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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 .