THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF EVERYTHING by Nick Mamatas – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The People's Republic of Everything by Nick Mamatas
Published by Tachyon Publications on August 29 2018
Genres: Adult, Speculative fiction
Pages: 336
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Although I didn’t enjoy all the stories in this collection, I’m still a big fan of Mamatas and his unending, quirky imagination, and some of these stories will be hard to forget.

I have read and enjoyed a couple of Nick Mamatas’ novels, and I thought it would be interesting to see how he approached the short story. Unfortunately, this collection was a mixed bag for me, and I ended up really enjoying only a handful of stories. Each one includes an afterword by the author, explaining how the story came about and where he was in his writing career when it was written. These “story notes” were in some cases more interesting than the stories themselves, which made me wonder if a collection of Mamatas’ essays might be a better fit for me. As I try to write this review, a couple of descriptive words about this book come to mind: Avant garde, experimental, and erudite to name a few. Some of these stories were tough to read. If you enjoy putting effort into your reading, then there is a lot to love and discover between the covers of this book, but the casual reader might struggle a bit like I did. Mamatas seems to love to draw on his own personal experiences for story fodder, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Except, not all life experiences deserve their own short story, in my opinion, and so I found that some of these just didn’t interest me enough to even read them to the end.

That being said, I am blown away by Mamatas’ imagination. These stories are weird, folks, and even though there were quite a few that I just didn’t “get,” several of them were delightfully strange in a way that I could relate to. Those are the stories I’d like to talk about in this review.

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One of my favorites opens the collection. Walking with a Ghost is about a couple of graduate students who decide to create a Lovecraft AI. They use Lovecraft’s written correspondence to create the AI, although the results aren’t quite what they expected. I thought this story was clever and funny, and having read and enjoyed one of Mamatas’ Lovecraft-inspired novels (I Am Providence), I thoroughly enjoyed this story as well.

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The title story of the collection, The People’s Republic of Everywhere and Everything, is a weird little tale about a couple of kids and their scheme to steal a device that can crack any password. I loved it in a “what the fuck did I just read?” sort of way. It takes place in Berkeley, California, a techy college town, where such a scheme is probably the norm. It also involves a character with a condition called Cotard’s Delusion, which leads you to believe you’re literally a dead man walking. Mamatas gathered several disparate ideas and somehow cobbled them together into an effective story.

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The Great Armored Train was one of my very favorites. Mamatas takes a bit of history—Leon Trotsky’s famous armored train used in the Russian Civil War—and adds in the legend of a woman who can turn into an owl. Somehow he combines these two ideas into an exciting, war-time tale that ends unexpectedly in a love story.

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Mamatas turns his attention to the perils of social media and online dating in The Glottal Stop, a story about a girl who uses her knowledge of chemistry to defend herself on a date gone wrong. We’ve all been there, right? If only we had half the imagination of the main character Beatriz!

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Finally, Mamatas finishes out the collection with a novella called Under My Roof, which I enjoyed immensely, maybe because it seems his longer fiction works better for me than his short stories. It tells the story of Daniel Weinberg and his family, who like millions of other people, were deeply affected by the events of 9/11. Years later, disillusioned with the state of his country, Daniel sets out to build a home-brew nuclear bomb and secede from the United States. Absurd, poignant, funny and irreverent, Mamatas explores the motivations of a man who has had enough and is going to do something about it. The story is told by Daniel’s son Herbert, who not only helps him build the bomb (the scenes of scouring the city dump for unlikely bomb parts are some of the funniest I’ve ever read!) but by default becomes a citizen of the newly minted “Weinbergia.” Part anti-war satire, part astute observation on the state of American politics, this story in particular deserves a much wider audience.

In the end, I’m very glad I picked up this book. If I hadn’t, I would have missed some very good stories, and that would have been a shame.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy.