In the dreaded year of 2020, the Extra-Fiction Contest, a production of Somos en escrito, The Latino Literary Online Magazine and publisher, did not happen. It was canceled, a victim of COVID-19. The planet in turmoil, not enough submissions were received.
Undaunted, they have decided to try it again, even though the virus is still skulking about the planet in deadly new variants.
And once again they asked me, the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, to be the judge. I said I would, because I’m all about encouraging those in the Latinoid continuum to push La Cultura into strange new vistas.
Or as they put it: “. . . we are keeping a few of our extra eyestalks out for anything EMERGING.”
I got the news that it was a go while my wife and I were on an interstate memorial road trip in for her mother who recently, at age 99, went “traveling in time and space.”
I was asked to make a video, so with my phone, in the Cowgirls room of the Silver Saddle Motel in Santa Fe New Mexico, I did my stuttering best to shame would-be constants into getting their caca conjunto and daring them to blow my twisted mind.
The deadline is September 30, 2021. Plenty of time, considering that it’s been one of the weirdest years ever. You should be brimming over with ideas.
The first place winner will get $100 and a copy of the upcoming Povenir Ya!,Chicano Science Fiction Anthology, that will have a new story by me. Second and third places will also get copies of Provenir Ya! There will also be two honorable mentions. All of the finalists will have their stories published online in Somos en escrito.
So, what are you waiting for? I need to get my mind blown.
Ernest Hogan somehow managed to have a career writing science fiction from a Chicano viewpoint even though the Anglophone publishing world is still convinced that there’s no money in such things. He invites all of you out there to join him in proving them wrong.
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