GUERRILLA MURAL REVIEWS AND REACTIONS

Ever since Tor failed to send out review copies of High Aztech for mysterious reasons, I get anxious about reviews.

Seeing reviews, like holding a copy of a book in your hands, is more solid proof that, yes, this chingadera actually has been published. I’m a “real” writer, not some loser scribbling away for my own deranged amusement.

So far, there has only been one review of Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song: 15 Gonzo Science Fiction Stories, on Amazon, and it’s a good one:

 

Ernest Hogan is one of the best fiction writers you've probably never read; which is tragic, since you inevitably need more of what he has, guaranteed.

This is one of the best single author short story collections in the past decade.

There's cyberpunk, werewolves, Aztec gods, culture recomboid nuttiness, and just plain wild flights of imagination.

Non-stop fun, not a boring story in the collection.

Cheap at twice the price; Ernest makes fiction fun again!” 

- Paulie

 

My favorite kind of review, a string of quotable sentences. You’d be surprised how academics can write an entire paper, and not come up with one phrase that I can exploit.

 

Just one review, and two ratings on Amazon, and one rating on Goodreads. I need more. . .

Yeah, I understand that it takes time for professional reviewers to get around to something, but reactions are important to me. Writing isn’t alive until it’s touched someone.

Thank Tezcatlipoca for the social media. Just while I start feeling down, I get feedback.

Here are some from Facebook:

 

Like a Madhatter’s guided trip thru a kaleidoscope!

 - Laura Crawford

Congratulations to Ernest Hogan on his new collection of 15 gonzo science fiction stories, Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song. And I would be remiss not to mention the first edition of his novel, Smoking Mirror Blues, is still available through Wordcraft of Oregon. Read him and find much delight. 

- David Memmott 

 

I ordered this 3 days ago. Two days ago it was created in Monee IL and shipped, and it arrived today. Great stuff!  

- Chris DeVito

In case you were unaware, Guerrilla Mural of A Siren Song is on the BSFA Award longlist for Best Collection. 

Just bought it so I can read it before I make my nominations.

- Ole Andreas Imsen

 

I used the title story, "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song," in my Alien Contact anthology, which was published by Night Shade Books in 2011. 

- Marty Halpern

 

I love it! Fun, offbeat tales from a Mexican future. The old Gods are made new, the old haters find new tricks, and the vatos always find a path forward. Beautiful lush prose and crazy diversity in the storylines and characters. Thank you for enlightening and entertaining me. Your intros offer a revealing look into your twisted mind and in themselves are worth the price of the book.

 - Tom Banger

 

It's apparently Ernest Hogan day at the US Latinx Science Fiction Collection, and why not? His collection arrived among new books bought for archiving. It's been longlisted for Best Collection by the British Science Fiction Association and the stories I already know here are excellent--you should get your hands on it! I was also responding to edits on a chapter I wrote for Los Angeles: A Literary History, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, on Science Fiction in SoCal. I was happy to point to native son Hogan’s achievements--his novel Cortez on Jupiter (1990) is the first US Latinx sf novel from a major genre press--beside local sf luminaries from the LA Sprawl like Octavia Butler and Ray Bradbury. I'll be teaching his funny and profound "Chicanonautica Manifesto" next week in my Afro- and Latinxfuturisms course this term. And I know a student will pick this book for an assigned end of term video review! I advise you to check this book out! 

- David Sandner

Meanwhile, keep those comments coming.

CHICANONAUTICA ZOOMS INTO THE MEX FILES

Chicanonautica is about me on Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files, at La Bloga.

Chicano . . .

Latino . . .

Futurismo:

The Other Sci-Fi!

GONZO AND ME

The whole 15 Gonzo Science Fiction Stories thing in Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song was a surprise. My publisher got inspired down in San Miguel de Allende.

Sure, why not? I was gonzo before it was cool. In fact, I was gonzo before I ever heard of gonzo. Guess I’m just warped that way. 

I have a perverse relationship with labels. As an Irish Chicano who lived most of his life as a fish out of water, people tend not to know what to make of me. Which means I get called a lot of things. Some of them insulting, what they usually call aliens, outsiders. You name it, I’ve probably been called it.

Some people feel sorry, that I must have been traumatized. No, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words . . . I eat them with every meal, chew them up an spit them out in new, distorted forms, all over the landscape. I survived by cultivating a nasty attitude.

And I laugh at the concept of political correctness.

So, I don’t care what people call me. Those poor bastards, their limited knowledge and experience hasn’t prepared them for encountering a creature like me. Their vocabularies fail them, so they reach for the something they know, that doesn’t fit, but will make a handy placeholder for now . . .

I often let them live with their misconceptions. It gives me the power to, when the time is right, give them a taste of my reality, and blow their minds. I also don’t care that I’m known as a cyberpunk, even though I am not now, nor have I ever been a card-carrying cyberpunk. It gives a rough idea of what I write and gets attention. Once the conversation is started, we can go on from there. 

I was writing things that could be considered gonzo, long before I discovered Hunter S.Thompson. I experimented with creative nonfiction in my notebooks (these days they would be called journals, but I find the word used that way a tad pretentious), inspired by Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon when it was serialized in Life and Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat as it appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press.

When I finally got around to reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I had been at it for years.

No wonder academics keep seeing me as a successor to Oscar Zeta Acosta.

Eventually, I started using gonzo style and techniques—observing and taking notes on the real world, then reconstructing them into something quite different from straight reportage—in my fiction. It manages to let some truths become self-evident that would have otherwise been missed. It’s also a special kind of vicious fun.

Hell, I’ve even called myself gonzo on occasion. I called my early online serial Brainpan Fallout a cybergonzo thriller in my own flyers.

Another more recent, deliberate experiment in gonzo science fiction appears in Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song: “Uno! Dos! . . . One-Two! Tres! Cuatro!” It’s probably the most gonzo thing I’ve written—so far.

So, yeah, I can be Señor Gonzo Sci-Fi, and teach my online “Gonzo Science Fiction, Chicano Style” class.

The only problem is some people are going to think I’m on drugs, but then if it sells more books . . .

CHICANONAUTICA LISTENS TO LABORATORIO 75 EFE EME, TIJUANA

At La Bloga, Chicanonautica discovers Laboratorio 75FM, Tijuana.

Maybe the hippest radio station on the planet:

Available online via radio.garden. 

These revolutions were not televised:

 

You may need to get up and dance: