Publication Date: May 1, 2011 | Series: Spectacular Fiction
When Julia Hernandez leaves her husband, shoots a real estate developer, and then vanishes without a trace, she slips out of the world she knew and into the Simulacrum—a place where human history is both guided and thwarted by the conflict between a species of anarchist wasps and a collective of hyperintelligent spiders. When Julia's ex-husband Raymond spots her in a grocery store he doesn't usually patronize, he's soon drawn into an underworld of radical political gestures where Julia is the new media sensation of both this world and the Simulacrum. Told ultimately from the collective point of view of another species, this allegorical novel plays with the elements of the Simulacrum apparent in real life—media reports, business speak, blog entries, text messages, psychological-evaluation forms, and the lies lovers tell one another—and poses a fascinating idea that displaces human beings from the center of the universe and makes them simply the pawns of two warring species.
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"The Majestic Plural, or Royal We, is well known—Sensation introduces the Arachnid Plural, the we of spiders, the ones that live inside you. The spiders care about you—deeply—and want to use you in a millennial war against certain parasitic wasps. No, I was wrong. The spiders only want to help. So let them in." —Zachary Mason, New York Times-best-selling author, The Lost Books of the Odyssey
"Mamatas is a powerfully acerbic writer, both in fiction and online. His acid wit is infamous, and it is on splendid display in Sensation, which is alive with scornful insight about pop culture, the net, and politics. I recommend it highly." —Cory Doctorow, www.boingboing.net
"(A) self-consciously [post-modern] third novel. This accumulation of pop-culture babble, layered with thin insight and metatextual archness, is amusing enough in an epigrammatic way." —Publishers Weekly (June 22, 2011)
"Sensation, in many ways, does what all good science fiction aims to do: it offers a critique of the status quo. It depicts an alternative in order to highlight the problems in our reality." —www.htmlgiant.com
About the Author
Nick Mamatas is the author of the novels Move Under Ground and Under My Roof, as well as the short story collection You Might Sleep. His writing has been translated into German, Italian, and Greek, and he has been nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards and the Kurd Lasswitz Prize. He is the coeditor of the online magazine Clarkesworld and his essays have appeared in the Clamor, In These Times, the New Humanist, the Smart Set, and the Village Voice. He lives in Oakland, California.
Nick Mamatas. Author of two novels; Move Under Ground (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and Under My Roof (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections; 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once (Prime 2003) and You Might Sleep... (Prime 2009), and the novella Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001).
He is also the editor of the anthologies The Urban Bizarre (Prime 2003), Phantom #0 (Prime 2005), Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake, Lethe 2008), and Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow, Tor 2010).
Nick also co-edited the magazine Clarkesworld for two years, which was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Stories from Clarkesworld have been collected in a pair of anthologies: Realms and Realms 2 (Wyrm Publishing 2008 and 2009).
Nick's own short stories have appeared in literary journals such as Mississippi Review online, subTERRAIN, and Per Contra, slicks including Razor and Spex, and fantasy and horror magazines and anthologies including New Dark Voices 2, Poe's Lighthouse, ChiZine, and Lovecraft Unbound.
His fiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany's Kurd-Laßwitz Preis. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Smart Set, H+, Clamor, In These Times, various anthologies. With Kap Su Seol he translated and edited the first English edition of a firsthand account of South Korea's Kwangju massacre--Kwangju Diary (UCLA Asian Pacific, 1999).
Nick now lives in the California Bay Area, where he is editor of tradebooks for VIZ Media and edits both Japanese science fiction novels in translation and books associated with Oscar-winning filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli.
The thing about Mamatas...you can't ever say he's done it again, no matter how many great books or short stories or essays he pens, because in doing so you'd run the risk of implying that he's repeating himself, which he isn't. No, what makes him such a vital voice in modern fiction is that he veers so wildly from project to project that you can't really predict his trajectory, but you're always sure he'll land somewhere interesting. He can be a smartass, but like the best of the weisenheimers there's way more of the smart than the ass. To which he'd probably have some choice rejoinder, but then that was a bit of a softball pitch.
The thing about Sensation...it's one hell of a novel. Genre conventions given the brainiac treatment, barbed pop and counter culture references aplenty, a style that's simultaneously inventive yet effortlessly accessible, and a healthy smattering of almost-too-clever-for-their-own-good gags all stewed up in Mamatas' vision of America, a place uncomfortably close enough to the real thing to make you check for webs over the bed before tucking down. Yes, but is it both fun *and* profound? Yeppers.
What's it about? You, me, the whole shebang--read the product description if you're the type who needs to know if there's a bone of SF under all the meaty stuff (spoiler alert: there is). The bottom line is that if you like your fiction sharp, quick, relevant, and refreshingly reckless, this is the fix. Yahbye.
At the risk of reviewing the author as much as the book: if you've followed the career, and perhaps more importantly, the widely varied interests of author Nick Mamatas (there's a reason some of his writings were collected as 3000 MPH In Every Direction At Once) for any substantial amount of time, you will find much that is familiar within Sensation, from Brattleboro to protest activism to virtual worlds to the Brood (just me? Fine, okay. This could easily have made this a hobo stew of a novel, but in fact Mamatas crafts a fully coherent and -- after its fashion -- plausible story so immediately prescient that it called the Occupy protests almost perfectly (how perfectly remains to be seen, I suppose.)
At the same time it is, without question, a story told by spiders about mutant wasps changing the course of human affairs. It's also a book about humans changing the course of personal affairs, and a book about social movements, and about online social networks, and about New York, and... well. It's about a lot of things. But they're things with a great deal of verisimilitude and they are strung together in an entirely enjoyable fashion, and that's what you're looking for, right?
Unless you're looking for a neat ending. In which case you've probably come to the wrong author, frankly.
Checked this out and found that I don't really like the way this guy writes. The book seems unfocused and all over the place. And I thought that the narrator Mamatas used was ineffective and really clumsy. I gave up early on this book. Maybe it got better. I don't know, and I don't care.
