Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest

by Nick Mamatas

In this science-fiction revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kalivas lives in solitude on the Farallon Islands, until the Master and his daughter M colonize his lonely realm.

Kalivas, the last free-range human, is pressed into completing dangerous and menial tasks on the Master's behalf. The new regime is disrupted when a great storm brings more cyborg mainlanders to the island shores. Can Kalivas finally break free and reclaim his islands, or will his affection for M keep him tied to the Master forever?

Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest reframes the drama as an anticolonial fantasia through futuristic gizmos, a broken continent, and a one-act play invoking the theater of the absurd. Told by the Bard's least civilized and most human creation, Nick Mamatas crafts a micro-epic for the modern era.

Genres: Retellings, Speculative Fiction

230 pages, Paperback

Published September 23, 2025

About the author

Nick Mamatas is the author of the Lovecraftian Beat road novel Move Under Ground, which was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards, the Civil War ghost story Northern Gothic, also a Stoker nominee, the suburban nighmare novel Under My Roof, and over thirty short stories and hundreds of articles (some of which were collected in 3000 Miles Per Hour in Every Direction at Once). His work has appeared in Razor, Village Voice, Spex, Clamor, In These Times, Polyphony, several Disinformation and Ben Bella Books anthologies, and the books Corpse Blossoms, Poe's Lighthouse, Before & After: Stories from New York, and Short and Sweet.

Nick's forthcoming works include the collection You Might Sleep... (November 2008) and Haunted Legends, an anthology with Ellen Datlow (Tor Books 2009).

A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.

Reviews

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is a human? What is a savage? Having recently seen an intriguing if not entirely good production of The Tempest, I was struck by how Mister Shakespeare handles those questions. Humans are, apparently, either tired old gasbags brought down by their own foibles, foolish irrelevants who will never achieve much, or horny young dumbasses. Not unfair, perhaps, but maybe a few categories of person left out of the Bard’s retirement epic.

As for savages, well, they’re a problem for a few reasons. “Boy, they sure do complain a lot when you take their stuff and ruin their lives, plus they’re gross” seems to be front and center, but I’ll leave the serious analysis to people who actually know anything about Mister Shakespeare and his plays (not me).

Kalivas (the novel) burrows into The Tempest like a nanobot might burrow into human flesh, transforming it into something radically different but still recognizable, and unsettling in that recognizability. Kalivas (the man, the last man actually) burrows into himself like the nanobots he alone does not possess, exploring his past and present away from and among the post-humans with the kind of outsider’s eye we can, ironically, only ever use with any accuracy on ourselves.

In other words, this is a very Nick Mamatas book by Nick Mamatas, which is the best kind of Nick Mamatas book. Nick hates meme-talk, but since when I told him I liked his book he said “great, now go tell Goodreads” I will end this review with *slaps cover of novel* “this bad boy can fit so much interiority in it.” The fact that my phone’s Autocorrect tried to make “interiority” into “inferiority” is the AI icing on the post-human cake.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounding up. What a strange book. It is simultaneously exactly as described – The Tempest
reframed “as an anticolonial fantasia through futuristic gizmos, a broken continent, and a one-act play invoking the theater of the absurd” – and also not what I was expecting despite having read this description ahead of time. I’m not sure now quite what I was expecting, but I’m glad to have read this – Mamatas has somehow produced a work that is both very fresh and original and very recognizable as the retelling that it is. Here, the narrator is Kalivas (a reimagined Caliban), the last “real” human isolated on the Farallon Islands after several disasters, with those arriving on the island – Prospero, his daughter, and the others – all ‘posthuman’ cyborgs. Very effective.

This was the first work I’ve read by Nick Mamatas – I picked it spontaneously, intrigued by the premise – and will look forward to reading more from him in future.

Thank you to CLASH Books & NetGalley for providing me an ARC to review.

[Rachel Ashera Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clever cyberpunk reimagining of The Tempest for our age of oligarchy, Kalivas! leans hard into the anticolonialist interpretation of the play and gives us Caliban as the last human among augmented gods who can't die. Kalivas is a Weird Little Guy, at once repugnant and compelling. The post-disaster world is sketched just enough for the characters to feel grounded in it despite their stylization and otherness. It ends, naturally, with a play-within-a-play that turned out to be my favourite part because I'm turning into some kind of pomo snob. Highly enjoyable.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In this science-fiction revision of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Kalivas lives in solitude on the Farallon Islands, until the Master and his daughter M colonize his lonely realm.

Kalivas, the last free-range human, is pressed into completing dangerous and menial tasks on the Master's behalf. The new regime is disrupted when a great storm brings more cyborg mainlanders to the island shores. Can Kalivas finally break free and reclaim his islands, or will his affection for M keep him tied to the Master forever?

Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest reframes the drama as an anticolonial fantasia through futuristic gizmos, a broken continent, and a one-act play invoking the theater of the absurd. Told by the Bard's least civilized and most human creation, Nick Mamatas crafts a micro-epic for the modern era.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love this description: "Nick Mamatas crafts a micro-epic for the modern era."

Exactly. This precisely delineates this reading experience. Caliban, from Shakespeare's version of The Tempest, starts us (as Kalivas) in the direction Author Mamatas wants us to go. He is, need I mention, not-quite human; he is Us-but-Other. Kalivas is the last fully human representative of our lineage after Apocalypse compels most to seek non-human augmentation. The Master (Prospero) has a "posthuman" as they're now called child, M (Miranda), with whom Kalivas is infatuated.

So, M is repelled but fascinated by Kalivas? So The Master is umitigatedly cruel to Kalivas? But who plays Stephano's part?

Y'all know better than that. The squalling hordes of banshees in the Spoiler Stasi make it impossible for me to tell. I can say that the nature of The Tempest is strongly present in this anticolonial reimagining, I will say that there is a lot more examination of the ways and means of Othering, I'd like you to know that the most common downfall of the retelling...losing sight of the central reason to retell a story in the joy of creating one's own...is entirely absent. As Kalivas hits the beats, the camera of our readerly attention is a few feet off its original mark; we see from a new perspective the way the stories meet, merge, diverge, and if one's paying attention, the why of it all.

[Ryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Told through the perspective of a reimagined Caliban named Kalivas, Kalivas is a sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Which, I know, if you're a high school Shakespeare survivor like me that doesn't sound appealing at all. But I really enjoyed this re-telling and it made me interested in re-visiting The Tempest.

Kalivas, who is now the only true human left after a societal collapse, is a servant to a court of mechanically enhanced individuals (known as "posthumans") and struggles with his loneliness, his enslavement to "The Master", and his infatuation with The Master's posthuman daughter M--a reimagined Miranda.

I really enjoyed that this version was through the eyes of Kalivas, as Caliban is one of the more fascinating parts of the original play. Rather than a story about revenge it becomes a thoughtful character study about the last true human struggling with his place in the world. The writing was fantastic and I'm interested in picking up anything else author Nick Mamatas has written.

*Thank you to Netgalley for providing me an ARC copy of this book. All opinions expressed are entirely my own*

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this "twist" on the Tempest and loved our little detestable narrator in Kalivas. Mamatas does a fantastic job of keeping the wryness of the Bard throughout his text, since that also plays to his strengths. Overall, an interesting and fun spin on an old story with some refreshed humanity and intriguing genre elements.

[S.J. Shank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kalivas! is a re-imagining of The Tempest for our AI-accelerated end times. This techno dystopia draws plenty of inspiration from the old-fashioned kind by centring the struggles of the last free-range human in a post-human world. It’s bleak, absurd and charming, and I couldn’t stop laughing. Highly recommended!

[Ian Mond]

A new Nick Mamatas novel is worthy of celebration. My review of this fine, tricksy, funny novel features in the September 2025 issue of Locus.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

We get a neat sci-fi future take on the Tempest, where the last man on earth is now our Caliban, and the future that is coming to replace is are our Miranda and Prospero. This was a solid read where we get a man slowly falling apart while the new world struggles to be formed. Also appreciate the turn it takes into play format at the end. Pick this up and enjoy the ride.