I figured it could wait.
Then, Matthew Goodwin, editor of the forthcoming Latino/a Risinganthology offered to scan and send me not only the essay about my book, but another that he wrote himself. And they say that the social media is waste of time!
In his essay, “Virtual Reality at the Border of Migration, Race, and Labor” Goodwin proves that he knows what's going on in the wide-ranging, multimedia field of Latino/a speculative ficion in a discussion of three works: “Reaching the Shore” (1994) a short story by Guillermo Lavin, El Naftazteca: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000 (1994) a satellite television event by Guillermo Gómez-Peña (outtakes of it can be seen online), and Sleep Dealer(2008), the powerful film by Alex Rivera. Goodwin points out that The dystopian problems depicted in these narratives are not future fantasies but present-day realities and: The beauty of these artworks is that they imagine highly creative protagonists who use virtual reality for their own purposes and find some way to change reality.
Those things could also be said about my works.
In her “Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan's High Aztech” Lysa M. Rivera not only discusses my work, but getsit:
Reminiscent of Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo(1972) as well as Stephenson's Snow Crash,High Aztech is pure Chicano cyberpunk.
But what is Chicano cyberpunk?
At once an aesthetic and a survival mechanism, rasquachecomes closest to describing Chicano/a cyberpunk production, which also transforms a found object (in this case, classic cyberpunk) by repurposing it to speak for a cultural underdog . . .
Creative protagonists again, changing reality!
High Aztechcan be read as a science fictionalization of Vasconcelos's theories of mestizaje.
Yeah, I'm a proud mestizo, believer in mongrel power, and consider impurity a good thing. I consider myself to be a member of La Raza Cosmica, the race that encompasses all other races. I tried to express this in High Aztech.
As a Chicanafuturist text, then, High Aztechnot only explores the effects of technology on people of color but also imagines alternatives to those impacts.
Protesting isn't enough. And I don't see – as some of my peers in decades past did – technology as the tool of the oppressors. Grab the tools, use them to build your world.
Hogan's text functions as a Chicanafuturist narrative not simiply because it is SF written by a Chicano but more specifically because it adopts a critical stance similar to an Afrofuturist.
I was doing postcyberpunk back when cyberpunk was just beginning. Afrofuturists have told me that High Aztechinfluenced them.
For Hogan and others like him, the motifs and metaphors of SF are best suited to counterdiscource, not escapist literature.
Escapsim is not enough. Contemporary, corporate-generated sci-fi tends to create escapist modules for oppressed consumers to retreat into. In books like High Aztech I hope to give people ideas as to how they can change their assigned realities.
Learning to survive in heterotopia requires a new way of being in the world, and what better genre is there than SF to make this happen?
Heterotopiameans the modern, urban multi/recombocultural environment, NOT a utopia based on the philosophy of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy Magazine . . . you really do need to exist in new ways there. And like I've said, Chicano is a science fiction state of being.
And a friend has offered to buy a copy of Black and Brown Planets for me. I will review it here.
The world may once again be in turmoil, but I'm feeling great, ready to take it on!
Ernest Hogan's High Aztech will be re-released new, improved, ebook and softcover Strange Particle Press editions from Digital Parchment Services in 2015. Meanwhile, buy their new Cortez on Jupiter. And buy and give La Bloga authors for the holidays.
A critic once described my style as “shakycam” -- as in low-budget documentaries shot with hand-held cameras in close, dangerous quarters. It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but does describe what I do as well as how I write.
I know I have a writing career because, like Frankenstein’s monster, it has taken on a life of its own. I keep losing track of it. I have to check my blog to make sure. Keeping up with it gets shakycam.
Take these items from my to-do list:
I’ve been (with the help of my wife) getting my novel Smoking Mirror Blues ready to become an ebook. We finally got through the final go-over and sent it off to the formatter. Tezcatlipoca willing, it may be available around Día de los Muertos.
That done, I started the tedious task of scanning my novel High Aztech -- like Cortez on Jupiter, it was written back in the Ninteen-Hundreds on an ancient mechanism called a typewriter. Not only that, but because of the Españahuatl slang, I’m probably the only human being on the planet who can do the necessary proofreading. I’m in for some fun times in the next few months!
I’m also working on a science fiction short story and a novel about bullfighting. The short story may end up as part of the novel in the end, but it actually creates more work for me.
I’ve decided to put my fantasy novel about the preColumbian ball game aside for a while because, if you haven’t guessed, I’m kind of busy. And I can’t let that cam get too shaky.
And I finally got a chance to do a collection of my short fiction. This is going to one desmadre of a project! It will include works from the typewriter era that will have to be scanned, and will be a twisted thirty-year journey through the strange things that grew in my mind, and the strange places where they got published. Trying to read it in one sitting will probably cause hallucinations and brain damage.
Imagine what putting together that document will be like!
When going over my list of published stories, I realized that there were some that will have to go in other volumes. “The Frankenstein Penis” and its sequel have a still-growing number of true stories connected to them. Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, and Victor Theremin, the science fiction writer who has lost track of where science fiction ends and his life begins, also demand their own books.
And after crossing a few things off my to-do list, I remembered something I had to add to it. Better get to work.
Ernest Hogan really is doing all that stuff. Being a Chicano makes it more complicated and exciting. It’s also very shakycam.
Last week's post began the Charla-Interview with Ernest Hogan, an internationally renowned sci-fi writer practically unknown to Chicano readers. The purpose of this is not to tell Chicanos they should read his sci-fi; the purpose is to introduce this vato and explain why you might like checking out his work, because confining our literary experience to predominately "ethnic works" and avoiding vampiro detective or reincarnated Aztec god spec fiction might be the flip side of Anglos who shun Chicano novels.
But in fact, Hogan's works are "ethnic." The sociological, political, cultural backstories to his futuristic novels make them so. I'm still amazed he succeeded in getting them published, given how Chicano they are.
For instance, his third novel Smoking Mirror Blues is a blast of avalanching prose about protagonist Beto Orozco who gets caught up in his artificial-intelligence creation of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, set in future El Lay. It's not the Hollywood Blvd. we know; it's not the Chicano community you grew up in. But Hogan drapes his stories with elements of our world and herein lies the "ethnicity" that appeals, at least to this Chicano.
Smoking Mirror Blues has a Black President. Okay, that's not sci-fi anymore, but when it was published in 2001 it was. High Aztech features a U.S. government gone Christian-extreme, to the point of burning heretics on the White House lawn. Almost where G. Bush Jr. wanted to take us or Palin would have. With that, Hogan's taking the reader maybe more into the horror genre than sci-fi, but point is, his treatment of issues we face today proves the relevancy created in this genre.
El Texto
RG: With that intro, Ernesto, one of the common themes in all three of your novels is immigration. In Cortez, your graffiti-art hero emigrates to Jupiter for a better life; you've got the U.S. building the Tortilla Curtain on the border; and in High Aztech you give us a renamed Mexico City--Tenochtítlan--as the capital of a country U.S. gringos emigrate to because La Amerika failed as a superpower. I know you live in Arizona, but do you think you might have overdone it with the Migra issue? And why'd you think it'd make it past the slush piles?
EH: When you put it that way, I look like an obsessed, militant vato loco, but truth is, I tend to write about immigration because I can’t escape the issue. I just noticed that some the art I sent you for this interview is about the Migra, and was drawn long before the cu
In a spring 2010 La Bloga post I mentioned Ernest Hogan, author of Cortez on Jupiter, a 1990 science fiction novel that "treats its Chicano protagonist in the way a Chicano would write it." I threatened to do an interview of Hogan, even though I tend to get out of sync and fall into gonzoismos. If you want to read regular interviews of Hogan, go here or here.
Entonces, Hogan had two novels (Cortez and High Aztech) picked up by Ben Bova's Discovery Series from publisher Tor. If you don't know about Ben Bova and Tor, you're no sci-fi reader, but FYI Tor is huge corporate publisher of spec lit. So 20 years ago Hogan broke into the spec fiction market in a big way. La cosa es, the vato's a Chicano.
I read Cortez years ago and dug the holymadre out of it. In years, what I found were Anglo sci-fi readers who knew of Hogan but didn't know he was Chicano. Al otro lado, I found NO Chicano literati who knew about him or his books. When I got in touch with Hogan, I told him I'd thought he was dead.
He responded: "Now and then I find these 'What ever happened to Ernest Hogan?' things online. Guess I have some work to do."
While Ernesto works on re-informing the sci-fi world he's not dead, I'm working on informing the Chicano world that we've had a 'mano we could have been proud of and reading, for the last 20 years, but we just didn't know about him. Truism: "Chicanos don't read sci-fi", so that's why they don't know about Hogan? That could be a topic for another time or conference.
When you learn how Hogan plays with Spanish, Spanglish, Náhautl, when he hear how he worked the immigration issue in far-futuristic stories, when you read about his crazy vato-heros playing god with the universe, you might forget "Chicanos don't read sci-fi" and try to win the autographed copy of Cortez on Jupiter we're giving away next Sat. To enter, send us an Email with the answer to the question below. If you win, we'll contact you for surface mail info. In the meantime .
When I first heard about Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fictionedited by Isaih Lavender III, I was interested. Then I found out that one of the essays was about my novel High Aztech, I figured I hadto read it. Then I saw that it cost sixty bucks . . .
Suerte, 'Nesto. I'm in my own Closet of Discarded Dreams and everything coming at my face is blocking the view. So, I commiserate,
RudyG
It's overwhelming, but in a good way. The world seems to have finally realized that Chicano writers exist and are worth reading.