CHICANONAUTICA GOES FROM MEXICO CITY TO MARS

That's thanks to Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Prime Meridian, in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga:

It's about a young woman from Mexico City:

Who dreams of moving to Mars:

With references to the old days of Mexican cinema:

Who know's where this could lead:

THE LOST ART OF SMOKING MIRROR BLUES

To celebrate the new edition of Smoking Mirror Blues, I shuffled through my mound of battered sketchbooks, and ran across the stuff I did for publicity for the original edition.

Suddenly, another one of those creative lightning bolts hit me. I was going to need art for my own social media publicity campaign. These files were generated (I had Corel Draw at the time) in black and white to be flyers that never got made. It was 2001, the War on Terror had broken out, my wife and I had just moved into a new house and were working full time at Borders, not leaving much time for conventions and such niceties.

So I ran 'em through GIMP and colorized and further augmented them, along with the cover of my self-published ebook. I love fooling around with art and/or technology. Especially when it gets wild and woolly in spite of itself. 

I also did some clipped, cropped, colorized, and distorted pieces, because—yes, dammit!--sci-fi ain't nothing but mojo misspelled.

And half of a Tezcatlipoca face can be a portrait, a landscape, and a starscape at the same time, as well as an homage to Max Ernst, and a reminder that all literature is space opera because the entire universe is inside outer space.

CHICANONAUTICA SEES THE BROWN BUFFALO

Chicanonautica reviews the new film about Oscar Zeta Acosta, over at La Bloga.

He was real:

Then he was made into Dr. Gonzo, and put into a movie:

Then another:

Now he's the whole show:

NEW SMOKING MIRROR BLUES EBOOK AVAILABLE!

Order it now! The new Strange Particle edition of Smoking Mirror Blues! Just $2.99! Or FREE via Kindle Unlimited!

SUGGESTED AFROFUTURIST READING

While waiting for a friendly corporation to come up with another big Afrofuturist product, why not read some sff-ish stuff by black authors? Go and grab some of the works of Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Bill Campbell,Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Nisi Shawl, Nora Jemisin, and others who I’m probably forgetting, but can be found in bookstores.

And there are others, coming out of older traditions, whose books you’ll have to hunt for, but are well worth it.

Originally serialized in Colored American Magazine (that Pauline Hopkins also edited) from December 1902 to January 1903, Of One Blood has a steampunkish setting, mesmerism, mediumistic powers, a cataleptic trance, astral projection, and the scientifically advanced lost civilization in the city of Meroe, Ethiopia. Yes, a precursor to Wakanda. It also presents some ideas of race and family--the one blood/Raza Cosmica thing-- that allow the novel’s central theme to be both incestuous and interracial.

A long, long time ago, before George Lucas' dream of a galaxy far, far away infected Western Civilization, I read a story in an anthology African fiction that blew my mind. It was called “The Television-Handed Ghostess” by Amos Tutuola, a Nigerian. Turns out it's part of a novel (okay, it’s not a novel as we’re used to in what’s left of Western Civilization) called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. I tracked it down and was astounded by the strange world of bizarre spirit beings that live in modern times, with television-hands, machine-guns, and such, told in style and structure that owes more to oral storytelling than the commercial New York book biz.

Between 1936 and 1938, the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier ran two serials, The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World and Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa--later published together as Black Empire--that allowed George S. Schuyler, known as the Black Mencken, to let his imagination run wild, creating the first example of pulp science fiction written for a black audience. Dr. Henry Belsidus gives Fu Manchu a run for his money, and there’s a cynical, satirical edge to the pulp mayhem. It deserves to be republished with proper, sensationalistic packaging.

Chester Himes is father of blaxploitation (two of his novels were adapted into the first of that movie genre) and urban crime fiction. His Harlem crime novels feature detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, and blazed a trail that led to Afrofuturism. His work got imaginative, since he was writing them for a Parisian publisher, and the French were willing to believe anything about America. His masterpiece, Blind Man with a Pistol, shows a Harlem like a Hieronymus Bosch composition full of sociological nightmares beyond the wildest dystopias. And his demonstration of how racism spawns seemingly random violence is chilling.

Frank Yerby, the first African American bestselling author, wrote The Dahomean, with idea of blasting open the minds of young black militants. Based on Melville J. Herskovits’ 1967 anthropological study, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, it presents a world that makes most commercial fantasy look like cheap knock-offs of warmed-over fairy tales. There are Dahomey Amazons, different versions of marriage and family, and a number of things that will probably disturb even twenty-first century readers. After reading it, you’ll never think of Africa in the same way.

I have to say it: Afrofuturism is just a reboot/rebrand of Neo-HooDooism, and Ishmael Reed has been doing for over half a century. Mumbo Jumbo is the great Neo-HooDoo novel. I think I’m overdue re-reading it, which I do often.