is happening to you. So, really, one of the abiding themes of the twenty first century is the idea of trauma and trauma being reflected in fiction and trauma being, motivation for one’s behavior and for one’s point of view. And sometimes even the replacement of dramatic conflict between people with traumatic conflict within a person that manifests inside a story. But trauma is, by definition, the experience of pain when what is making you experience that pain is not present. That’s what trauma is. It is past… it is past tense pain in the present. And so, a little bit of trauma here and there in small bites can be good. It can, just be enjoyable. Like, oh, that was really rough. But, yep, there’s only a little story. Somebody’s wrote a little story about it. This is okay. No one’s actually dead except for all the dead people in real life. And short fiction, I think, is amenable to the pace of life. I love short fiction. I always have, which isn’t unusual. It’s… it’s definitely a minority current inside the world of letters. I can still laugh at poets and one act playwrights, although now I’ve become a one act playwright. But short stories really are for the for the small audience that still likes short stories, which allows you to militate against commercial, influence for some parts. You can get a traumatic experience that is not so heavily commodified as, say, a Hopepunk novel is. And in the case of 120 murders, they’re all about or all referenced or all informed thematically or personally by songs you already like, but you don’t need to go to Spotify to remember and experience the song anymore. You get a… you get a free mental experience after you buy my book. But it doesn’t also involve using Spotify or Tidal or any of these other systems that pay, 0.00012¢ per stream, which is why, for example, I can still enjoy Morrissey. And people say, oh, you know, he’s so problematic. He’s a fascist. He’s a fascist. He’s a disgusting individual. Don’t give him any of your money. Well, I’m not. In fact, I don’t know how I could. If I listen to Morrissey for the rest of my life, I’d send him $7. Rachel 22:19 Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s why God invented torrents so that I could listen to Morrissey guilt free. So Nick 22:24 Ahh. You know, I was one of the people who got pegged. I got nailed by the RIAA here in the US. [W&S Note: RIAA: The Recording Industry Association of America: a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States] Rachel 22:29 No. Nick 22:30 Well, I was. Yes. You know, Rachel, you’ve known me for a long time online, even though we’ve never actually spoken before today in a real time like this. But don’t you remember back in 2004 on my live journal, I posted an article from The Village Voice, and it was my article about my experience getting sued by the RIAA. Rachel 22:46 I… I… I remember that kinda era of… Nick 22:50 Yeah. Rachel 22:51 People getting hit by that. Nick 22:52 I was one of the hit ones. [Rachel: Ahh] And I wrote the article about my experience about it. And afterward, people said, ahh, look. He’s… he sold out. This must be part of the settlement where he writes this article saying it’s bad or he’s sorry. And then people are like, oh, look. He’s trying to make his money back by writing an article. So, I had I had to pay them some money. I had to pay $3,000, which was the second lowest fine. The first lowest was that 12-year-old girl [W&S Note: Brianna LaHara paid $2,000, or about $2 per song she allegedly shared] who downloaded a bunch of music. An acquaintance of mine who was a lawyer - a friend of mine who’s a lawyer - took the case, and he called in to what was essentially a telemarketing boiler room with other lawyers, and they were just handling these things like you would handle, you know, selling vapes on the phone or something. Or selling office supplies on the phone. And they got down to $3,000 and, where they begin at $3,500. No. We gotta go lower. We gotta go lower. My friend said, he said, we’re not going any lower. My friend said, you know, this guy is a freelance writer. That’s all he does. He doesn’t have another job. And he said, okay. $3,000. Never mind. They just knew they were not gonna get any more out of it than that. As an example of being, semi out of the loop of totalizing publishing industry norms that that paid off on some level, that they only paid $3,000 to steal Nas’ Made You Look. And, that book, that one by Sublime, that’s always stuck in people’s head. It’s about summertime or some shit like that. Like… like, all good escape of songs is about the weather. Rachel 24:25 Yeah. See, this is our mistake. We should have been… we should have thought to download millions of songs at once and sort of regurgitate them into AI pap, and then nobody would be getting sued at all. Nick 24:33 That’s right. If only we had a business doing that [Rachel: yeah] instead of just being super with us. David 24:36 But things have changed, certainly. I was wondering your work and most recent anthology crossed a number of genres from Horror to Sci-Fi, Noir. What’s the common ground for you as a writer and editor? Nick 24:48 Well, partially, those are the genres where short fiction is still somewhat vital. In literary fiction, short fiction is mostly represented in… in university backed up theory journals that, by definition, nobody reads because they’re university scholarly journals. And nobody reads physics journals or sociology journals or any other kind of, scholarly journal for entertainment purposes or even necessarily at all. Unless they are going to use it for their own research, which is what those things are for. But, literary fiction made a dubious Faustian bargain saying, we want jobs for the top 3% of ourselves, and in exchange, we will capture short fiction and make sure nobody reads any. And they went for that. And then they were all turned into adjuncts anyway. But Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror still have a pretty vibrant short fiction marketplace, in that there are a dozen good magazines you can publish in, even if you’re a nobody. And, a dozen good anthologies you can publish in, even if you’re a nobody. And a bunch of not so good magazines and not so good anthologies you can publish into. And you can’t make a career you can make a career doing so, but it’s a notional career. Career of a reputation and occasional several thousand dollars or several hundred dollars here and there. And you can get reprints and, sometimes some dope whose grandmother died says, oh, I wanna make a movie, but I don’t have any ideas, and they’ll option your story that kind of thing. And then Crime Fiction sort of fits the middle ground between literary fiction and Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and that there are… is… there are some good venues to publish short Crime Fiction in, and, of course, historically, short Crime Fiction has been massively influential, Poe and Doyle and that sort of thing. So, if you like if you just happen to like short fiction, I just happen to like short fiction, those genres are the ones to explore and experiment in. And, of course, these… these genre forms are porous, especially Horror. Horror is a tone. It is spicy food. You can have a spicy brownie. You can have a spicy taco. You can have a spicy sausage. Crime is a plot, and it can be any kind of plot that involves some kind of social transgression that hints at violation of some law. And that can be a law in the future. It can be a law in the past. It can be a law created by a ghost. And so, these all combine. I will say 120 Murders started out as purely Crime Fiction. My goal was it was gonna be a crime and New Noir. But as it turns out, in The United States, at least, almost every crime in New Noir anthology one sees is created primarily in house. And so many of our rejection letters were like, wow. This is a great idea. I sure wish I had had this idea, so I could do it. Tell us when it’s out. I wanna read it. Thanks for nothing. And when we did find a publisher, he… that publisher, a small press called Ruadán Books, was highly interested in what he called the gamut of Dark Speculation, of Dark Speculative Fiction. So that could be any sort of Dark Speculative Fiction, like Dark Magical Realism. Don’t ask me for an example. Dark Fantasy, Dark Science fiction, Transgressive Fiction Noir with a speculative element. And so, I opened up my concept for a Noir Fantasy, some Science Fiction, and that sort of thing. So, we have a story called “See America” by Todd Grimson, who is a wonderful writer who isn’t… isn’t as productive as capitalism would want him to be. He published three wonderful novels in the eighties and early nineties. And I encountered him, And, he is a very friendly type of guy who will just sort of start messaging you out of the blue. And he started messaging me out of the blue with stories, and one of them fit. And I said, oh, boy. Do you like music? I said, I love music. So, good. Can you pretend that you wrote this story after listening to a song, and the time that the song is? He said, no. I can’t do that. I love music too much to both adapt to a single song. And so, we said he was influenced by the work of Cabaret Voltaire. So, we changed the concept. The concept of 120 Murders is, one picks a song from the college radio or alternative music video era and is inspired by it on some level or by the video you saw, by your experience as a child while listening to it, and you write a story about that. And so, we had to change it a little bit, saying, oh, you have a story that kind of fits. Please pretend for me that you like music or that you like a certain kind of music. So, the… the concept changed both in expanding genre and in expanding the production process. And this is true if our genres work. You know, genres are, fungible and porous and capacious. In other words, that won’t help us sell any copies of this book. Rachel 29:21 No. Please. You need to sell copies so that more of this exists. But one… one of the things that really impressed me is that it’s an anthology themed around the last era of music where you could actually have songs about negative things. Nick 29:36 Yes. Rachel 29:37 Almost… almost universally. And I… I it’s not like there’s not music out now that I like. You know? I’m determined to not be one of those old people who only listens to things from when I was a teenager. Nick 29:52 Yeah. Rachel 29:53 You can’t just turn on the radio and hear something sad anymore. Nick 29:58 Mhmm. It’s true. Rachel 30:01 It’s not there. Yeah. I mean, I can go to a bookstore still, despite the rise of Hopepunk, and I can find something that’s gonna make me feel sad. Thankfully, we have a wonderful tradition in this country of writing almost exclusively depressing novels. But… Nick 30:14 It’s the prairie. Right? It’s that prairie makes you sad. Rachel 30:17 It’s the prairie and the history of genocide. That’s what does it. You know? And the fact that it’s cold almost all of the time. But, you know, I… I don’t see that happening in music anymore, and that was why the second you announced this, I’m like, oh, no. I am gonna love this, because this is just this weird little quirk of an era where you could have sad music about bad things. Nick 30:48 And you could find it. That’s the thing. Rachel 30:50 Find it? Nick 30:51 Yeah. Now radio stations are [unclear] conglomeratized. And that was happening in the eighties too. They were firing DJs and saying, oh, we could just program music. Or maybe we could get rid of music. And we can get rid of unusual formats. I mean, the… they created… when adult-oriented rock moved to classic rock, that says we’re gonna stop adding new music, that was the death knell creatively of radio, at least in the U.S. And I would be surprised if it was not the same in Canada, except perhaps Canada has the, mandated CanCon. [W&S Note: Broadcasters are mandated to devote a specific portion of their programming to Canadian content. For music, a minimum of 35% of weekly music broadcasting must be Canadian.] Rachel 31:21 We do still have mandated CanCon. Nick 31:25 I do have mandated can con. Like, my friend Jason, you better write something. I need a Canadian in this. He wrote about the replacements. Everyone I tried to peg for demographic reasons said, I’m not doing demographic stuff. I’m writing some crazy song you never heard of. But, of course, there’s enormous amounts of sad music and horrifying music out there that you have to find the hard way the algorithmic processes. So that kind of discovery is no longer there. [Rachel: Mhmm]. I’ve got a kid now, and I remember a few years ago when he was learning how to type and looking at computers and things, he said, oh, I’m gonna do something cool. Said, what are you gonna do? I’m gonna go to amazon.com. I’m gonna go type in cool stuff and see what you can buy me. I said, well, I’m not buying you anything from Amazon. When you type in cool stuff, and if you like, a bunch of random shit came up. I said, look. They… it is all cool. It works. The Internet works. They can type in cool stuff and do that. But you can’t really do that with music. At least not in a way that it’s effective. And I listen to music constantly online. I’m constantly streaming this or that thing. Usually, like, DJ mixes and EDM and, Shoegaze Compilations, and I’m just studying it. And I have to stop saying, wait. That was a song I wanna hear more than once and write it down. Just like I was a teenager listening to college radio and say, what was that? Please come back stumbling stammering DJ. He doesn’t know how to be a DJ, and tell me what those 14 songs were. So, that mode of discovery is gone. And because it’s gone, there’s no impulse to try to create it for a mass audience. And the music industry has destroyed itself. Right? The… the music industry is now a licensing industry for the most part. They’re not interested in launching new apps or new sounds. They’re interested in… in selling and reselling Bob Dylan’s music like they’re NTS. That was extremely challenging, and that is also one reason why this 120 Murders is with a small press, a small start up press, but we’re, like, the second book they’re doing. And it came from a Facebook conversation. The guy that published said, oh, Nick, do you wanna write a story for my anthology? I sure do. Said, oh, you’re doing publishing? Yeah. I’m doing publishing. I’m doing anthologies. You think, Ellen Datlaw will wanna work with me? I said, I think I wanna work with you. Or at the very least, myself, I said, you should probably try me before you try Ellen Datlaw, who’s, like, an extremely famous [anthology editor] to be said that anyone could be an extremely famous anthologist. She’s an extremely famous anthologist and quite busy and, doesn’t suffer fools badly in a beginning level. And I love the small press, and I love sort of just thrashing around with small books. So, it’s for me, it’s, more fun. So, here we are on our small podcast talking about our small book of small stories that make us feel small sad feelings. Rachel 33:53 Yeah. Which segues in perfectly to what small, obscure projects is everybody working on. Nick 33:58 You tell me, Rachel. What are you working on? Rachel 34:00 My new book is out, Blight, which is incredibly depressing. And the first book, Cascade, has many wonderful blurbs, including from yourself. But the one that we almost put on the cover was from Peter Watts, and it was finally something to make the whole punk shut the fuck up. I would say that… that Blight is a little bit more cheerful, but not really by much. So, that… that is out. That is available for you to buy and hold with your greedy little hands. As well, there should be another story of mine floating around with Trollbreath Magazine, another small upstart publishing enterprise called “Do You Love the Color of the Sky?” And I am working on one or two new Sad Bastard Cookbooks. So, there she is. Nick 34:58 Wonderful. I love The Sad Bastard Cookbook, especially. [Rachel: Yep!] I think that book is hilarious, and it looks beautiful. One of the good things about, Neo-Authorization, is it gave us all the tools to do things to make a book that looks as good as a book that you can find in the store from a major publisher, of course, that’s only potential, you know, you do have that skill to do it. Most people can spot a small press book a mile away. [Rachel: Mhmm.] So, that’s a really good achievement that The Sad Bastard Cookbook looks so great, and is so great, and is so funny. And, I… I’m getting a second copy of it for my son who’s 11 and is expressing an interest in cooking, but also in not having very flavor-filled meals. Like, very simple things he likes because he’s a kid and he’s a picky eater. Here’s how you make a pancake. Here’s how you make an egg. You can take a pickle out of a fridge. So back in April, we were all there for the launch party. It was amazing. It was three cities in one day. Food from town to town. 120 Murders came out. By the way, did you know who’s in this book, Rachel? Can content! Silvia Moreno Garcia has a story in this book. Rachel 36:00 Oh, I sure know that! That was my favorite one. Nick 36:02 That’s right! Big deal! The old pal of mine’s got her start as an anonymous commenter on my live, you’re gonna look at her now. Look at me now! Paul Tremblay is in the book. He’s got a story about a pizzeria that doesn’t, take cards. He had to get his revenge on the pizzeria. That was his motivation. Kara Hoffman, famous anarchist thriller writer, writing about a dumpy ass town in the middle of New York, which is every dumpy ass town in New York. We have Meg Gardner, the crime novelist, the mystery and thriller novelist, work by Molly Tanzer, a big honking novelette about a college radio DJ and a prank war and murder. And I’m in that story. [Rachel: Yes!]. Because the story is about me asking her for the story. [David chuckles]. Good to know. Story actually happened or maybe one thing didn’t quite happen the way it was supposed to. I have Alex Jennings, a great writer whose first novel was very musical, and he’s deeply musical. He… he’s the one guy who pitched me a song that I had never heard before as his motivation. He stumped me. He stumped me, he stumped the editor. We had Tom Gibson, who we talked about before, and many, many others. And they all explained. They have little notes about where they were when they first heard their song or what motivated them. And then we have Jeffrey Ford, one of my favorite writers. And this is a great source. I said, “Oh, so, Jeff, do you like this kind of music?” And he said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “Okay. Here are three songs. Pick one and pretend you like it.” [David laughs]. And so, if you ever see Jeff Ford, make sure to ask all about Black Flag. He’s a huge fan of Black Flag, especially the Henry Rollins vocalist era. He’ll answer all your trivia questions with a, “What the fuck are you talking about?” Rachel 37:49 Incredible. Nick 37:50 Incredible. Also coming, I have a short crime comic script in the anthology of comics, short comic book stories, Perfect Crime Party, and it is called the… the 21-foot rule. Do you know what the 21-foot rule is? Rachel 38:09 I do not know what the 21-foot rule is. Nick 38:11 It is a racist police gambit that, gives them ideological cover for shooting people in that, within 21 feet, the police say, a knife beats a gun. That is, I can pull out my knife and rush up to you and stab you if I’m within 21 feet of you before you can pull out your gun and shoot me. And that is why I… police say, oh, I had to shoot him, I thought he had a knife, but he was 20 feet away, exactly. And I… I wrote a story about this a few years ago. It was published in, a prose version of it in a, first of all, we have a small press magazine called Dark Yonder, number one, and I recreated it as a comic book script, and my friend and coworker at my day job, Jules Valera, a wonderful artist out of Glasgow, Scotland, did all the art and all the lettering, and that’s coming out. [W&S Note from https://www.nick-mamatas.com/bibliography.php “The Twenty-One Foot Rule.” Dark Yonder #1, Thalia Press, January 2023.] And in September, if we have September, my next novel is coming out from a small press called Clash Books, a small press that has made its way, climbed its way up to being a medium-sized press. And this is why I’ve got a career, because the editors and publishers and founders of that press read my first novel twenty years ago when they were teenagers and said, oh, wow. I wanna do this. And they were fans of me for whatever reason. And I am like a Velvet Underground in that nobody bought my record, but everyone who bought the record got involved in music. And the same with me. Nobody bought my first novel, but everyone who bought it said I’m gonna ruin my life and become an editor, a writer, or a publisher. And, Rachel 39:29 Called out! Because I bought your first novel. Nick 39:32 There you go. Yeah. And now I could share. You have me on your podcast. And so, the book should be called, if… if the springtime meet is lucky and persuasive, Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. [Note: Nick spells out K-a-l-i-v-a-s] [W&S Note https://www.raincoastgroup.com/item/9781960988799] And it is a modern dress or postmodern dress version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest taking place in a future where everyone but the Caliban character, the titular Kalivas, is a kind of futuristic, posthuman cyborg. That is why they have the magic powers of Prospero, etcetera. And Kalivas is the last free-range human. But publishing being what it is, this past week, the distributor consortium they even call themselves consortium, which is amazing. It’s like calling yourself McEvil. So, can we change the title? And this and then said, what do you wanna change it to? We wanna change it to, “The Last Free-Range Human.” And I thought I was shocked at how terrible an idea that was, because that doesn’t sound like a novel. That sounds like Robert F. Kennedy’s next book about not eating his kittles because it’s got red dye in them. And so, this book might be called The Tempest with a three instead of an e. That was my thing. I said, what would these people want from me? How about The Tempest with a three? Or the, the T3 Pest, as I’ve been calling it in my mind. But anyway, in September, look for a book by me about the Tempest. Just type in Mamatas Tempest book, please into Google. It’ll pop whatever it’s called, it’ll pop up. Rachel 40:43 Awesome. Nick 40:42 And finally, at some point in the future, I’m working on this now, I’m writing a book about Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction and the anarchist and Taoist elements, in her fiction. And it has taken me a long time because every two months somebody puts out another Omelas “fix it” story. For the two of you who don’t know, not you two on this podcast but the two of you in the audience don’t know, The… “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a very famous story by Le Guin, which is about a utopia that is somehow fueled by the degradation of a young child in a closet. And some people don’t like that kind of thing, and they walk away from Omelas. And this has aggravated people for forty years, and for whatever reason in the past fifteen years or so, someone, every couple of months, says, you know what? I’m gonna fix this story. How dare that, Le Guin, do this? I’m gonna rescue that fucking baby, or I’m gonna, have another town with another baby being tortured. I’m gonna make that baby better, or I’m gonna go in there to heal the baby, give the baby a hug, or all this fucking garbage. And so, the… the Omelas four pages, half a chapter, has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Because whenever I said, okay, this chapter’s in bed, another asshole rolls up with a fucking Omelas, “fix-it” story. [David laughs]. Very much as in the being an Omelas book, honestly. We’ll see what happens. That’s what I’m up to. David? David 42:17 I’m not going quite at warp nine at the moment. So, I’m recently retired, and I’m taking that literally and figuratively. I’m trying to break into being, you know, the science fiction, fantasy, horror, short story writer. So, I’ve been in a group for about five years. I’ve got about fifteen, twenty stories and they’re getting to a point I’ve been in poetry for like thirty years and I write at a very high level, but fiction is such a different animal. Just trying to, get the writing done and send it out and see what happens. Nick 42:48 You should take my class. I got an online class in April. You should take it. For everyone else listening to this podcast in June, take my class, sometime. [David laughs]. Maybe November. We’ll… we’ll see when I figure you’d like to do it again. David 42:58 We’ll talk because that sounds, sounds good. Rachel 43:02 Alright. So, thank you so much for joining us. And where do people find you online? Nick 43:07 Right now, the only place you can find me online that if you’re a stranger is Bluesky, @mamatas. That is m-a-m-a like mama, t as in Thomas, a s, all the vowels are a’s. As I say to every telemarketer that I’ve ever called, I’m at mamatas@bluesky. I’m on Facebook. Don’t try to friend me. I mean, you can try to friend me, but, honestly, if you are a guy whose picture is of you wearing a hat and you got a beard, I cannot tell you apart from anybody else, so I will not friend you. You can send me a little note or you can take off your fucking hat. That’s all I got. And, haven’t updated my live journal in four years. It’s not gonna be updated anymore. Pretty much off Twitter. I always stay on there to see if the Elon Musk screen counts are real or fake. Often, they’re fake. And they don’t need to be. He has a lot of insane tweets that doesn’t you don’t need to be creative about them to… to try to smear him. He is a self-smearing machine. So, Bluesky it is, or my website, which I’ve not updated in four years either. But we’ll probably get that updated by June 2025, I hope. Nick-Mamatas.com. Rachel 44:22 Amazing. Well, this is so much fun in a feel bad kinda way. Nick 44:29 Alright. Thank you so much for having me, and continued success to you, Rachel. Good luck with your retirement, David. Rachel 44:34 Yes. Yep. And to you as well. And everybody, go buy 120 Murders. It’s fantastic. Nick 44:37 That’s right. Keep your heads down and your hands up. = = = Rachel 44:40 Wizards & Spaceships is a Night Beats production. It’s written and produced by David L. Clink and Rachel A. Rosen. Our theme music is by Rick Innis. You can find more of his music at anythingthatgrooves on SoundCloud. Our logo is by Marten Norr. See more of his work at flowerprincedraws on Instagram. Rachel 44:55 Our soundbites are from Pixabay. Rachel 44:57 At least half of our dad jokes are by Rohan O’Duill. Rachel 45:00 You can find show notes, other episodes, and links to our other projects at wizardsandspaceships.ca.