Writers Cast
July 21, 2011
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.”
Nick Mamatas is an incredibly inventive writer. Sensation
combines comedy, inter-species communication, fantastic imagination,
social and political critique into a fast moving, tightly plotted and
very unusual storyline. By combining a science fiction bent with a
hyper-real portrayal of modern digitally connected culture, Mamatas is
able to play with all the elements of modern everyday life, so we see
things differently, perhaps even more clearly.
In some ways like The Matrix, there is an invisible world around and behind our own. Fittingly, in Sensation,
that world is essentially woven by a species of spiders that has
created an very special relationship with the human world, one that is
far from predictable and complicated in its own right. These spiders
care about humans, protect them, and use them for their own purposes in
an ongoing war with a parasitic species of wasps. On this unlikely and
unusual premise, Mamatas has built a fantastic story.
I enjoyed
reading this book on a number of levels, not the least of which for the
author’s simultaneously dark, comedic and critical approach to our
modern digital, paranoid, corporatized and controlled society. I do
like it when a novelist can successfully include political critique in a
work of fiction. Mamatas is an accomplished writer with a dystopian
outlook I enjoy. And similarly I enjoyed our conversation about this
book and the author’s approach to writing. I think you will appreciate
his approach to talking about his work.
“Nick Mamatas continues
his reign as the sharpest, funniest, most insightful and political
purveyor of post-pulp pleasures going. He is the People’s Commissar of
Awesome.” — China Mieville, award-winning author of Kraken and The City & the City
Nick’s website is well worth a visit as well as his online journal (Nihilistic Kid).
