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It's the year 2015, and looking back at 2014, some interesting stuff has happened, and it has to do with the core Chicanonautic concerns. Seems that science fiction and fantasy – or at least the offical stuff from big time publishers – has discovered diversity, and is giving awards to women of color. Big news! The future and the universe are diverse!
Since I've been doing this for decades, and jumping up and down screaming to get people to notice, I have mixed feelings about it. I was diverse before diversity was cool.
I remember when all science fiction was considered trashy, and fantasy didn't quite get picked up on the radar. Getting published was considered a minor miracle, and if you made any real money, maybe you weren't really sci-fi after all.
Add the fact that you might be a Chicano or something weird like that -- well, I had a lot of people look at me like I was crazy and try to talk me out of it. I guess I got used to it. I never did expect much acceptance or cooperation. I figure I'm like movie monster, running amok until the authorities bring in the heavy firepower.
I was out to see if I could get away with things, and I managed to do it.
But the times have changed. Magazines like The Atlanticand The New Yorkerare publishing articles that would have been the stuff of fanzines when I was getting started. The masses eat up sci-fi franchises brought to them by multinational corporations that they know and trust.
Maybe a book or two gets bought now and then, but I don't see my writer friends and acquaintances getting rich.
I'm not getting rich either, but 2014 was a successful year for me. My multi-book deal with Digial Parchment Services' Strange Particle Press is going well. Editors doing “diverse” antholgies are getting in touch with me for stories. And academia has discovered me, so if I play my cards right, my books will taught on campuses all over. My readers, who have been called a “noisy minority” have grown up to be editors, publishers, and professors.
Seems like all the hard work I've been doing for decades is paying off, but I do wonder. I've been right here all along, stomping the terra, and it took this long to discover me. Haven't I been visible or noisy enough?
Maybe it's because I've always been an outsider, waging a guerrilla war for my own existence, that I'm uneasy about diversity in science fiction and fantasy being the coming thing. I don't know how to be in. I don't trust the Establisment. What if they decide that it's just a fad: “Diversity? That so 2014!”
But then, what if writers like me are the coming thing? Science fiction is busting out all over the place, in real life, with changes happening faster and faster. Is it more than a coincidence that this is happening simultaneously with the post-Ferguson racial strife?
The future is coming, and it's looking scary. It'll cause some freak-outs. People are going to need new visions to help them sort it out. Diverse writers with wild imaginations can do that.
Ernest Hogan is the author of the novels Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues. Watch for his story collection, Pancho Villa's Flying Circus.
2014 just wants to keep on running me ragged. Things keep happening (besides the riots and the racial strife). Not only is the new Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press ebook of Cortez on Jupiterorderable, but the press release is available, so you can read about the impending soft-cover edition, find out where to write about getting review copies, and read quotes of wild praise for the book.
If that isn’t enough, Digital Parchment has started a new Ernest Hogan blog so they can promote their editions of my books. They also started an Ernest Hogan Tumblr. I’ll be posting stuff on both of them, so check ‘em out!
Which brings me to the main subject of this post . . . the writer Nalo Hopkinson, who teaches at UC Riverside, sent me a direct message on Twitter (most of my sales and gigs these days come through the social media) asking if I would be willing to lead a workshop “on writing Latino-focused SF/F/H,” because “The community has been asking for it.” Ever the professional, I asked if it was a paying job, and it is, so it looks like in February 2015 I’ll be teaching a master class (hey! I’m an expert in the field!) as part of their Writer’s Week. I will provide more details as I get them.
2015 and February are coming at us fast. I need to think about it, and take some notes . . . I could fill the time with funny stories about my weird career, but since this is a university thing, I should probably ask the communitythat Nalo was talking about what theywant. I’m assuming that a lot of you aspiring Chicanonauts read La Bloga.
So, what would you like to know about writing Latino-focused speculative fiction/fantasy/horror? Are there specific questions you’d like answered? Just what can I do for you?
I’ll be waiting for your comments . . .
Ernest Hogan has accumulated a lot of ancient Chicano Sci-Fi wisdom over the years. He’s willing to share it. Especially for money. Or food. Or cerveza. Oh yeah, feliz Día de Los Guajolotes.
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on 11/14/2014
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WorldCon 2015 - How inclusive of Latinos & Native Americans?
The world's biggest SF/F convention will be held in Indian Country of Spokane, Wash., next August. Since I participated in many "Spanish strand" workshops/panels in WorldCon 2013 in San Antonio, I've suggested they should continue the Latino inclusion and involve some Native American speakers on panels and workshops. Officially, I've received no response. The one move they made at changing their all-white, very-old/male speakers list was to add Tananarive Due. Questions about Latino and Native American author-inclusion and workshops remain.
The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) produces WorldCon. It's part of the long-running F/SF establishment that's dominated speculative lit for decades. Its old direction of good-old-boy club has changed somewhat to include women. Then blacks. Then Asians. But it's an uphill climb for them to change themselves into a group better reflecting 21st Century North American spec lit. How is it that Sci-Fi people are so retrograde conservative?
Another piece of that establishment is The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, SFFWA. Here's recent posts about them
"In the early 90s, I applied and was first denied entrance (I'm from Mexico, but still live here) until I argued that America is the whole continent and that Mexico is in America and thus I should be admitted to SFWA (I had done everything asked for). They eventually relented, letting me in as the first Mexican in SFWA, and a few years later managed to drop me when I was late paying my annual dues (by no more than a week). I agree: let´s do something new and multinational about it."
"I decided not to join (not based on this update)."
"I am definitely ready for a multinational thing."
Spec author Silvia Moreno-Garcia just posted this on FB: "SFWA sucks [something]. Sorry if you like it, but I am so bored with it…. Next year I'm spending my membership money on some other banal thing that brings me more joy. Like a fancy octopus plush toy."
I don't know exactly what Silvia is referring to. But there's NO reason that Chicano, Latino, Native American, black and other historically underrepresented authors should have to worry about anything other than creating their art. PERIOD. Exclusion, privilege, bureaucracy, chauvinism of any form have no place in speculative literature. Or much of anywhere else.
If you're thinking of maybe attending Sasquan next year, here's what they say about being included in workshop/panels: "Sasquan would like to hear from you if you’re interested in being considered as a panelist and/or a performer. We don’t know everyone and Worldcons always find a few good panelists/performers by encouraging volunteers to apply."
Remarkable Latino Children's Lit of 2014
Just in time for gift-giving season, here's one group's list of kid's books--some written by Latino First Voices--with Latinos as the main characters.
"Latinas for Latino Lit (L4LL) announces our annual "Best of the Best" children's literature titles written by or about Latinos. Selections include award-winning authors such as Duncan Tonatiuh and publishers ranging from household name New York presses to community-focused, independent companies.
"Why publish this list now? At the end of the year, "tastemakers" such as The New York Times and National Public Radio (NPR) publish their "best of" lists. Inevitably, their selections feature few, if any Hispanic authors. The L4LL Remarkable Latino Children's Literature of 2014 selections spotlight this glaring absence, rooted not in Hispanic authors' lack of talent. Rather, their exclusion reflects the tastemakers' significant professional blind spots and institutional flaws."
¡Ask a Mexican! Happy Birthday: Thoughts on 10 Years of Raising DESMADRE
History will decide the Chicano authors and their literature that should be called classic. But I don't know how history could omit Gustavo Arellano and his works. In the guise of humor and satire, el hombre has produced some of the tightest, most precise, chignón funny writing of our generation. Here's a message from him:
"This week marks the 10-year anniversary of this infernal columna—10 pinche years already! The Mexican is not much for retrospectives—that's a gabachothing—but I do want to take a moment to offer thanks to a couple of cabrones: former OC Weekly editor Will Swaim for giving me the idea for the column; VICE Media chingón Daniel Hernández for writing the Los Angeles Times profile that changed my life; Scribner for printing ¡Ask a Mexican! in best-selling book form; mi chula esposa for all her support and pickling my peppers (and that is not a metaphor); Tom Leykis for hosting a call-in-version of ¡Ask a Mexican! all these years (subscribe to his podcast at www.blowmeuptom.com); all the haters, whose vile words remind me why I started writing this in the primera place; my friends and familiafor the obvious reasons; the Albuquerque Alibi for being the first newspaper besides my home periódico to have the huevos to run the column; and, lastly but not leastly, ustedes gentle readers, whose eternal curiosity about Mexicans makes this weekly rant an eternally rollicking bit of DESMADRE. To the next decade or 50!"
If you'd like to send him best wishes, or another windmill for him to use his lance on and dissect, do so.
Should Latino/a authors do YA lit with la política?
If you're a Latino/a writer who thinks the political has no place in Latino kid's lit, that it can't be engaging to young people, that it won't earn good reviews, that such novels won't be successful, here's a Sunday NYTimes book review of Paolo Bacigalupi's new YA, The Doubt Factory. He's no Chicano, but he's got otras sangres that spice up his prose. Here's a snapshot of what he did:
"Paolo Bacigalupi [and Alaya Dawn Johnson] are attempting a path in their latest books, thrillers that don’t just marry the personal to the political, but exploit the fantastical conventions of genre to make a head-on critique of the contemporary political landscape.
"To be a teenager is to be acutely aware of power, in all its forms — by virtue of having so frustratingly little of it. Which means adolescent protagonists impose a limiting factor on political fiction. They turn to science fiction and fantasy and play politics to their heart’s content: There’s no believability ceiling to how teenagers in futuristic societies can change their worlds. Following up award-winning Y.A. dystopian novel, Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, an impassioned astonishment of linguistic ingenuity and innovative world-building, but also an attack on the politics of poverty and oppression.
"Now, Bacigalupi uses conventions of genre to attack a thoroughly unconventional brand of evil: the public relations experts and scientists-for-sale who conspire to replace certainty with manufactured doubt, nicknamed The Doubt Factory: “The place where big companies go when they need the truth confused. . . . The place companies go when they need science to say what’s profitable, instead of what’s true.” Tobacco industry lobbying, pharmaceutical companies’ manipulation of the F.D.A. — Bacigalupi doesn’t shy from indicting real-world doubt merchants by name and deed.
"In our proudly post-postmodern world of antiheroes and shades of gray, the value of nuance, in fiction and beyond, is almost axiomatic. To see the world in black and white is to see it through a child’s eyes. Bacigalupi is challenging this conflation of simplicity with naïveté, which makes for a somewhat flat narrative, but a stirring cri de coeur. Compromise, complication, doubt: These are his enemies. Maybe there’s nothing childish about moral clarity; maybe to understand that some stories have only one defensible side is what it means to grow up.
 |
| a VERY Chicano-political fantasy novel |
"In the end, this is the message for young readers: Wake up. Ask questions. Challenge authority. Form your own opinions. Fight injustice, no matter the cost. These days, suggesting that a book has an overt message is almost an insult, as if purpose is incommensurable with art. Maybe so: these are not perfect novels. But they’re bold and ambitious, unafraid to charge into territory too often avoided, their authors keenly aware: Some messages are too important not to deliver."
You can read the entire article and then decide whether you'd like your next kid's book to get a review like this. I wish it so.
Es todo, hoy,
by Ernest Hogan
The world probably isn’t ready for it, but I’ve learned that the world is never ready for all the good stuff. So don’t wait. Do it now.
So why not Latino/a Rising, the first collection of U.S. Latino/a science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative genres? Editor Matthew David Goodwin already has Kathleen Alcalá, Giannina Braschi, Pablo Brescia, Ana Castillo, Daína Chaviano, Junot Díaz, Carlos Hernandez, Adál Maldonado, Carmen Maria Machado, Alejandro Morales, Daniel José Older, Edmundo Paz-Soldán, Alex Rivera, and Sabrina Vourvoulias onboard.
Also:
Latino/a Rising will not only include literature. There are many Latino/a artists who are using science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative genres in their art work. And this anthology will include some of their most interesting artwork.
Wait a sec, I think I forgot something . . . oh yeah!
There’s going to be a story by yours truly in it, Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails.
The Paco of the title in none other than Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, hero of two of my stories The Rise and Fall of Paco Cohen and the Marichis of Mars and Death and Dancing in New Las Vegas that originally appeared in Analog.
And yes, I’m working on more stories that I hope to assemble into an epic -- suitable for adaptation into a major motion picture or miniseries -- novel . . .
Meanwhile, contribute to the campaign. Help turn these wild Latino/a dreams loose on this troubled planet!
Ernest Hogan is trying to find time to finish a number of stories while publicizing the new edition of Cortez on Jupiter, and helping get High Aztech ready for re-release. There are also other projects he keeps remembering.
A while back, the subject of why there aren’t more Latino science fiction/speculative ficton/fantasy writers came up, and I don’t think we found a clear reason. It’s probably the same reason that we don’t see more Latino writers in general -- it’s usually not profitable, and we tend to end up doing other things just to survive. My father wrote, even published a few articles, but he had to work, keeping Flying Tiger Airlines’ planes flying to get the money to support his family. I imagine all Latino families have stories like that.
Another reason is that being a writer is something you are doomed to, like bearing the Mark of the Beast. I disagree with the cottage industry that claims anyone can be a writer if you just take their classes, go to their seminars and workshops, follow their rules and instructions. I don’t think that everyone should be a writer any more than we should all be bullfighters or astronauts. You gotta have the right stuff, cabrónes!
My idea of mentoring an aspiring writer is to say, “Okay! You wanna be a writer? Be a writer! Go do it!” Some of them do. Others need more help from me. If you need more help from me, you don’t have it. I feel like an old junkie listing to young hipsters saying, “I really want to get hooked, but I keep forgetting to take my shots . . .”
Encouraging people to be become writers is like helping them to become drug addicts -- a sort of Twelve-Step program in reverse.
I ended up a writer because I couldn’t quit. At age thirteen, I published a few letters in comic books, and I was hooked. From my typewriter to the world! What a thrill!
Lately I realize that I’m one of the most successful Chicano writers of my generation. If we narrow it down to science fiction, I’m number one!
It’s a cheap thrill I chuckle at as I work at my day job.
If I hadn’t had that taste of publication, I probably would have just done my creative stuff in private, like most Latinos. I ain’t no humble campesino toiling away in dignified anonymity -- if too long goes by without my being published, I get really depressed. And without thinking about it, I’m scanning for opportunities.
And I feel bad about my unpublished novels and stories.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, my career has a life of its own. It does things out in the world without my supervision. And these days, I spend more time managing it than writing.
And to think, once I believed I was a failure, after not being published in Nueva York, and only getting into print a few times a year (and not making much dinero at it). I got a full time job and slowed down -- or at least thought I was slowing down. Turns out I kept on publishing at the same rate as when I was knocking myself out.Also, it turned out that people actually read my novels and the weird, obscure magazines where my stories appeared. Some of them went on to become editors and publishers.
Now I’m working with a newfangled publisher in San Francisco, getting my novels ready for rerelease, and putting together a collection my short fiction.
All because I didn’t, and couldn’t, give up.
Still, I wish I was writing new stuff more of the time.
I’m developing some funny reactions when I hear or see the word “diversity” -- especially when concerning science fiction, speculative literature, or what ever we’re calling that twisted wad of imaginative genres today. It happened when I read Rudy Ch. Garcia’s recent La Bloga post. Before I knew it, I had tweeted:
I was diverse back when it scared the shit out of people.
Right away my friend Selina Phanara reminded me that I still scare people “plenty,” and Bill Campbell of Rosarium Publishing remarked that “I think it still kinda does.”
Yup. Diversity still does kinda scare the shit out of people. It's just that nowdays, it’s supposed to be a good thing, what we’re all working for in this here civilization. You can still be scared of it, but you have to grit your teeth and look brave.
Reminds me of some old job interviews where the interviewer would turn a shade paler and give me a forced smile. It was as if I was H.R.Giger’s Alien, drooling slime and deploying the inner jaws. It would have been hilarious if I didn’t really need a way of making a living at the time . . .
Long before everybody was talking about the need for diversity in sci-fi, people in the genre would go around congratulating themselves about how they were always promoting “tolerance” -- and you’d always be running into stories where caucasians would learn that people with green skin, that looked like giant insects, could be okay folks.
Tolerance ain’t so great. Ever been around people who were “tolerating” you? And trying hard not to notice the color of your skin? Talk about quiet horror.
After all the stories where the hero shoots first and asks questions later, the subject of tolerance usually came up when trying to sell sci-fi to a highfalutin audience.
So now there’s all kinds of talk about diversity and sci-fi, and since I’ve been tilting with this windmill for about forty years it brings back memories, and the desire to speak out.
Even back in the Seventies, diversity was considered desirable. It would bring prestige, if done right, so it doesn’t scare away the perceived predominately white audience. You couldn’t go too far. Make it like “mild” salsa . . .
Ocatvia Bulter, Samuel R. Delany and Steven Barnes would be interviewed and discussed, but somehow, their race wouldn’t be mentioned. Better not bring it up. The audience may be disturbed.
Diversity was desirable, but wasn’t considered profitable. The audience was seen to be white folks from the Midwest. And not everybody liked sci-fi. What would happen to the profits if they lost the racists?
Of course, it’s the 21st century now, a new millennium. The publishing world is in turmoil. Ebooks are rocking their universe, which is no longer centered around New York City and a white elite.
And when they go out to meet the audience, more and more of them aren’t white.
It scares them.
Kinda like I scare them. And for me, it ain’t fun until it gets scary.
In the next few years, where books come from and how people get them will change radically. Diversity will be necessary for survival in this brave, new global village.
Or will it be a global barrio? Or an intergalactic barrio?
Hollywood and the surviving publishers will follow, not lead.
Ernest Hogan is a Chicano science fiction writer, an unlikely thing to be, but he really had no choice.
The Cultura wars are always going on in the twilight zone between the Anglo and Latino Americas. The latest has to do with Chipotle, a corporate chain with a Nahuatl name that is trying to make Mexican food classy, so that folks who suck down Starbucks coffee all day can feel superior to the gente who like home-style cooking. Post-Ethnic America wants classy, upscale taco stands, culture, rather than Cultura, which is why they had bestselling-author Jonathan Safran Foer come up with a “branding campaign” called Cultivating Thought.
People need to have their thoughts cultivated? I though they came naturally. What kind of dystopian mind-control is this?
Cultivating Thought will put short stories by “award-winning authors, as well as celebrities” on cups and bags. Unfortunately they did not include any Latino authors, which of course has caused a backlash.
La Bloga’s own Rudy Ch. Garcia got into the act. he posted this on Facebook:
LatinoStory4Chipotle
What we can do to answer Chipotles' exclusion of latino writers--
1. Make up our own story (250 words, max)
2. Use your favorite LOCAL latino restaurant's logo or slogan
3. Identify your city, and share your piece across the country.
4. You can use the LatinoStory4Chipotle tag
I'm working on mine. Even if you're not, spread the word, por favor.
I was amused. I usually don’t participate in things like this, especially if they have a list of requirements, but inspiration hit me like sniper’s bullet, and the following story squirted out of my scrambled brain:
A SLICE OF MY LIFE AS A CHICANO STATE OF SCI-FI
© Ernest Hogan 2014
Got a message from Victor Theremin: MEET ME AT EL BRAVO, MUY PRONTO!
I rushed to mi troque and zig-zagged through Phoenix. I hadn’t heard from Victor in years. And I needed no excuse to indulge in El Bravos’s red meat burritos.
I passed a burning Chipotle on the way.
At the restaurant, I looked around. No Victor. But I saw someone dressed as a saguaro cactus at a table, sitting next to a brain in a plexiglass box.
“Ernie, I’d like you to meet Flash Gomez,” the brain said in Victor’s voice.
“Flash! I haven’t seen you since you disappeared back in the Nineties --”
“Yes. A lot has happened since then.”
Then agents in FBI-ish suits and sunglasses burst in, brandishing sparking stun guns.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this,” said Victor’s brain. It began to glow with a pulsating yellow light, accompanied by an electronic whine. They pulsed and throbbed faster and faster.
Soon I was dizzy and couldn’t see.
The next thing I knew I was in my backyard, seated in full-lotus position facing the big cow skull. I had the aftertaste of salsa in my mouth and a tingling in my inner ears. When I got up and peered over the fence, everything looked wrong.
Instead of our neighborhood, I saw a Martian landscape, just like the NASA photos. Except there was a Chipotle on nearby hill. It was burning.
I asked my wife, “Did we always live on Mars?”
It’s my usual schtick -- surreal imagery hung on a pulp framework. The word “sci-fi” is in the title, but it’s not really science fiction, probably more like speculative fiction, magic realism, or some such conceit, but we’ll let future generations figure that out.
You can enjoy the quick weird jolt without knowing whothehell Victor Theremin or Flash Gomez are, but if you’re curious you can investigate.
I do like the idea of putting stories on cups, bags, T-shirts, the social media and such. We writers are going to need to get creative as big time publishing heads for disaster.
