by Ernest Hogan
Over at Mondo Ernesto, I’ve announced my deal that will result in new, improved ebooks and paperbacks of my novels, but also a story collection. Here I’d like to give La Bloga readers a behind-the-scenes look at how it all goes. People tend to find writers' lives interesting, and if it’ll make them interested in my works, I’m willing to share.
High Aztech will be the first of these books. Like DVDs, they will be loaded with extras. The publisher has also asked for reviews that can be used in promotion. There are reviews of High Aztech, most of them came after its original paperback release.
Even though my first novel, Cortez on Jupiter, received excellent reviews, no review copies of High Aztech were sent out. I kept hearing, “What? Your book is out? We got the box with the new Tor releases and it wasn’t in it.” The ad in Locus had no text, just a big blank space. It seemed that sinister forces were at work.
Despite these dirty tricks, folks read, liked, and reviewed High Aztech, though not in the usual venues. With interwebs, more reviews came in. And they’re still coming.
I feel justified in calling it an underground cult novel.
I decided to do a Google search, just in case there were more, or some I missed, and made an astonishing discovery: My works and I have been mentioned in academic books!
It was no surprise to find High Aztech discussed in Thomas Foster’s The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, and I was delighted to be linked to Ishmael Reed’s classic Mumbo Jumbo:
Reed’s novel has influenced Chicano science fiction writer Ernest Hogan’s attempt to produce an ethnic intervention in cyberpunk conventions [. . .]
I must admit, I identify more with Reed’s Neo-HooDooism and the emerging Afrofuturistic aesthetic than cyberpunk.
Then I found a full paragraph about me in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature edited by Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio. Contributor Emily A. Maguire says:
Chicano writer Ernest Hogan bridges the gap between hard science fiction and cyberpunk.
And:
Hogan’s first two novels interweave Pre-Colombian mythology and Spanish, Spanglish, and Nahuatl language into a humorously dystopian sci-fi context.
Also:
Hogan’s most recent work thus humorously riffs on such ghost-in-the-machine texts as Gibson’s Neuromancer (and on society’s obsession with technology) by exploring the intersection of religion, technology, pop culture, yet does so with a distinctly Latino twist.
If that wasn’t enough, Frederick Luis Aldama, in Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry, mentions my cyberpunk, pre-Columbian-mythology-dimensioned novels as examples of Latino authors making for our consumption all variety of lowbrow, middlebrow, and highbrow literary texts.
That all gets me feeling good, but I still wonder if there’s any reviews of High Aztech, or even articles, that I don’t know about. I know that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are posted on the interwebs. So I’m putting this out to you readers of La Bloga: Do you know of any? Please let me know.
I’d even like to hear any comments you may have about High Aztech.
By the way, the original ebook versions of my novels will no longer be available once the new High Aztech is published. So if you want them, buy them from Kindle and Smashwords now.
Ernest Hogan is finding 2014 to be an eventful year. Details will be revealed later.
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