Chicanonautica: High Aztech News

by Ernest Hogan 

High Aztech is alive and well, and rampaging through the world. Really. I have to check Google to keep up.

Reviews keep coming, and not all of them are good. I don't despair over them. It's a diverse world, dissenting viewpoints happen, and deserve attention. Besides, it get suspicious if they're all good reviews.

This one gave is from a Carol Evelin, who gives High Aztech one star, and headlined it “Don't waste your money.” It's also now the first review you see on the Amazon.uk. Like others, she objects to the Españahuatl slang. She quotes a paragraph as an example:

My Aztec calendar bedsheets still smelled like Cóatliquita. I kept thinking about that as I had sex with Patiyonena. The muchacha - yeah, I know, she's over twenty, but I can't really think of her as a full-grown woman-must have been good; I remember gozoaing, but I don't remember much about the act, except that I forgot about the desmadreization of my life. Also, I kept opening my eyes, to remind myself of who the Mictlán I was patchioaing, and somehow I managed not to forget and cry out "Cóatliquita!"

Not bad, if you ask me. Could even arouse some people's interest.

She goes on to say: It's not the sex that bothers me, it's the continuous use of words that I don't know nor understand. . . I want a story that flows without being constantly jarred to a stop by gibberish.

Even in this century, there are still a lot of monolinguals with limited vocabularies out there who get upset by languages—and other things--that they aren't familiar with. They shouldn't read my books.

They probably shouldn't read books at all.

 

Facing the unfamiliar is what SF/F is all about. Escapism is a mere side-effect.

I go through the world, merrily encountering strange new words, and adding them to my vocabulary. It makes life interesting, richer, more fun.

Or, to use the quote from the book that's posted on Goodreads:

They jabbered amongst themselves in a bizarre jibberish that sounded like Spanish gone wrong: maybe gringo Spanglish, some kind of Españahuatl that I hadn’t decoded yet, or a dialect of Spanmayan, Zapotecnish, Spanotomi, Mixtecnish, or some other new native language; or Japanish, Spanorean or…I’m getting carried away. You need a talent for picking up new words and grammars these days-it’s become an obsession with me, someday I’ll probably write a book about it, but in what language?

As for it not being worth your money, if you have Kindle Unlimited you can get the High Aztech ebook for free—a great deal for those of us who read to encounter and explore new things.

Also, royalties keep coming in. It's not going to make me rich, but it indicates that some folks like it, like the at students at School of the Art Institute of Chicago that Josh Rios recently introduced to the book.

And it was called “the seminal Chicano science fiction novel” in an article about Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in Americas at the University of California's ARTSblock. Not to be confused with the book Altermundos, where its praises are sung in essays reprinted from the journal Aztlan.

And High Aztech will be soon be discussed as part of Sal Herrera's “The Force of Teotl: Deriving Change From Chicano/a Futurisms and Indigenous Philosophies” at the 2018 Native American Literature Symposim.

So, I'm boogieing into the new year with a smile on face. I'm a cyberpunk/Afrofuturist/Xicanxfuturist/Chicanonaut, intruding my way into science fiction, comics, fine art, and Latinx/Native American Literature. My virus is spreading. ¡Ticmotraspasarhuililis!

Ernest Hogan is also busy drawing a lucha libre comic strip, and is determined to finish his insane Victor Theremin novel in 2018.