CHICANONAUTICA SEES CARTEL 2045 EXPLOIT ITSELF

Chicanonatuica reviews Cartel 2045 at La Bloga.

It’s a movie with Danny Trejo:

From the Trump era:

With killer robots:

Meawhile, back in L.A.:

MUSINGS ON SURREALISTIC VEGETATION

A three-head beast roars at the blazing sun and greets me as I return to Hacienda Hogan.

Springtime in the Sonoran desert. The cacti are flowering, their sexual apparatus fully aroused and functioning. So beautiful. People would think you were a pervert if you took such pictures of animal genitalia.

But then, the Monstrose don’t need no stinking flowers to get surreal. It just needs to grow, bake in the sun, crack and break. Nature going wild. Never fails to make a good picture.

Sometimes you have to get in close. Let the sacred energy vibrate your eyeballs.

Limbs can spontaneously amputate, then grope around for sustenance, blurring the border between the plant animal kingdoms, in keeping with Aztecan beliefs.

Slow-motion, self-inflicted flaying/crucifixions decorate the arid landscape.

 

Flowers glow like lukewarm fire.

Others arise with the serpentine.

Beauty does improve after a night of smoldering debauchery.

And finally, the desert becomes a jungle, threatening to devour the city.

CHICANONAUTICA PIMPS THE PALBARAS DEL PUEBLO WRITING WORKSHOP

That's right, in the latest Chicanonautica, at La Bloga.

And they even have a video:

METASTELLAR INVERVIEW 3

From the ezine MetaStellar: Speculative Fiction and Beyond's Long Lost Friends program.  I show to E.E. King and Andrea Goyan how a make a mess of everthing. The third of three episodes.

CHICANONAUTICA FINDS OUT WHERE TOM MILLER WAS

Chicanonautica reviews Tom Miller’s Where was I? at La Bloga:

He writes about the Southwest:

The border:

Don Quixote:

And other characters:

METASTELLAR INTERVIEW 2

 From the ezine MetaStellar: Speculative Fiction and Beyond's Long Lost Friends program. I attempt to explain the Latinoid continuum to E.E. King and Andrea Goyan. The second of three episodes.

CHICANONAUTICA ZOOMS FOR EL PORVINER, ¡YA!

Chicanonautica is about promoting El Porviner, ¡Ya! Over at La Bloga.

Another jump into the future:

Zooming from a bookstore:

Encountering a heckler:

 

You never know were the new sci-fi is coming from:

METASTELLAR INTERVIEW 1

From the ezine MetaStellar: Speculative Fiction and Beyond's Long Lost Friends program, E.E. King and Andrea Goyan talk to me about my relation to cyber and other kinds of punks. The first of three episodes.

CHICANONAUTICA EXPOSES THE HAZARDS OF WRITING WHILE CHICANO

Chicanonautica barfs up some nasty realities at La Bloga.

This was triggered by my being close to finishing my new novel:

And being a Chicano:

Gotta get ready to show it to some publishers:

So I need a pep talk:

MAGNIFICENT MULTIVERSAL MAYHEM

 

 

So, there I was out of the house, in a theater, enjoying what was coming at me on the screen. Yeah, I was right not to wait for it to show up on a streaming service.

I knew Michelle Yeoh was wonderful, but Everything Everywhere All at Once is. . . Words failed me. After a while I thought, I gotta review this, but how? I couldn’t think of what I would say, the way I usually do with most entertainment these days.

Eventually, synapses fired, thoughts

bubbled up in my overstimulated brain . . .

What we have here is a genuine case of Twenty-First Century Genre-Meltdown: sci-fi, action/martial arts, slapstick comedy, rom-com, all at once. I laughed my head off and was in tears at the end.

But wait—there’s more.

More than just a blast of endorphins you could also get from jabbing your brain’s pleasure centers with an electric cattle prod. Thoughts, ideas start coming along with the mayhem. Some in the dialogue, but most of them actually come through action. This is a masterpiece of showing rather than telling. Aspiring writers take note.

All the gut-level entertainment is about one of the great existential problems of our times: living with science, and our technologically enhanced access to information making the multi/universe larger and us and our place in it smaller. And it’s funny. 

It also handles the whole concept of the multiverse better than Marvel, or any of the other corporate franchises.

I’m reminded of when I first encountered the word multiverse, in  a scene from Michael Moorcock’s 1969 Jerry Cornelius novel, A Cure for Cancer:

‘The multiverse. All layers of existence seen at once. Get it?’

‘Philosophy isn’t my bent.’

‘This is physics, dear. Get in.’

And of course, most of the audience thinks it's all just sound and fury signifying nothing but a temporary lapse in the boredom that is an essential part of the pre-packaged lives they’ve bought into.

I think pop culture has finally caught up with us avant-garde spec fic wise guys. Wonder if I can cash in on it? Or at least have fun trying.