CHICANONAUTICA CRUISES THE SAN ANDREAS FAULT AND ZAPOTECAN CALIFORNIA

It’s earthquake ground zero and a new colony in Cali in Chicanonautica, over at La Bloga.

Will California be a new Atlantis?

Or is it a chunk of Lemuria crashed into North America?

There’s a Zapotec influence:

And new kinds of Mexican restaurants:

GIVE THE GIFT OF GONZO

Suddenly, I’m officially gonzo! As in Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song: 15 Gonzo Science Fiction Stories—not my idea, but if the glass slipper fits . . . And it packaged as part of a series:

The footnote refers to a quote from the entry on me in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

There is a pleasing gonzo energy to Hogan's work, though not to date any sense of any outbreak into work of radical originality: but he continues to seem capable of storming into general view.

The only time it’s been said that I’m not radical enough. As for storming into general view, I’ve been beating myself bloody at it for decades. Maybe the time has finally come . . .

Gonzo is a good word to describe what I do. I’ve been doing stuff like this before I heard of Hunter S. Thompson. I also was surreal before I knew about Salvador Dalí.

I am doomed to forever be explaining myself. People need to label you.

But remember the words of Frank Zappa:

What will you do when the label comes off
And the plastic's all melted
And the chrome is too soft?

So, give the gift of gonzo this Holidaze, and check out my other novels. A reviewer did say Cortez on Jupiter was “like taking a stroll through the mind of a mad Mexican Hunter S. Thompson.”  And the hero/narrator of my underground cult classic High Aztech is a kind of gonzo journalist.

VAMPIRE RUN TO VEGAS AND THE JAMES DEAN GAS STATION

The day after the eclipse, we left Phoenix as the sun was setting, heading for Las Vegas. It was dark before we hit the strip of Highway 93 known as Bloody Alley because of all the accidents that happen there. 

My fantasies of a galactic highway system were tempered by my having watched the Mexican vampire gunslinger movie El Pueblo Fantasma before Emily got off work. 

She also brought some of her mom’s ashes, after all, we were carrying on the tradition of the Maggie Devenport Annual Road Trip. Em also brought an audiobook of Stephen Fry reading ghost stories, to set a spooky mood as we glided through the interstellar blackness of the dark desert void.

My writer’s brain noted that a vampire making this drive would be a good beginning for a vampire story. It would need more, though. Stuff to keep it from being a cornball, here’s-the-vampire-folks thing. Too bad that James Dean didn’t live to star in an R-rated, Seventies, “Vampire Run to Vegas.” Or maybe in the story, he became a vampire, who now drives these roads at night . . .

At one point a pair of headlights came straight at us . . .

 

We gassed up at Kingman. $3.95 a gallon. The Petro station was festooned in Halloween decorations. The gritty realities of 2023 C.E. were effectively blacked out. Dime store demons were welcome companions.

After a while, Vegas materialized as an ocean of urban lights, triggering my visions of a galactic civilization.

Spent the night in Mike’s Henderson (just out of L.V.) house, parked our Elantra, transferred our stuff–including Emily’s mom–to his Prius, and had no trouble getting to sleep even if a neighbor’s air conditioner played a mechaniod concerto just out our window.

Next morning we whizzed past Las Vegas. The illusions of a glittering, mulitcolored, neon Oz on the edge of decadent galaxy gave way to the sun-blasted, post-Apocalypitic deserts of Planet Nevada, its own world of gambler’s utopia, legal prostitution, atomic testing, Area 51 . . . Hunter S. Thompson was right, this is the American Dream . . . Ha . . . Ha . . . Ha . . .

Henderson, and other Nevada towns, are Mars colony-esque. As most of the arid Southwest–Aztlán, dammit!--is. This region is a dress rehearsal for what Terrestrial Civilization (if you haven’t noticed, Western Civilization is an obsolete concept) plans to do to the Red Planet. It’ll be like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, only a lot more bizarre . . .

Somehow, I managed to get to California without taking any Planet Nevada photos. The westward journey mellowed into a different kind of weirdness. Then when it gets to California, the state of my birth, it becomes familiar territory, but then we were north of the SoCal of my youth, still another flavor of strange.

This popped into focus in Wasco, at the Jolly Kone Drive-In, now a postmodern archaeological ruin, boarded up with its wind and ultraviolet radiation-eaten sign, and a mural blending into graffiti in the back. What I’ve been talking, and writing, about. It could have been part of one of my Mars stories.

Then, in trying to find our way through farm country, a friendly highway worker pointed us to the James Dean gas station. It’s a local tourist spot, the last stop Dean made before he drove off to have his fatal accident. 

It was selling gas for $6.35 a gallon. There was also a gigantic store/tourist trap with all kinds of stuff for sale, and photo ops that weren’t necessarily on subject. 

Dean probably would have made a great vampire in his old age. Now one of the cutouts of him stands by the gas pumps, with bird shit dripping down his face.

THERE ARE TWO ‘R’S IN GUERRILLA

 

Things were looking good, Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song was up and selling on Amazon, I was busy making noise about it on Facebook and Twitter, when Will Bayer, a friend from my old neighborhood in West Covina, pointed out that the cover was missing one of the Rs in guerrilla. Awk!

I took a few deep breaths, and a line from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo popped into my head: “Too much perfection is a mistake.” One of the wisest sentences uttered in any movie.

 

Ever see a happy perfectionist? Didn’t last long, did it?

So I shot an email to my publisher, and she got on it. Thank Quetzalcoatl for computerized publishing! The problem was soon fixed.

In the meantime, I repeated on the social media that the early print-on-demand copies with the goof were destined to become valuable collector’s items.

I even started an Instagram account.

If you ask me, it looks like another case of Tezcatlipoca reminded me not to act like somekinda chingón.

CHICANONAUTICA GETS BACK TO A TRANSMOGRIFIED WORLD

Chicanonautica is back from a road trip, and the world looks transmogrified, over at La Bloga.

It was another search for America:

With post-Apocalyptic scenes:

And utopian flashes:

That lead to transmogrification:

A NEW ERNESTO BOOK AVAILABLE!

Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song:15 Gonzo Science Fiction Stories, a collection of my stories, is available from Amazon now!

I have been talking about as Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus, but after my publisher commissioned urban artist, student of the arts of life, traveler, and pizza-lover, EkzaOne, AKA Daniel Illescas to do a fantastic cover painting, the other title worked better.

Buy and read it now, so you can say you were among the first.

THE JUBILEE NOW

As we hurdle into another election year, the term Civil War keeps popping up. It was used in explaining by the rebel Republicans ousted Kevin McCarthy, the January 6 indictments, and the Speaker of the House fiasco. I saw this as my cue to get around to reading Bring the Jubilee, Ward Moore’s classic about a universe where the South won the War Between the States. Or should I say the War of Southron Independence? Maybe there would be some insights there.

There sure were.

I had to keep checking the publication date. 1953. This book was not inspired by our current political predicament. The Grand Army is not based on the Proud Boys. The echoes of the current opinions expressed by various characters come out of the amazing, incredibly detailed world building. And Moore, a Northerner, didn’t seem to have a political agenda. He was fascinated by how changing one small thing could change history, and the world.

And what changes! The twentieth century is steampunkish  (long before steampunk). There are air pistols and spring powered guns. Bicycles dominate the street and airships fill the sky.The North and South have not turned out as expected. 

Race relations are different: Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration to Africa, voluntary or forced; those who went westward to join the unconquered Sioux or Nez Perce were looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didnt embark for Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had the fare or not, deserved anything that happened to him in the United States.

Not to mention, the United States' economy sucks. And then there’s the international situation . . .

This alternate universe is presented in disturbing detail through the eyes of a historian.

There are nonwhite characters, but they’re more like well-developed characters for our era, rather than the stereotypes common in the1950s, when publishers and readers expected “Negroes” to speak in thick dialect, so they were “authentic.”

It’s all made more impressive by how it sheds light on the recent talk of a New Civil War. 

As a kid in the Sixties, I found it hard to believe that there were people who believed that the South should have won. Now I realized that it is not only true, but there are a lot of people would be happy to have the intellectual life of a medieval peasant. This book helps me deal with that disturbing reality.

It also demonstrates how fragile the course of history is, and how easily it can be changed. That gives me hope, but I do realize that the changes are hard to control, but then if you sit back, do nothing, and it gets worse, and you didn’t even try to affect it . . .  

There’s that old saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it. Expect to hear it a lot in the near future.

They should be teaching this book in the schools, what the hell, give them something else to ban . . .

CHICANONAUTICA REMEMBERS PALENQUE

 

Its about Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, in Chicanonautica, at La Bloga.

It’s in the news:

My memories were triggered:

It was the home of a so-called ancient astronaut:

I was reminded of this story, which may be the future of Mexico: