Is it the future yet? 2025 just whizzed by. My story “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs” was reprinted in Seven to the Stars. A new story “Doula” appeared in Sound Systems: The Future of the Orchestra. My attempts to find a publisher for my novel Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin showed me that the publishing industry is in worse shape than I thought, so I’m looking at the small presses.
And now it’s 2026. To make things crazier, I just turned 70. And my doctor says I could last another 30 years. What’s a Chicanonaut with one foot stuck in the future because Chicano is a sci-fi state of being supposed to do?
Meanwhile, Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I came out. I’m not in it, but I’m quoted and mentioned, because being the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, I’m an integral part of the . . .
Movement?
Phenomenon?
Anyway, I recommend you buy it, and read it, because we need these kinds of visions to help build alternatives to the fascist apocalypse that’s being forced on us.
Codex II will be out in a few months, and it will have a new story by me, “A Wild and Woolly Road Trip on Mars,” and another adventure of Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars. I don’t think Elon Musk is going to like it.
It’s also part of my yet unfinished novel Paco Cohen is Alive and Well and Living on Mars. I’m going to make it one of my major projects for the new year. I promised Ben Bova I’d do it. And Paco is going to drive me crazy until I do.
I’m thinking differently about my approach to writing. I’ve given up on New York coming to its senses and making my work universally available, so it gets made into movies and TV shows, becomes part of the global pop culture, and makes me rich. I’m going to concentrate on what I call my bucket list books, because someday is now, and I’ll feel like a failure if I croaked without at least finishing them.
These are the books (and stories–they keep happening, I could fill a book with the ones I wrote this decade) that claw their way through the dark recesses of my brain, threatening to burst out of my skull if I don’t write them.
They’re also the sort of things that people how know the biz keep talking out of, because they know they won’t sell. The market doesn’t want them, but they just may be what the world needs.
I’ll worry about publishing them later. What the hell, forty years ago nobody thought a Chicano science fiction writer didn’t stand a chance, and now I’m alive and well and inspiring new branches of literature and getting inspired by the madness around me to create more.
A lot more.
I wonder if 30 years will be enough?
Xicanxfuturism? ¡Sí!
¡Y más!
Ernest Hogan wants you to buy Seven to the Stars, Sound Systems, Xicanxfuturism codices I & II, and his novels. Read them and tell the world about them. He doesn’t expect to get rich but wouldn’t mind if it happened.
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