by Ernest Hogan
I’m a deranged optimist. I always expect the new year to be fantastic and make plans like a mad scientist. Muhuhahahahahaha!
Then 2026 kicks off the mother of all shit shows. It makes the Nixon years look like a joyride. I could list the horrors, but I’m sure things worse than anything I could recount here are probably going to happen before this goes up.
What the holy hell! I’m going ahead anyway! I’m crazy enough! I don’t want their myopic, dystopian apocalypse. I want the future to be better, full of the triumphs of human possibilities.
Fortunately, I’ve been involved in something that’s pushing for such a world.
I’m talking about Xicanxfuturism.
As the Father of Chicano Science Fiction, I’ve been at it since before the word was coined. It’s what Chicanonautica is all about. I’m realizing that it’s the story of my life.
Xicanxfuturism: Gritos for Tomorrow / Codex I is out, and even as the world is being distracted by the global pendajada, it’s starting some strange rumblings in Aztlán and beyond. The overall mood of the book is rebellious. All those angry, creative Xicanxes . . .
Xicanxfuturism will help us survive. Or at least inspire us to try.
Codex II is coming soon, and I’ll be in it with both a drawing and a story: “A Wild and Woolly Road Trip on Mars,” featuring Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, and an episode to be included in an eventual novel.
Speaking of novels, New York isn’t interested in my new novel, Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin–in which a Chicano science fiction writer with a non-Hispanic name loses track of where his life ends and the sci-fi begins (hmm . . .) so I’m trying the small presses. Like I’ve said, I always keep one foot in the underground so when the shit hits the fan, I have a place to stand.
And it looks like the shit is hitting the fan.
There’s also that pile of unpublished short fiction that I’ve produced in the last few years. Time to weaponize my creations. The coming situation will demand different kinds of entertainment.
Believe me, as a child of the Sixties I've been around on the cultural revolutionary/evolutional merry-go-round a few times, we ain’t seen nothing yet . . .
The times they are a-changing, like that rock star who won the Nobel prize said. 1969 seemed like a whole other world compared to 1966. I feel that it will be similar–probably more extreme for 2029 and 2026. As a Xicanxfuturist/Chicanonaut, I can’t afford the bourgeois luxury of being apolitical. I am what the monsters want to eliminate. Just read my books and stories.
Meanwhile, keep your head down, watch each other’s backs. Rev up those imaginations.
As the Popol Vuh says:
Such was the defeat of the rulers of Xilbalba. The boys accomplished it only through wonders, only through self-transformation.
Ernest Hogan is alive and well and living in Aztlán. Tezcatlipoca is whispering in his ear. Seventy years old and ready to go wild.
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