Not since Ayn Rand's Howard Roarke has there been an artist as iconoclastic, as idealistic, and as splendidly spectacular as Pablo Cortez. And look out, he's twice as radical!
"Energetic, fast-paced, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable." -Analog
Combining hard science fiction with pyrotechnics worthy of "The Stars, My Destination," Ernest Hogan tells the story of the painter who founds the Guerrilla Muralists Of Los Angeles, goes on to make Mankind's first contact with the sentient life-forms of Jupiter.
“If Hunter S Thompson and Alfred Bester had a Chicano child, it would be this. - Dave Hutchinson
The Secret Origin of Pablo Cortez
An Introduction to CORTEZ ON JUPITER
A
long time ago, in the outer fringes of Los Angeles County, I was working on an
abstract painting, when Pablo Cortez popped out. The art teachers at Mt. San
Antonio College ("Mount SAC") encouraged abstract art, none of this
stuff with recognizable imagery or social commentary and certainly no
commercial art or illustration. They were Fine Artists who created Fine Art
that educated middle class people could dress up in their best clothes, visit
on the weekends in downtown galleries or museums and feel civilized.
I
was a Chicano kid (yeah, yeah, I was born in East L.A., my mother’s maiden name
was Garcia – ya wanna see my I.D. while we’re at it, officer?) whose ideas of
culture came from television, drive-in movies, and reading material I bought at
liquor stores. I felt that my art should grow out of the funky environment that
I lived in. The future starts now, and it also starts here.
No
wonder Pablo Cortez popped out of that painting.
I
was having a good time playing Jackson Pollock, slinging and smearing paint,
putting stuff like paint thinner to make it drip ... and there was a problem
with the drips. I liked them, but they had a tendency to flow in the same
direction – down. This would dominate the composition, nail it to the ground. I
needed to defy gravity somehow. Like I was on an orbiting space station.
I
was also experimenting with writing about Chicano characters – finding new viewpoints
for that gave a fresh, intense life to my stories. (Yeah, I could be an artist and writer. And I could understand science, too. Keep your
borders out of my way...) I was interested in the things that weren’t in
science fiction, after all, they were going to be in the future, too.
Also,
once you’ve got a good character – one that comes to life on the page and in
the reader’s mind, you’re like a mad scientist who has zapped a monster to
life. All you have to do after that is follow it around, study how it interacts
with its environment, report to the world what happens ... that is if the
military doesn’t come screaming down out of the sky and blast it all away for the
common good.
This
was the Seventies. The Sixties had burned out. The Vietnam War had just ended.
Nixon and Watergate were dominating the news. The economy was in the toilet.
Everything seemed to be out of whack. A lot of people thought the world was
coming to an end. As one of my teachers said, "You keep expecting to see
people wearing crossed ammunition belts."
This
was before Star Wars (yeah, I’m old) and everyone knew there was no
money in science fiction, and there was none of the trendy talk about diversity
we hear about now. Everybody seemed to think that the science fiction audience
was all white nerds who would be alienated by "minority" stuff. I was
looking out into a world that certainly was diverse, and the term
"minority" was becoming meaningless. I was trying to create the best,
most original writing that I could, because it had to be done, and I guess my
intent was to be revolutionary.
In
some ways, I was as crazy as Pablo Cortez.
My
first version of the story of Pablo Cortez – a novelette that no longer exists,
and I don’t even remember the title – was never published. I struggled to write
it, then sent it around, and got rejected. A few editors thought I showed
promise, but no one wanted to publish it.
That
was after I gave up on studying art, the whole world of Fine Art made no sense
to me, so I dropped out to pursue writing. I did have some minor success as an
illustrator and cartoonist, but that was underground. For years I lived under a
mound of rejection slips.
Granted
there were personal encouraging notes from editors, and later on the occasional
sales that kept me from quitting.
Then
Ben Bova started his Discoveries series for Tor. He was looking for new
writers. My wife, Emily Devenport, urged me to send him something. He was
asking for synopses, so I sent him one of a surrealistic, sex-crazed (and still
unpublished) space opera.
Ben
didn’t go for that one. He explained that he was working for a conservative guy
who wouldn’t go for such kinkiness, and wasn’t beyond burying a book that he
didn’t like.
However,
Ben felt that from my bio, I had something different to bring into the field
with my ethnic and artistic background. He asked for another synopsis.
And
of course, I didn’t know what to do.
Lucky
for me, Pablo Cortez, like a good monstrous creation, had refused to die.
I
had just sold a condensed version of Pablo Cortez’s story, "Guerrilla
Mural of a Siren’s Song" to
Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Weasley Smith’s Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine. I was taking Ray Bradbury’s advice that if you still believe
in a story that you couldn’t sell, after a few years, cut out a page, and send
it out again – and I cut a lot more than a page.
What
if I take that story, shove a stick of dynamite up its ass. stand back, and
take notes on what comes splattering down all over the landscape?
Ben
liked my Cortez on
Jupiter synopsis, and
suddenly, I had become a real writer, with contract with a New York publisher,
an agent, and everything.
This
was the Eighties. I did not sell Cortez
on Jupiter as a Chicano
science fiction novel. Nobody believed that there was an audience for such a
thing. I’d be honest about my ethnicity, but because I wasn’t dealing with
people face-to-face, they’d assume I was white like all the other sci-fi geeks.
I said that the main character was named Pablo Cortez, but didn’t go on about
his being a Chicano, or speaking Spanglish. I hoped they wouldn’t notice until
it was too late.
To
my surprise, Ben essentially, let me go wild, and write what I wanted, the way
that I wanted. His advice was minimal, but dead on. I don’t think this happens
much anymore.
Despite
what some people might like to think, Cortez
on Jupiter is not autobiographical. Like a lot of my
viewpoint characters, Pablo Cortez started out as parts of me would live a lot
differently if they went off on their own agenda. Good fictional characters
usually have less sense of self-preservation than real people, and have a knack
for getting into interesting kinds of trouble. Writers tend to find ways to get
along, so they can write.
But
there are people who claim that they can’t tell my fiction from my nonfiction.
Believe me, I’m always aware about where my life ends and the fiction begins.
Cortez
on Jupiter got great
reviews. I was compared to William Gibson. I smiled a lot.
Unfortunately,
it didn’t become a runaway bestseller. An editor at Tor called it a
"success d’esprit."
This
was also a time when science fiction was going in one direction, and I was
going in another. With bookstores, and publishers in the control of
corporations, the genre was becoming nerd lit – that is, fiction created
specifically for nerds, which is different from what I grew up reading. Modern
readers wanted stories focus-grouped for their demographic, part of franchises
they were familiar with, brought to them by multinational corporations they
trust. And, please, no new ideas!
"I
like sci-fi because I always know how it’s going to end, and there are no
surprises," as one once explained to me.
Still,
Cortez on Jupiter
attracted a loyal following. You could say it has become a bit of an
underground cult novel. I’ve always kept one foot in the underground, so when
the shit hit the fan, I’d have a place to stand.
Locus published two reviews, one calling it
the best science fiction first novel since Neuromancer, the other complaining about the
"abominable prose style."
Like
the rest of my work, people either love or hate Cortez on Jupiter.
Some
fans were turned off by the Spanglish, thought it was alienating and hard to
read while others loved it, telling me that it was the first time they saw
language they used every day in print. One editor called my readers, "noisy
minority.” Maybe they weren’t noisy enough.
And
now that it’s the 21st century, and tides are turning, we’re hearing a lot of
talk about diversity, postcolonialism, Afrofuturism and nerds that come in all
colors, it may be that Cortez
on Jupiter’s time has
finally come.
I
have this bad habit of being ahead of my time. Maybe that’s why I became a
science fiction writer.
So,
meet Pablo Cortez, the product of the life of a renegade Chicano. His story
isn’t nerd lit. Nerds – whatever their ethnicity – need to be challenged, not
coddled, like bulls who refuse to charge the matador, and need to be stuck with
firecracker-studded banderillas to perform. Maybe it will inspire you to
perform, face the unknown, or even our own future. The future always contains
the unexpected, and danger.
And
if you have the right attitude, it can be wicked fun.
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