by Ernest Hogan
When
I first heard about Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction
edited 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 had
to read it. Then I saw that it cost sixty bucks . . .
I figured it could
wait.
Then,
Matthew Goodwin, editor of the forthcoming Latino/a Rising
anthology 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 gets
it:
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, rasquache
comes 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 Aztech
can 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 Aztech
not 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 Aztech
influenced 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?
Heterotopia
means 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.
3 comments:
"...believer in mongrel power…assigned realities…NOT a utopia based on the philosophy of Hugh Hefner…"
No wunder you became a wordsmith.
I think it was Dorothy Parker who said, "Don't borrow from other writers...plagiarize the hell out of them."
I've got to fit the above phrases into my next children's story, somehow.
Low Writer
You told us that you were invited to teach about Latino SFF ect. You can talk about these reviews of your book (and others) with the class. And the book cover of your HIGH AZTECH is visually great.
I will talk about my novels in the class (blush), mostly because I happen to be a big part of Chicano sf . . . so far. The High Aztech cover is by Dell Harris, who was doing this sort of thing long before people talked about being postcolonial or Afrofuturist.
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