by Ernest Hogan
Ernest Hogan: Victor? What the fuck? It's 4:24 AM, for Tezcatlipoca’s sake!
Victor Theremin: I'm feeling restless. Could use some writer talk.
EH: I thought I turned my phone off . . .
VT: You know I have access to outlaw technology.
EH: What? There's video, too? I haven't downloaded any apps for that.
VT: I’ve had my hacker friends download stuff to your phone.
EH: I wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s an invasion of my privacy.
VT: Is there any such thing as privacy anymore?
EH: Uh-oh. I nearly woke up my wife. I better go to the living room . . .
(The sound of footsteps, soft impacts, profanity.)
VT: There is so much to think about right now.
EH: As usual.
VT: Actually, cabrón, there's a helluva lot more than usual.
EH: Yeah, I guess you're right, with COVID, and all that political and other pendajas going on.
VT: Precisely! This is the end/beginning of new eras! And you know what that means?
EH: What? You on a beach somewhere? Why is the sky purple?
VT: It means that us Chicano science fiction writers are gonna have to rethink everything, and reconsider what we've been working on!
EH: I know it happened to Emily.
VT: How is your wife?
EH: Restless. Eager to get on with a new phase in her life.
VT: See? There a helluvalota that going around.
EH: Just what is a helluvalota?
VT: Quit trying to change the subject.
EH: Can't help it. You knocked me out of some heavy REM sleep.
VT: I tell you, something is happening. Something planetwide. More than the pandemic, or politics, something affecting everybody’s brains . . .
EH: There you go again, losing track of where the sci-fi ends and the reality begins.
VT: I keep telling ya, it doesn’t matter these days.
EH: Could be. I’m thinking about pitching my next novel as mainstream.
VT: What? The one with the AIs, aliens, and a character based on me?
VT: Uh-oh, looks like you’ve gone over the bend.
EH: I don’t know. I just realized that it’s actually a modern day retelling of Don Quijote, and what could be more mainstream than that?
VT: I always considered it to be the first psychological sci-fi novel.
EH: About senile dementia?
VT: The final frontier.
EH: The problem is when I try to come up with things to compare my stuff to in the pitch, I have a hard time coming up with recent, popular sci-fi.
VT: You’re solidly in the tradition of Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick . . .
EH: Today’s sci-fi audience doesn’t remember them.
VT: Stick with sci-fi, Ernie. The truth will out!
EH: It might work better if I said I was like Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ishmael Reed.
VT: Like the modern reader remembers them.
EH: I know the post-Twilight/Fifty Shades of Gray audience doesn’t like to think when they read, but I keep hearing that the mainstream audience is bigger than genre. And I really would like to take the chance to actually make it big before I go back to tin-cupping it in the underground.
VT: What, you think you can be the Chicano Vonnegut?
EH: Better than being the Chicano Kilgore Trout.
VT: I thought I was the Chicano Kilgore Trout!
VT: And how has the mainstream world treated you?
EH: I still have trouble convincing them I exist. And they still give me the bum’s rush. Or take off running when they see me. And this is all before the realize I’m a Chicano.
VT: Ever thought about where sci-fi ends and the mainstream begins?
EH: A lot lately. When I shelve books at the library, I keep running into books that look interesting in the General Fiction section, and when I take a look they have science fictional plots, only they don’t have the entire universe, or even multiverse in danger, like they insist on in commercial sci-fi these days.
VT: This is the age of genre meltdown, besides, genres are just marketing gimmicks, and high-brow conceits like magic realism and speculative fiction are just pretensions for readers who want to feel intellectual.
EH: In my ten years as a bookseller, not one customer ever came in asking for magic realism or speculative fiction.
VT: So, whatcha gonna do, ese?
EH: Think I’ll keep all my options open. When trying to sell the book, I’ll start at the top, go for the dough, and if that doesn’t work out, I still have one foot stuck back in the underground.
VT: Sounds quixotic as all hell. Good boy! Uh-oh, there’s an unidentified phenomenon in the sky that I need to investigate, gotta go, bro!
Ernest Hogan is the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, and Victor Theremin is a fictional character, at least in this universe.
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