Nick Mamatas, Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. Troy, NY: Clash Books. 2025. Pp. 230. Paper.

In Nick Mamatas’s futuristic novel Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, Kalivas, the last “free range human,” is “too busy being alive” in the midst of post-humans, the cyborgs that never die, or at least until “existential boredom” kills them. Using Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a plot structure, the novel reflects on not just the theme of territorial colonization, which in fact is less of a concern, but the colonization of scientific advancement and its threat to humanity, forcing us to ask, what exactly is the ultimate goal of such advancement?

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan, has been exiled on an island, where he causes a storm to shipwreck the men responsible for his exile. But while he is a victim himself, he also becomes a colonizer, taking control of the island and enslaving Caliban, the island’s original occupant, by virtue of his magic and superior knowledge.

In Kalivas! the island is San Farallon, where the modern-day Prospero has been exiled with his daughter M. Here Kalivas, Mamatas’s Caliban, still lives a human life, all alone. He had been exiled here with his mother, Soterio, a modern-day witch, a genius scientist, who’d been mistreated by mainlanders, just like Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, had been exiled from Algiers for her witchcraft. But Kalivas has no scientific inclination, and he doesn’t understand his mother’s art and so he remains a “free range” human. He is a man who still preserves the elements that make one a human being, unlike all the other characters we meet in the novel.

The post-human, modern-day Prospero is much stronger than Kalivas because he is fitted with chips. When he arrives on the island with his baby, Miranda, he needs milk to feed her, and Kalivas is forced to commit violence on behalf of his master—kill a baby seal and open its gut to collect milk. The asymmetrical power relation between them does not, however, discourage Kalivas. He knows that San Farallon is his land, though colonized, and he is determined to keep fighting to reclaim it. When new men, all post-humans, arrive on the island after a storm, he teams up with a modern Antonio to become the island’s king in a comic, almost absurdist, turn of events. His short-lived rule shows his human will to become his own master and the master of his land, and also, with a tinge of irony, humanity’s desire to rule over others, even over post-humans.

The fact that Kalivas is the narrator of the story is very significant. The colonized Caliban in Shakespeare can speak with the colonizers only because the colonizers have taught him their language. And he has been taught the language simply because he is a useful tool for Prospero and Miranda. Of course, Caliban revolts, by claiming that he is now capable of cursing the colonizers but that’s not something that benefits him in any way. He is a voiceless indigenous man in his own land. Mamatas turns that upside down by making Kalivas the narrator of his own story, a story of humanity that Kalivas preserves by fighting post-humans until the end. The other humans, the post-humans at various stages of achieving their immortality, outlive him, but their “living” merely leads to existential boredom.

One major tool Mamatas uses to keep Kalivas human is the use of pornography. Kalivas’s mother has left him with TV screens and enough “pornos”—which, to Kalivas, means not just adult but all films—to watch. Besides going out to find rudimentary food and growing potatoes and serving his master, Kalivas is only watching pornos. They are his only means of connecting not only with the outside world, the mainland, “civilization,” but also with the ultimate human elements. Machines cannot have intimacy, nor can they have sex. Machines do not have weddings, they do not procreate. At one point, some mainlanders, all of whom are post-humans at different levels of sophistication, come to take Kalivas to the mainland for procreation, but it’s already been too late; Kalivas can merely commit suicide marking the end of the last true human being.

The two-part structure of the novel deserves comment too. The first part is a standard prose narrative, but the second part appears as a one-act play, with a title, written by “anonymous.” At the beginning I was not sure how to approach this—whether I’d like it and whether the experiment would work. But as I read the novel further, it began to work amazingly well. This section, much shorter than the first, reminded me of the haibun, the poetic form that starts with prose and ends with either haikus or other short forms of poetry. This poetic section builds on the preceding prose but takes an emotional turn, transporting readers to a different meditative world. The poem thrums with the atmosphere created in the prose section but gives a different experience. Exactly like this, in Kalivas! the play builds on the previous narrative and takes the reader to a new reality of a thousand years later, with many philosophical reflections. This play has echoes of Shakespeare as well as the theater of the absurd, mainly Beckett, and forces us to meditate in existential terms. This is where we encounter a full post-human world trapped in an existential crisis where the disintegrating cyborgs are “in search of a life beyond the confines of the stage.”

In Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest, the post-humans are condemned to question immortality just as existential thinkers delve into the predicament of being free. So what’s the “Another Tempest?” Is it the arrival of new technologies? The AI? How is humanity going to survive the new threats science is bringing to us? The novel poses some of the AI-era’s pressing questions about the future of humanity with humor, wisdom, and grit. As fun as it is to read, it is a serious and timely reflection on our condition as human beings.

October 27, 2026

Khem K. Aryal is the author of the short story collection The In-Betweeners and the fiction chapbook His Grandma Blues. He is also the editor of South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South and Migrating Craft: The Art and Practice of Contemporary U.S. Writers with Immigrant Roots. He teaches creative writing at Arkansas State University.

Editor’s Note: “So for me,” Nick Mamatas stated in an interview, “ The Tempest was always a bit Greek.” For a connection between the author’s personal and family Greek American traces and the novel see here.