SAN FERMÍN 2015: DANGEROUSNESS AND ALTERNATE UNIVERSES

(from Mondo Ernesto)

The first encierro looked out of control. More like a riot than a staged event. Like the scenes in old monster movies where crowds are running through the streets, trying to escape a gigantic monster. Only wilder.

The encierros, or runs, during the the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona, Spain are scored by Time (Duración), Corenados (Gorings), Tramatismos (Injuries) and Peligrosidad (Dangerousness). Oddly enough, Time isn't as important at the rest. Dangerousness is what makes a good, or great encierro.

This is not sport as practiced in Western Civilization. This ritual is more like religion. Like the pre-fiesta protests where PETA beauty contest winners wear plastic horns, take off their clothes, and smear themselves with fake blood. See Richard Wright's Pagan Spain: It is the conquering of fear, the making of religion of the conquering of fear.

Why not a Church of Tauromachy? Isn't America supposed to be all about freedom of religion?

In that first encierro, a woman, after making it to the corridor into the arena, stopped running, and covered her ears. She had reached a personal limit. I watch for people like her, who are facing their fears. Sometimes it reduces you to a pile of quivering jelly, but what you gain from it is the courage of self-knowledge. There is a heroism in it.

This is a truer thing than America's “horror” culture, where fake blood and gore are mass produced and celebrated. Sometimes you need to reach out of your artificial consumer environment and touch the gooey mess of reality. It will teach you about your place in the universe, and the food chain.


It does cause visions of alternate universes to dance in my head: What would Hemingway think of what San Fermín has become? How and when did bullfighting become illegal in Aztlán? What if the Spanish influence was stronger and bullfighting was part of the cowboy/beef culture? Where would the running of the bulls be held in America? Would MacDonald's and Burger King be sponsoring bulls?

There's a Burger King along the encierro route. And a space that is for rent . . .

I really need to find time to finish that science fiction bullfighting novel.

And even though I'm stuck barbecuing my brain in Phoenix, I can enjoy San Fermín at my computer thanks to SanFermin.com, SanFerminTV Online, and San Fermin Encierro's YouTube Channel.

How I enjoyed the high-Dangerousness – it got an 80! – encierro on Saturday! At one point, a bull named Finito had three men pinned to a wall. Finito charged into the arena with blood on his horn. Later, he threw Iván Fandiño, who had been gored in 2013. With blood on his face and no jacket, Fandiño killed Finito.

On the last day's encierro, the bulls from Miura made history for being the fastest in history. It set a new record at two minutes and five seconds. It also rated a 60 for Dangerousness. The real action was at Dead Man's Curve.

The bulls were muy bravo, and pretty badass, this year. A speed record, 10 gorings (8 were Americans, we're number one!), and 27 injuries. One bull even refused to run.

But it's all over now. Back to the alternate universes that are America and Arizona. Comic-Con? Really? And there's all this political turmoil, racist rhetoric, violence, and fighting over flags. So civilized.

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

JOHN WATERS FINDS AMERICA

(from Mondo Ernesto)

Riots in the streets. Conflicts spreading like viruses. And a presidential election looming. Looks like it's time to go searching for America again.

It's not that we lose America. It's more like we lose track of it. It's especially easy in this days of social media, when you can fine tune your input according to your tastes – then, oh, the shocks when your step out of your comfort zone onto . . . the road.

That's where you find the real America, on the road. Huckleberry Finn knew it. So did Jack Kerouac. And Hunter Thompson.

And so does John Waters.

His latest book, Carsick, is another fine example of the Great American Road Book. He tells of hitchhiking across America, and more.

Carsick is another work of American literature that straddles the borders between fiction and nonfiction. After an introduction, he presents two outrageous novellas: one presenting the best case scenario, the other the worst. Waters' own twisted utopian and dystopian visions. Magnificently outrageous. The kind of stuff that makes you fall in love with America as the fantastic place where anything is possible, the way it should be, if only so many Americans weren't afraid of everything.

This gets into speculative fiction territory, crashing through alternative universes and all. Maybe John deserves a Hugo award for this.

Then, he goes on to document his real trip. Celebrity hitchhiking in the time of interwebs. Real people that are strange in ways his imagination didn't expect. The amazing, mind-blowing thing is – and I'm fighting the urge to commit spoilers here – it leaves you feeling good, and hopeful about this country.

It's the sort of book we need right now. And it makes me once again think of John Waters as a Great American.

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEWS CORTEZ ON JUPITER!

(from Mondo Ernesto)

Here's what they had to say:

Hogan's debut, first published in 1990, introduced the subgenre of Chicano SF to a startled, dazzled American audience. Now, 25 years later, the book's Spanglish prose and freeform plot still amuse. All Pablo Cortez cares about is creating art, whether it's humongous graffiti sprayed across Los Angeles or zero-gravity paint slinging in space. Uncool authorities and timid collaborators can't stop him. When he confronts the alien Sirens of Jupiter, who have zapped the minds of earlier explorers, he takes their overwhelming flood of bizarre images as subject matter for new masterpieces. Hogan keeps Pablo's obsessive rants from becoming too intense by working them into a collage of comments from friends and enemies, along with hefty chunks of Aztec mythology, as he builds a jangling, rambunctious picture of artistic genius. This is tons of fun for freethinking readers who appreciate heroes with cojones. (Mar.)

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

A new CORTEZ ON JUPITER review!

There's a new review of Cortez on Jupiter in theVol. 5 No.2, April 2015 issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone by Cynthia Ward. You can buy this issue or subscribe here. Meanwhile, here's some quotes:

. . . the novel undermines expectations on practically every front.

Really, Hogan's entire novel is subversive.

The author's most fundamental subversion is in the language itself. It's true that slangy, dense, not-immediately-accessible language, packed with eyeball-kicking neologisms and non-English words, is a cyberpunk specialty. However, loan-words from a First World power like Japan don't begin to pack the seditious punch of the language of America's own disenfranchised, and Hogan doesn't stop with Spanglish.

I could go on and on, trying to capture Cortez on Jupiter in a word. Revolutionary? Gonzo? Well-written? Nahuatlfuturist? Anarchic? Recombocultural? Satirical? Cutting-edge? All are accurate (yes, even "cutting-edge," though the book was first published 25 years ago).

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

Rave Review for Locus Award Finalist Ernest Hogan's Cortez On Jupiter From Performative Utterance

Check out this rave review for Ernest Hogan's wonderful Cortez on Jupiter - out now in a brand new author-authorized edition from Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press - by Digital Parchment Services/Strange Particle Press

Ernest Hogan’s debut novel, published in 1990 as part of Ben Bova’s Discoveries series, is a remarkable piece of original SF that is radical in ways that perhaps haven’t really been acknowledged yet.

Cortez On Jupiter is the story of graffiti artist Pablo Cortez’ career progression from Basquiat-esque guerrilla muralist in 2020s LA via a staggered Bester-like plot to a weightless take on Jackson Pollock on in orbit above the Great Red Spot. Meanwhile a series of attempts to communicate with the alien Sirens of the Jovian atmosphere repeatedly have fatal consequences. Fascinated, Pablo volunteers.

Initially framed as a documentary on Pablo’s career, told in flashback and transcripts, Cortez on Jupiter steers a course that manages to include explicit satire and old-fashioned sensawunda SF tinged with cyberpunk simultaneously.

The Science Fiction Encyclopaedia talks about Hogan’s ‘pleasing gonzo energy’ which most obviously manifests in Pablo’s rapid-fire Spanglish-with-Nahuatl dialogues. Long, free-flowing sentences leap around worldbuilding impressionistically rather than through any attempted simulation of mimesis. Pablo drops Aztec deities into his rambling seemingly allocating new mythic status to everything.

Paint stick in hand like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool starless night years ago in L.A. that crushed the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute little scarito in my scalp that I wore my hair extra short for months to show off. Or like in that time before time when space wasn’t separate from time or anything was separate from anything else and all was the goddess Coatlicue, She of the Serpent Skirt, but then she was the Cipactli monster: alligatoroid, fished, but more a great, quivering mass swimming in an endless sea that was also a sky, a mass with mucho, mucho hungry mouths that devoured everything, the monster, the sea, the monster, the sea, so the sea was the monster and vice versa — everything all mixed up like Siren zapware feedback — ay! Makes me want to be like the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca — I wonder which I am, culture giver or trickster? Could I be both? Why not? I know how they felt when they decided, Hey, enough of this formless nadaness! Let’s tear this monster/paint blob apart! (p2-3)

It becomes clear later that Pablo is, as he suspected, both culture giver and trickster. In particular the loner Pablo continually voices the trickster’s absence of respect for society, whether in small groups, through the justice systems, or in the Space Culture Project. In the latter Pablo rails against the Director as “An icon-maker rather than an iconoclast. No wonder we didn’t get along.” (p83)

One of SF’s favourite toys is the neologism, from raygun to cyberspace SF has modified language to tell its story but I struggle to think of any writer who has made language so distinctly his own the way Hogan does. (He even creates the wonderful “nuevofangled cyberpsychoautonomoelectromagneticneuroextrasensorywhatchamacallit.” p210) The Spanglish vocabulary not only gives Pablo cultural depth but contributes in classic trickster fashion to subverting the otherwise standard First Contact story. In his hands the toy is a weapon, reflected by the Picasso quote Pablo has tattooed: “Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.” (p25)

Writing in SFEye Hogan said of himself:

Growing up as a Chicano, I often found it easier to identify with aliens, mutants and other sci-fi thingies than with the white people who were supposed to be destined to conquer the galaxy.(Greasy Kid Stuff From Outer Space, SFEye 11, December 1992)

That outsider feeling has translated in Pablo into the man who can communicate with the Sirens when they have mentally destroyed others because of the artistic perspective and because of that identification more with the alien than society. In Cortez on Jupiter Ernest Hogan challenges the Heinleinian vision of space conquest, the prevalent Manifest Destiny of Space Exploration that lingers on. The ‘heroic’ first man to lose his mind to the Sirens is Phil Hagen.

a typical nondescript astronaut — not even the fact that he was black and raised in Brazil made him much different from the sterilized whitebread spacemen of the mid-twentieth century. He was all hard-edge haircut and close shave all the way down to the convolutions of his brain. (p27)

That sounds like Starship Troopers‘ John Rico to me, and the last line of that paragraph reads: “I can’t even recall anything he ever said that interested me.”

Cortez On Jupiter takes a conventional mainstream SF idea or two as its plot, hence the SFE suggestion that Hogan isn’t doing anything radically original, but in warping language as Pablo does “I really don’t care what language they’re from — I just use ‘em when they fit.” (p9) Ernest Hogan satirizes swathes of SF that went before. 

 
Historically, Hernan Cortez defeated the Aztecs in part through his relationship with a woman who interpreted for him. Pablo is a very different Cortez, but his return from the Sirens is facilitated by fellow artist Willa translating his thoughts. Multi-faceted synaesthetic communications assimilate Pablo and the Sirens where the establishment protocols all failed. Hogan convincingly offers SF a new, post-Anglo paradigm. Pablo’s linguistic exuberance and artistic questing highlight and challenge the media obsessions and the cultural establishments of today both real and as more commonly portrayed in SF.

Cortez on Jupiter is a frequently very funny novel but one with a serious heart. His story may be closest to Alfred Bester, but his freewheeling hi-NRG word mashups and sharp wide-ranging satire owe as much to Ishmael Reed. Twenty years on I still know no writer in SF consistently doing what Hogan does with language to document, shape and comment on colliding cultures.

Read Ernest Hogan's Locus Poll Top Ten Novel Cortez On Jupiter - For Only $3.99

Free Read Chapter 1 Locus Award Finalist - Only a Wild Chicano Graffiti Artist And A Beautiful African Telepath Can Save the World - Not Your Grandparents' Science Fiction

Chapter 1. Intro 

Yeah, yeah, I know that that big chingada System-famous I.I. superstar reporter Ms. Anna Paik is due here a little while ago, but – ay, ay, ay, that blob of paint! It just hangs there in the very center of my splatterpaint studio like a miniature Jupiter gone todo loco – the big planet with tides and weather and gravitisimo snapped on the strain of the mindscrambling secret of its monstrous microscopic inhabitants so's its regular bands get all broken up into merrily swirling asymmetrical patterns of mingling paint of cyberexaggerated color – like the glorious, unholy mama of all cat's-eye marbles, it glares at me.

I try not to see that Zulu bitch.

I'm so glad there's no gravity here, no está aquí, no way, nada . . . but that floating glob has a pull just the same. I orbit in free-fall, make the cabrónes let me paint here in the center of Ithaca Base where the spinning doesn't suck you to the floor like the irresistible pull of Jupiter – so big, so bad, so goddamn awesome that as you fall into those convulsive, frenzied clouds, you feel like you're being sucked up, not pulled down – Jupiter is too big, too gigantic for you ever to be on top of it – and it's still pulling me.

And she still pulls me.

"I'm gonna make you a Pablo Cortez!" I growl, and attack. Paint stick in hand like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool starless night years ago in L.A. that crushed the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute scarito in my scalp that I wore my hair extra short for months to show off. Or like in that time before time when space wasn't separate from time or anything was separate from anything else and all was the goddess Coatlicue, She of the Serpent Skirt, but then she was the Cipactli monster: alligatoroid, fishoid, but more a great, quivering mass swimming in an endless sea that was also a sky, a mass with mucho, mucho hungry mouths that devoured everything, the monster, the sea, the monster, the sea, so the sea was the monster and vice versa – everything all mixed up like Siren zapware feedback – ay! Makes me want to be like the Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca – I wonder which which I am, culture-giver or trickster? Could I be both? Why not? I know how they felt when they decided, Hey, enough of this formless nadaness! Let's tear this monster/paint blob apart!

It explodes – like an amphetamine-choked blob, like the Cipactli monster, brutally torn in half by her moving mijos, screaming as her lower half rises to become the heavens and her upper half falls to become earth – forming the universe – but she manages to bite off Tezcatlipoca's foot in process, so he tears off her lower jaw. Mutilated and screaming, space and time set in motion as we move from Ometecuhtli's timelessness to Xiuhtecuhtli's fiery spinning clockwork around the North. What the Mayans call the Burden of Time is picked up, latches on. Amorphous micromonsters sail through the air, some colliding with me, sticking to my naked flesh and my chones. One seeks my eyes in order to blind me. Lucky I wear goggles like Tlaloc, the storm god, and a respirator – the paint just bounces off the Nostic-coated lenses.

This whole canvas-lined chamber explodes with color. Beautiful. Like her, Willa, the Zulu goddess that pollutes my Aztec pantheon.

Still, the polycrylic paint has this sickening tendency to settle into little giggling globes that just sit there like mini-Jupiters, mocking me. I refuse to allow entropy to happen in my presence, so like a samurai Jackson Pollock, I scream and thrash the disgusting buggeritos into tinier flying sky-serpents that gaily decorate the canvas on the walls.

The canvas is raw, unprimed, and the polycrylic is mixed with a base that gives it the consistency of water. Splatter marks don't just sit there looking pretty – they grow fur as the canvas absorbs it, thirstily. My work is always wild and woolly.

Soon the colorful swordplay is over and I am victorious. All the paint (except for a few stubborn, but insignificant BBs) is slapped into the canvas. I shed my goggles awhile and the furious splatters change into visions.

André Masson, eat your heart out!

Bizarre animated hieroglyphics materialize in the Jovian storm clouds: demonic cartoon characters exhaling balloons full of obscenity – endless 3-D labyrinths of orbital castles complete with living gargoyles and tapestries you can walk into – large, luxuriant cars encrusted in jewels and tailfins that race the crowded, tangled spaghetti of freeways with off ramps all over the galaxy – the vegetal love poetry that an intelligent network of vines sings to the jungle it intricately embraces – the ecstatic rush of falling into an ocean of warm mud that tastes delicious and makes you feel so good – pornographic geometries that can only be imagined on a scale more than intergalactic – the byzantine plots of surrealistic soap operas that take place outside of spacetime in Omeyocán, the highest heaven, domain of Ometecuhtli, the Dual Lord, supreme being outside of space and time: Sirenesque, because they never picked up the burden of time either, like before I hit the paint blob or the Cipactli monster got torn apart; see my problema? – the ballet of subatomic particles smaller than any yet discovered! – et cetera et cetera et cetera...

Letting the stick fly, I attack the canvas with paint-covered fingers – desperately trying to record the visions before they fade, but never finishing before they do, so I have to fill the many gaps with memory and imagination. I shift from warrior to artist; un poquito more Toltec than Aztec. Like that Nahuatl poem:

He knows colors, applies and shadows them.
Draws the feet, the faces,
Sketches the shadows, obtains a finish,
As if he were a Toltec artist
He paints the total colors of flowers.

Yeah, that's me-ish. My folks would be proud. I remember the poetry, the flowers and songs. It's important because the enemy destroyed so much of La Cultura. Sí, Papa. Sí, Mama. I remember.

Then I see her face again. Willa's face – that dazzling, living African sculpture that exists somewhere between the inside of my overloaded cabeza, the zapware fireworks of the Sirens, and the frontiers of the universe. It all starts turning into her after a while . . . then tears start growing in my eyes, get bigger and bigger, and finally break away and orbit my eyes like Earthish waterplanets.

The door seal pops. It's Anna Paik, come to interview me in my unnatural habitat.

I slip the goggles over my teary eyes, let myself drift so I face the door – I've lost track of where it is (again) but canvas starts to pucker, bulge like a zombie's grave, tearing loose from the gluespots, a large section breaks free, wraps around whoever it is that's trying to enter, then gets tossed where it hovers like a multicolor mutant jellyfish.

Then she enters. Anna Paik, the muchacha that the System loves to look at and listen to.

I can feel Willa getting jealous (they tell me it's my imagination).

Anna is awkward getting in. Even though she's been on an epic tour of the System, in and out of gravity wells for the last few years, she's still terminally grav-legged – even doing yoga facial exercises to fight facebloat, those lips, slicked the same shade of electric blond as her hair, stretch wide, clinching the light in a way that could cook my chorizo. She sees me seeing her and that cute overly-made-up-for-holo (kinda making her look like a pornette) Eurasian face popped into an instant professional smile with a flash blush and a hint of flirtation in those eyes that wore violet contacts for the occasion.

"Pablo, you started without us," she says, up close and personal, with a slight Russian accent that almost makes me forget she's wearing a bubble ziploc clear baggie suit over some skintight furry designer jumpsuit that's the same color as her contacts.

"I couldn't resist that paint. Hey, don't I rate those famous dark, mysterious eyes?"

Giggle giggle. "The contacts are part of the outfit, goes with the flocked toe and fingernails. We're contracted to sell it as a package. The demogs figure this'll go over big with the arty types."

"With or without the baggie?"

"Well, we couldn't let it get your paint all over it."

I get a toehold and prop myself upside down from her. "Hey, why not? It'd be a Pablo Cortez original. Real megabuck action there!"

She smiles again, really must have trained hard to get all her gravbound facial expressions to work in freefall. "We thought of that. Only the helmet is Nostic'd. We'll do a network time-lag-adjusted auction later."

"Interplanetary Infotainment thinks of everything . . . my agent know about it?"

"Of course, silly." Pause. She holds the smile while wondering if she should have called me silly. "You'll be getting a cut, I.I. wouldn't dare cheat you."

"Yeah, not even them."

She reaches up and puts a plastic-wrapped hand on my shoulder. "Look, we want us all to look good here, with the whole System plugging in and all." The pat is a poquito too hard, sends me back, but I'm braced, and she goes into an unplanned backflip. "Whoa! I don't think I'll ever get the hang of this. Anyway, speaking of looking good, we do have a makeup man standing by – he specializes in correcting for freefall facebloat ..."

I peel off the goggles and respirator, smear some paint on my face. "This is all the makeup I need."

"Okay . . . yeah . . . And are you sure that's what you want to wear?"

Her eyes are on my multilayer paint-spattered chones (and probably on what's inside them). "Ay! I put these on just for this interview! I usually paint in the nude. I figured I.I. wasn't ready to show me with my huevos hanging out." She cocks her head to the side where she wears a bulky earcuff, listens to it buzz. "Huevos? Eggs? I don't understand."

"Don't tell me your translator isn't programmed for slang . . ."

"Isn't Spanish Spanish?"

I laugh. "Yeah, like Russian is Russian and English is English all over the System. Words are words. I don't really care what language they're from – I just use 'em when they fit."

For a while her face goes inscrutable/Orientalish as if facebloat was setting in. Now something else comes through the door – the camera, mounted on a serpentine waldostalk and wrapped in Nostic'd plastic like the head of a mechanical dragon sealed in a cocoon. Anna vigorously stretches and clenches her face a few times, listens to her earcuff, and says, "They're ready to roll. You ready to begin?"

I nod. The red light on the camera clicks on. I flick my wrist and send the paint still clinging to my stick at her.

#

FROM THE UNEDITED HOLOTAPE OF THE "ANNA AT LARGE" INTERVIEW WITH PABLO CORTEZ FOR INTERPLANETARY INFOTAINMENT'S "SYSTEM NOW":

(Blobs of paint splatter on Anna's baggie.)

ANNA PAIK: Hi, everybody! This is Anna Paik, coming to you from a different place, a colorful place, a place where the activities of one man have become the focus of Systemwide attention in terms of both science and art. This is the studio of Pablo Cortez, in the central freefall module of Project Odysseus' Ithaca Base, orbiting just outside the magnetosphere of Jupiter.

(More paint splatters on Anna.)

As you can see, I'm not alone. Systemfolx, please allow me to introduce you to Pablo Cortez ...

(Camera quick-pans to a tight shot of Pablo, who is upside down and at a forty-five-degree angle to audience's viewpoint. He floats in semifetal posture, has the thin legs and thick, bloated chest of a spacer, and wears only undershorts and a respirator and goggles that are floating around his neck. He has an untrimmed beard and unruly black curly hair, all shot with gray.)

PABLO CORTEZ: Hi, everybody!

AP: Pablo, is this the way you usually dress while doing your splatterpainting?

PC: Naw, I usually wear less, but my mama taught me to dress when I get company.

AP: Would you like to say something to your mother?

PC: Sure would. Too bad it's impossible. She's dead. My father too. They fooled around with a lot of drugs in their time with one of those neo-Aztec cults. People keep saying that's why I survived my encounter with the Sirens.

AP: How interesting. Have drugs been an inspiration for your art?

PC: No! I don't believe it's necessary, especially with an imagination like mine.

AP: Do you use drugs recreationally?

PC: Not lately. Not after the Sirens. Sure, I fooled around with alk and canniboids – the usual kid stuff – when I was younger, but it was never more than a passing interest to me. Being drunk or stoned makes it hard to paint and draw – and that's the most important thing in my life!

(He starts looking at the paint-spattered canvas that lines the studio.)

AP: That puts you at odds with some of the leaders of the System's art community.

PC: That doesn't bother me. I've always been at odds with communities. And leaders. I've always lived between worlds, never quite at home anywhere – but able to travel anywhere.

AP: And you certainly have traveled. You were born in the eastern sector of Los Angeles, orbited in Hightown, and ended up in the Jovian System.

(His eyes are still fixed on part of the canvas.)

PC: Uh, yeah . . . I also bummed around the norteamericano continent back in my teens and early twenties – you know, cheap, obsolete vehicles-for-hire that were built back in the twentieth century that often left me and assorted campesinos and their pigs and chickens stranded way out in the middle of nadawhere. Still, I got to cross war zones, jungles, and deserts, see cities, murals, ruins, and museums, and find out how a big chunk of the human race still lives in this here new, improved twenty-first century. Quite an education, really.

AP: And yours has mostly been a do-it-yourself education. You don't have a high-school diploma and never went to college.

(He turns to look at her for a moment, then resumes contemplating the canvas.)

PC: I went to college – I just never bothered to register. I always figured the best way to approach schools was like a thief – or a Guerrilla Muralist – sneak in, ransack the place, satisfy a few curiosities and desires, then get the hell outta there before someone snaps the cuffs on you!

(He stretches his legs out to a wall, hunches himself to the patch of canvas he's been looking at, and starts working it with his fingers. The camera tries to follow.)

AP: Did you get this attitude from your parents?

PC: No. They were college-educated Chicano intellectuals. Both had degrees in anthropology. The problem was they identified more with the people being studied than with the anthropologists. Probably what made them go neo-Aztec. They were working on an Aztec myth cartoon project...

AP: Do you consider yourself anti-intellectual?

(He turns to her. The camera stays on the paint he is working.)

PC: No! I believe in the intellect, thinking, studying. I like intellectuals. It's institutions that I don't trust. Why is anybody who hasn't sold his brain to a bureaucracy and doesn't wait for official permits to think called anti-intellectual?

(He goes back to painting.)

AP: But since the arrest and disbanding of the Guerrilla Muralists of Los Angeles, you've had to deal with several institutions . . .

PC: Yeah, but I dealt with them my way. Not like the rest of GMLA. Except for my buddy, Buck Waldo, they're still back in their hometown, waiting for committees to vote on their ideas before starting work.

AP: Let's talk about the Guerrilla Muralists of Los Angeles. Most of the System knows about them because of you, yet strangely they are relatively unknown outside of the L.A. Sprawl.

PC: They stood regional. Thought small. Didn't go nowhere.

AP: But how did the group form? How did you get involved with a group of art students?

#

Uh-oh. Here goes. Looks like I gotta do a verbal autobio – at the same time all these images on the canvas are getting ripe and near the danger point where the Sirenflashes'll fade and Willa'll have done something for nothing.

And the camera is moving in close to catch my fingers fondling the paint. No bother – I'm an exhibitionist, I don't mind an audience – in fact, I love an audience! And now I've got the whole System (or at least those plugging into I.I.) looking over my shoulder. Yippie!

The part of my brain that handles talk is different from the part that does painting. I can do both modes at the same time. Just open up all the gates and let it all pour out!

I splat some more paint on Anna.

Let the show begin . . .

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Ernest Hogan on Cortez On Jupiter!

Here's Ernest Hogan's beautiful introduction to the new edition of his groundbreaking novel, Cortez On Jupiter!

Not since Ayn Rand's Howard Roarke has there been an artist as iconoclastic, as idealistic, and as splendidly spectacular as Pablo Cortez. And look out, he's twice as radical!

"Energetic, fast-paced, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable." -Analog

Combining hard science fiction with pyrotechnics worthy of "The Stars, My Destination," Ernest Hogan tells the story of the painter who founds the Guerrilla Muralists Of Los Angeles, goes on to make Mankind's first contact with the sentient life-forms of Jupiter.

“If Hunter S Thompson and Alfred Bester had a Chicano child, it would be this. - Dave Hutchinson

The Secret Origin of Pablo Cortez

An Introduction to CORTEZ ON JUPITER

A long time ago, in the outer fringes of Los Angeles County, I was working on an abstract painting, when Pablo Cortez popped out. The art teachers at Mt. San Antonio College ("Mount SAC") encouraged abstract art, none of this stuff with recognizable imagery or social commentary and certainly no commercial art or illustration. They were Fine Artists who created Fine Art that educated middle class people could dress up in their best clothes, visit on the weekends in downtown galleries or museums and feel civilized.

I was a Chicano kid (yeah, yeah, I was born in East L.A., my mother’s maiden name was Garcia – ya wanna see my I.D. while we’re at it, officer?) whose ideas of culture came from television, drive-in movies, and reading material I bought at liquor stores. I felt that my art should grow out of the funky environment that I lived in. The future starts now, and it also starts here.

No wonder Pablo Cortez popped out of that painting.

I was having a good time playing Jackson Pollock, slinging and smearing paint, putting stuff like paint thinner to make it drip ... and there was a problem with the drips. I liked them, but they had a tendency to flow in the same direction – down. This would dominate the composition, nail it to the ground. I needed to defy gravity somehow. Like I was on an orbiting space station.

I was also experimenting with writing about Chicano characters – finding new viewpoints for that gave a fresh, intense life to my stories. (Yeah, I could be an artist and writer. And I could understand science, too. Keep your borders out of my way...) I was interested in the things that weren’t in science fiction, after all, they were going to be in the future, too.

Also, once you’ve got a good character – one that comes to life on the page and in the reader’s mind, you’re like a mad scientist who has zapped a monster to life. All you have to do after that is follow it around, study how it interacts with its environment, report to the world what happens ... that is if the military doesn’t come screaming down out of the sky and blast it all away for the common good.

This was the Seventies. The Sixties had burned out. The Vietnam War had just ended. Nixon and Watergate were dominating the news. The economy was in the toilet. Everything seemed to be out of whack. A lot of people thought the world was coming to an end. As one of my teachers said, "You keep expecting to see people wearing crossed ammunition belts."

This was before Star Wars (yeah, I’m old) and everyone knew there was no money in science fiction, and there was none of the trendy talk about diversity we hear about now. Everybody seemed to think that the science fiction audience was all white nerds who would be alienated by "minority" stuff. I was looking out into a world that certainly was diverse, and the term "minority" was becoming meaningless. I was trying to create the best, most original writing that I could, because it had to be done, and I guess my intent was to be revolutionary.

In some ways, I was as crazy as Pablo Cortez.

My first version of the story of Pablo Cortez – a novelette that no longer exists, and I don’t even remember the title – was never published. I struggled to write it, then sent it around, and got rejected. A few editors thought I showed promise, but no one wanted to publish it.

That was after I gave up on studying art, the whole world of Fine Art made no sense to me, so I dropped out to pursue writing. I did have some minor success as an illustrator and cartoonist, but that was underground. For years I lived under a mound of rejection slips.

Granted there were personal encouraging notes from editors, and later on the occasional sales that kept me from quitting.

Then Ben Bova started his Discoveries series for Tor. He was looking for new writers. My wife, Emily Devenport, urged me to send him something. He was asking for synopses, so I sent him one of a surrealistic, sex-crazed (and still unpublished) space opera.

Ben didn’t go for that one. He explained that he was working for a conservative guy who wouldn’t go for such kinkiness, and wasn’t beyond burying a book that he didn’t like.

However, Ben felt that from my bio, I had something different to bring into the field with my ethnic and artistic background. He asked for another synopsis.

And of course, I didn’t know what to do.

Lucky for me, Pablo Cortez, like a good monstrous creation, had refused to die.

I had just sold a condensed version of Pablo Cortez’s story, "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song" to  Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Weasley Smith’s Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine. I was taking Ray Bradbury’s advice that if you still believe in a story that you couldn’t sell, after a few years, cut out a page, and send it out again – and I cut a lot more than a page.

What if I take that story, shove a stick of dynamite up its ass. stand back, and take notes on what comes splattering down all over the landscape?

Ben liked my Cortez on Jupiter synopsis, and suddenly, I had become a real writer, with contract with a New York publisher, an agent, and everything.

This was the Eighties. I did not sell Cortez on Jupiter as a Chicano science fiction novel. Nobody believed that there was an audience for such a thing. I’d be honest about my ethnicity, but because I wasn’t dealing with people face-to-face, they’d assume I was white like all the other sci-fi geeks. I said that the main character was named Pablo Cortez, but didn’t go on about his being a Chicano, or speaking Spanglish. I hoped they wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

To my surprise, Ben essentially, let me go wild, and write what I wanted, the way that I wanted. His advice was minimal, but dead on. I don’t think this happens much anymore.

Despite what some people might like to think, Cortez on Jupiter is not autobiographical. Like a lot of my viewpoint characters, Pablo Cortez started out as parts of me would live a lot differently if they went off on their own agenda. Good fictional characters usually have less sense of self-preservation than real people, and have a knack for getting into interesting kinds of trouble. Writers tend to find ways to get along, so they can write.

But there are people who claim that they can’t tell my fiction from my nonfiction. Believe me, I’m always aware about where my life ends and the fiction begins.

Cortez on Jupiter got great reviews. I was compared to William Gibson. I smiled a lot.

Unfortunately, it didn’t become a runaway bestseller. An editor at Tor called it a "success d’esprit."

This was also a time when science fiction was going in one direction, and I was going in another. With bookstores, and publishers in the control of corporations, the genre was becoming nerd lit – that is, fiction created specifically for nerds, which is different from what I grew up reading. Modern readers wanted stories focus-grouped for their demographic, part of franchises they were familiar with, brought to them by multinational corporations they trust. And, please, no new ideas!

"I like sci-fi because I always know how it’s going to end, and there are no surprises," as one once explained to me.

Still, Cortez on Jupiter  attracted a loyal following. You could say it has become a bit of an underground cult novel. I’ve always kept one foot in the underground, so when the shit hit the fan, I’d have a place to stand.

Locus published two reviews, one calling it the best science fiction first novel since Neuromancer, the other complaining about the "abominable prose style."

Like the rest of my work, people either love or hate Cortez on Jupiter.

Some fans were turned off by the Spanglish, thought it was alienating and hard to read while others loved it, telling me that it was the first time they saw language they used every day in print. One editor called my readers, "noisy minority.” Maybe they weren’t noisy enough.

And now that it’s the 21st century, and tides are turning, we’re hearing a lot of talk about diversity, postcolonialism, Afrofuturism and nerds that come in all colors, it may be that Cortez on Jupiter’s time has finally come.

I have this bad habit of being ahead of my time. Maybe that’s why I became a science fiction writer.

So, meet Pablo Cortez, the product of the life of a renegade Chicano. His story isn’t nerd lit. Nerds – whatever their ethnicity – need to be challenged, not coddled, like bulls who refuse to charge the matador, and need to be stuck with firecracker-studded banderillas to perform. Maybe it will inspire you to perform, face the unknown, or even our own future. The future always contains the unexpected, and danger.

And if you have the right attitude, it can be wicked fun.

–Ernest Hogan

DIGITAL PARCHMENT SERVICES ANNOUNCES The Republication of Ernest Hogan's Controversial Science Fiction Romp CORTEZ ON JUPITER

DIGITAL PARCHMENT SERVICES ANNOUNCES

The Republication of Ernest Hogan's Controversial Science Fiction Romp

Cortez On Jupiter

"Ernest Hogan is the creator of a Xicano science fiction genre with a crossover readership. …raw creativity."

–Frank S Lechuga

Digital Parchment Services through its Strange Particle Press science fiction imprint, and Ernest Hogan, are extremely proud to announce the publication of a brand new trade paperback edition of Hogan's Locus Award finalist science fiction novel, Cortez On Jupiter. 

The enhanced ebook version of Cortez On Jupiter, which contains a new introduction about the writing of this highly controversial novel which introduced Chicano tropes to science fiction, is available now – and a premier trade paperback edition will be coming out in January, 2015.

Hogan, who describes himself as "–a recombocultural Chicano mutant, known for committing outrageous acts of science fiction and other questionable pursuits" has had stories published with great acclaim in publications such as Amazing Stories, Analog, Science Fiction Age, Semiotext(e)SF, and many others.

Cortez On Jupiter will be followed by Ernest Hogan's High Aztech, Tezcatlipoca Blues, and a collection of Ernest Hogan's short stories: Pancho Villa's Flying Circus.

Cortez On Jupiter is the story of a wild young Chicano artist who covers Greater Los Angeles with fantastic graffiti and a beautiful African telepath who opens the door to communications with the deadly Sirens of Jupiter.

Not since Ayn Rand's Howard Roarke has there been an artist as iconoclastic, as idealistic, and as splendidly spectacular as Pablo Cortez. And look out, he's twice as radical!

Combining hard science fiction with pyrotechnics worthy of The Stars, My Destination, Ernest Hogan tells the story of the painter who founds the Guerrilla Muralists Of Los Angeles, goes on to make Mankind's first contact with the sentient life-forms of Jupiter.

It's a roller-coaster ride from vulgarity to the transcendent, as the unforgettable Pablo Cortez struggles, selfishly and selflessly, to expand humanity's consciousness on a journey from the barrio to the stars.

"Hard SF, satire, adventure, and some very strange humor combine in this intriguing, inventive, and sometimes disconcerting SF story."

–Science Fiction Chronicle

"An alien first contact story featuring a hyperactive, irreverent, and self-absorbed Chicano artist from East LA. Cortez is recruited to make contact with creatures discovered on Jupiter who "speak" in projected images. It's a dangerous assignment; previous attempts to communicate have ended in insanity and death, but Pablo is always up for a little bit of craziness."

–Michael Lichter, Amazon

"It grabs you and won't let you go. The best [first novel] I've read in science fiction since Neuromancer."

–Tom Witmore, Locus

"Energetic, fast-paced, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable."

–Analog

"If Hunter S Thompson and Alfred Bester had a Chicano child, it would be this."

–Dave Hutchinson

On Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00NMQFUJK

Prepublication price $3.99 - regularly $5.99
ISBN: 9781615085804

Review copies: M.Christian, Digital Parchment Services Publisher m.christian@digitalparchmentservices.com

Digital Parchment Services is a complete ebook and print service for literary estates and literary agents. The founders of Digital Parchment Services are pioneers in digital publishing who have collectively published over 2,500 ebooks and PoD paperbacks since 1998.

DPS clients include the estates of multiple Hugo winning author William Rotsler, and science fiction legend Jody Scott; authors such as Locus Award finalist Ernest Hogan, Hugo and Nebula nominee Arthur Byron Cover, prize winning mystery author Jerry Oster, psychologist John Tamiazzo, Ph.D., award winning nutritionist Ann Tyndall; and Best of Collections from Fate Magazine and Amazing Stories.