High Aztech: The Wildly Inventive Underground SF Classic

I didn't buy this book; it's my husband's which resurfaced after a recent house move. Having exhausted my own small library I thought I'd give it a try. Having struggled to page 39 and the start of chapter 4 I decided it wasn't worth it. Here's why; just a taster of the way the whole book is written:My Aztec calendar bedsheets still smelled like Cóatliquita. I kept thinking about that as I had sex with Patiyonena. The muchacha - yeah, I know, she's over twenty, but I can't really think of her as a full-grown woman - must have been good; I remember gozoaning, but I don't remember much about the act, except that I forgot about the desmadreisation of my life. Also, I kept opening my eyes, to remind myself of who the Mictlán I was patchioaing, and somehow I managed not to forget and cry out "Cóatliquita!"It's not the sex that bothers me, it's the continuous use of words that I don't know nor understand. What is even more annoying is, having reached page 39 and wondering how much longer I had to suffer this, I checked the end of the book for the final page number and found, guess what, a glossary of these ridiculous words! It would have been nice to know there was one, but the book has no list of chapter titles, never mind a mention of a glossary. The author says in the glossary "I tried to write High Aztech so readers could enjoy it without understanding the slang." Unfortunately, I don't. It's irritating, annoying and distracts completely from the story. I don't want to spend my reading time trying to figure out obscure words, I want a story that flows without being constantly jarred to a stop by gibberish.Don't bother to search this book out; at £20+ it really isn't worth the price.

A TOP SHELF review, originally published in the March 25, 2016 edition of The MonitorIn the early 1990s, a Chicano from East L.A. published a pair of science fiction novels that would go on to receive considerable critical acclaim and make significant inroads into the genre for Latinos everywhere.Hewing more closely to weird, gonzo pulp fiction and comics than to the more politically active realism preferred by the Chicano intelligentsia, he was for many years unknown to his hermanos literarios. The culturally embedded nature of his narratives likewise made him less palatable to mainstream readers of sci-fi. Both of these oversights are gradually being corrected. Soon Ernest Hogan will be recognized as an essential, revolutionary voice.By the late 1980s, Hogan had published several stories in Analog and other professional markets, and this success encouraged him to submit a manuscript to author Ben Bova, who was curating at the time a series of novels by up-and-coming writers for TOR. Their resulting negotiations produced in 1990 what is likely the first Chicano “hard sf” novel ever: the widely hailed Cortez on Jupiter.Two years later, Hogan followed his debut up with the cyberpunk masterpiece High Aztech.The story line is set in the year 2045, in a Mexico City that has returned to its ancient name of Tenochtitlan, the capital of a country to which Americans now flock due to the decline of the United States. This migrant flood complicates the revival of the Aztec religion, as Christian groups vie with indigenous Mexican beliefs, leading to the creation of biological virii that infect human minds with the ideology of one faith or the other. Xólotl Zapata, a renegade cartoonist, is the carrier of the Aztec virus, and he soon finds himself pursued by multiple groups hoping to stop the ascendancy of Mexico. Yet their plan to cancel out his infection with their own has consequences that they could never have imagined.Now, I’m going to be straight-forward about something: High Aztech is not an easy read. That’s a good thing, however. Hogan crafted a novel that rivals the bizarrely cryptic genre work of Burroughs or Lessing, that takes linguistic, philosophical, and structural risks along the lines of A Clockwork Orange.The frame story is an interrogation of Xólotl, but his erratic, ADHD stream of memories is interrupted by commentary from observers, notes from field operations, and other creative techniques for widening the narrative net. While these choices mean we don’t get as much character development and depth as perhaps traditional methods might achieve, for Hogan’s philosophical and politically speculative purposes, it’s a great fit.Most spectacular, however, is the hybrid language with which Xólotl laces his responses to the interrogation. Called Españahuatl, this fusion of Spanish and Nahuatl (the indigenous Aztec tongue) is at times wildly funny and earnestly poignant, much like the “Nadsat” that Anthony Burgess once crafted.Sadly, TOR pretty much abandoned the novel right after its publication, doing nothing to publicize a book that they clearly realized was more ethnic than they had expected. Fooled by his last name, many in the publishing world didn’t realize that Hogan was actually a Chicano (rather than a daring Anglo). His full-throated expression of Latino sensibilities within the frame of science fiction is only now being fully appreciated.

Xolotl Zapata is not exactly road tripping, but rather being forced to trek across Tenochtitlan because of the religious virus he is spreading throughout the city. Ernest Hogan has indeed crafted a novel that has the kinetic energy of a semi truck barreling down a hill with no brakes. We see Xolotl take part in various philosophical discussions about religion, language, culture, environmentalism and their intersections. These conversations I found to be the most fascinating parts of the novel. The momentum is aided by the sonorous hybrid language Hogan has his characters sing throughout the story. Like Cortez on Jupiter, the language used is rhythmic. Simply reading individual paragraphs, sentences, phrases, is a delight. That being said, the action scenes in the novel were the only lull for me. The conversations the characters had with each other was more compelling that seeing them physically fight each other. Cortez on Jupiter is a perfect novel, and High Aztech almost reaches those heights.

Ernest Hogan has a very special way of interweaving Aztec lore with popular culture, extrapolation of current trends and barrio language and idiosyncrasies. High Aztech allows the classic science fiction reader, who might not be not very knowledgeable of real Earth cultures, even though he/she can understand the politics and customs of Coruscant of Arrakis, an opportunity to get immersed in a very interesting and original milieu and even better story. Read this novel, you won't be disappointed.

A little uneven as a story, but there are some stunningly written passages. I could see the beginnings of the freewheeling, surrealist, funny af style he perfects in his recent short story “These Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Are Greatly Exaggerated.” I assign that story regularly in my decolonial SFF class and the students love it…assigning this novel this semester.

A delightful satire of religious fanaticism, in fact fanaticism of every stripe, as protagonist Xolotl Zapata careens like a pinball between the various cultural, religious and criminal factions of a world-ascendant Tenochtitlán (aka Mexico City). Infected with one religious doctrine-believing virus after another, the ultimate solution just might be a reality-expanding embrace of them all. Very fun to read. [There is at the end a glossary (totally not necessary) and a pronunciation guide, which might be useful if not knowing the correct pronunciation would be a distraction to you. I managed OK thanks to long ago high school Spanish.]