Chicanonautica: More than Echoes and Embers

by Ernest Hogan

Once upon a time it looked like I was the one and only Chicano science fiction writer. The thought terrified me. All that responsibility. I wasn’t sure if I could take it.

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve been delighted to discover that I’m not alone in my Quixotic, lifelong compulsion to commit acts of sci-fi while being Chicano. It’s also a great relief to feel that I'm not representing the entire Latioid continuum of the human race in the genre. I can have fun and be irresponsible. Yippie!

One of the best and most prolific one of my colleagues is Pedro Iniguez. Recently his Mexicans on the Moon: Speculative Poetry from a Possible Future won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. That’s right, poetry–he also writes horror. I had the pleasure of getting an advance copy of his latest, Echoes and Embers: Speculative Stories, and wow!

I’ve been a science fiction fan since I was watching Space Patrol on a tiny black and white TV and went to see Forbidden Planet at the Floral Drive-In in East L.A. back in the antediluvian 1950s. I’ve been reading the genre since Richard Nixon was in the White House.

This book took me back to when I was 12 years old reading every “sf” (as they were labeled back then) book and magazine I could get my hands on. Once again I was thrilling to adventures worthy of the pulp era. But this isn’t just a nostalgia trip, Iniguez is up to date on his science, and creates a wide variety of characters and future scenarios about peoples of backgrounds that were influenced by the Spanish empire intruding on their lands, cultures, lives. He also goes into more literary territory.

Back in the day, to appreciate science fiction hell, most fiction written in the English language–and movies and television -- you had to adjust to everything being from a caucasian, Anglo-American viewpoint. I was always aware that people like myself and my family weren’t included in these visions of other worlds.

It’s great to see books like this, opening up new worlds full of all kinds of people, and it isn’t all derived from what came out of one little island.

I heartily recommend Echoes and Embers to la Raza!

Those of you non-Raza out there should also find it to be fun, entertaining reading.

If I can read about Ray Bradbury’s strange, exotic midwesterners and Stephen King’s dwellers of far-off rural Maine, you surely can get into a little Xicanxfuturism.

And get used to it. There’s a lot more coming. To your town. Soon. 

Ernest Hogan and Pedro Iniguez will be in the upcoming two-volume anthology  Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow. Pedro will be in Codex 1. I will be in Codex 2. Pre-order now.

Ernest will be teaching “Gonzo Science Fiction, Chicano Style” at Palabras del Pueblo again in October.