Recommend: Monsters of the World

For this month’s recommendation post, we’re asking readers to tell us about their favorite monsters of the world. What inhuman or almost-human beast, hybrid, giant or otherworldly creatures most fascinates, terrifies or speaks to you? As usual we have asked a handful of authors, artists and other friends to prime the pump with their suggestions, but what we really want is to hear from you.

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Jo Thomas (Journeymouse; Elkie Berstein trilogy)

It probably comes as no surprise to people who know even a little bit about me that my favourite kind of monster is werewolves. After all, I’ve written three books that involve killing and/or living with them: 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf, A Pack of Lies and Fool If You Think It’s Over. I’ve even written blog posts about why I decided to write werewolves, the rules I use, and what I see as the history I'm tapping in to. (Although I’m not an academic who specialises in werewolves in historic literature, and I may be wrong or filtering out the stuff I don’t make use of.)

However, here’s the thing. Furry monsters have been the most intriguing to me for a while, even before I had dogs of my own and even before I started trying to work out how they would actually, well, work. Werewolves seem to represent the monster within, the animal nature that's hiding inside every human being, just waiting for that “it’s in my nature” or “it’s just the way I am” excuse to come trotting out. I want to be better than that. I want to be a human being, a person in control of themselves. On the other hand, there are times I envy these monsters, even if it’s a curse and it means they are forced to exist outside of community and civilisation. After all, they get to be a rampaging monster with no thought to the consequences.

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Ernest Hogan (Mondo Ernesto)

The best monsters though are the ones that haunt your dreams, give you nightmares, and change the course of your life. So I'll have to go with the mutant slaves from the original 1953 version of Invaders from Mars—those bug-eyed, furry brutes with visible zippers down their backs. In the dreams at least, there was only one, and he was coming after me. I would go to adults, but they couldn't see—or even believe in—him. This developed into a phobia of monsters, and hatred of science fiction.

Then one nightmare, after some adult had told me there was no such things as monsters, I turned around, and there he was. I grabbed one of his arms, and it snapped off, and crumbled. He was made of the same delicate, almost solid smoke of the Magic Snakes fireworks. I punched him, and he fell apart like those flimsy snakes. I was no longer afraid of monsters. I loved them. And I loved science fiction, too. Since then, my life has been full of monsters. It makes me smile.

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Alina Dimitrova (academic page)

Baba Yaga is… an old Slavic perception of horror. In the numerous variations of her legend, spread over an enormous territory, she appears as an anthropomorphic, monstrous-looking figure, a cannibal and terrifying magician who hates humans. Dwelling in a deep forest outside the human realm, she is profoundly related to the wilderness and to nature cults. Her house on chicken legs reflects in a curious way an ancient burial custom of cremating the dead in small wooden huts built on tree stumps. Absorbing elements of witch and goddess, and often associated with some female evil spirits that exist beyond the Slavic imagination (just compare the horrifying tale of Hansel and Gretel…), her multidimensional figure provides infinite perspectives for exploration that trigger the curiosity of the researcher.

The most astonishing aspect of her mythological image is her ability to turn into a positive character that helps humans, sometimes involuntarily, especially the young hero who struggles to accomplish his task and save the day.

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Don Riggs (faculty page)

I was born in the Year of the Dragon. A tarot instructor once said of the King of Staffs in a spread I head dealt myself with my own deck, a card which features an old dragon, “That is your job”—not realizing that I also worked at a school with a dragon as its mascot!

The dragon has differing associations in different cultures. Largely negative in Western culture, in Chinese tradition the dragon is associated with rationality (as opposed to the passion of the tiger). In the Near Eastern roots of Western Culture, the dragon is associated with the Female, as in the Babylonian Tiamat, which was slain by Marduk. Merlin Stone, in When God Was a Woman, argues that the killing of dragons by (male) heroes in Western myth and folklore reflects male fear of the primordial Mother Goddess, whom they were trying to obliterate even in memory. Tolkien glossed the medieval dragon as an emblem of “malitia,” or malice, and it is with this in mind that one may read Smaug in The Hobbit as manifesting pride, wrath, avarice, and possibly even sloth (sleeping on a pile of treasure for 100 years).

Literary dragons that have inspired me include: Fafnir, whom I remember from reading Sigurd of the Volsungs; the unnamed dragon from Beowulf; the combination of the two in Tolkien’s Smaug, also the delightful Chrysophylax, from Farmer Giles of Ham; the dragon in Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea; Anne McCaffery’s dragons; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Great Chinese Dragon.

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Katharine A. Viola (art page)

My favorite monsters are trolls. I have been fascinated by these creatures since I was a child. I love how they are a diverse creature with several different species; mountain trolls, forest troll, etc. I particularly love how they are depicted as larger (much larger) than humans, but not too intelligent; they are scary and intimidating, yet easily escapable if you can outwit them.

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Now tell us about your favorite/most nightmarish monsters in the comments. If you prefer, you can share your favorite monsters as images on social media, and have a chance of winning a prize (see rules from Classics International). And if you haven’t had enough of monsters, there’s a whole evening of them in London next Tuesday: Why do we need monsters?

Interview with Ernest Hogan

This week we’re joined by TFF old friend Ernest Hogan (who had a story in WSaDF, a mini-sequel in our ten year anniversary blog campaign, and has blogged for or about us a couple times before), to talk about his work, a forthcoming novel, art show, and the end of the world.

East L.A.-born Ernest Hogan is the author of Cortez on Jupiter, High Aztech, and Smoking Mirror Blues, which have given him the reputation as the Father of Chicano Science Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Amazing Stories, Analog, Science Fiction Age, and many anthologies. His “Chicanonautica Manifesto” appeared in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies. His is also an artist. He blogs at mondoernesto.com and labloga.blogspot.com. His is married to the author Emily Devenport, and they live in Arizona.

We asked him a few questions:

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The Future Fire: You wrote a mini-sequel to your story “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus” from We See a Different Frontier, titled “Xiomara’s Flying Circus.” Have you written, or do you plan to write, any other stories set in this postcolonial steampunk universe?

Ernest Hogan: That whole universe started with the title “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus.” I thought it up, laughed, wrote it down, and years went by before random historical details about pilots who flew for Villa and how Raoul Walsh went down and shot scenes of a silent film with him. My alternate universes tend to be something I encounter and they grow in weird ways. I had trouble getting into the story until I started thinking of it as a spaghetti western. It would be fun to expand both stories into sprawling novel like Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down or Mumbo Jumbo, but genre publishers like their novels to be slam-blang action adventures that nerdy teenaged girls can relate to, which makes it hard for sixty year-old Chicano writer. I may go back to the universe if an opportunity arises, which could happen.

TFF: You also inspired the We See a Different Frontier campaign with your coining the term “recombocultural.” Can you tell us a bit about this concept, and why you think it’s important to speculative and postcolonial fiction?

EH: I was influenced by Ishmael Reed (uh-oh, I evoked him again) in his pioneering use of the term “multi-cultural” in an essay about artist using material from different cultures. I saw it as a natural for science fiction and fantasy (in fact, fantasy was multicultural before it became a commercial genre package in the seventies). Then I started getting flak from right-wing sci-fi types who were afraid I was trying to oppress them with political correctness—even though I ain’t never been politically correct. I realized that what I was doing was more than multiculturalism. I started using recomboculturalism to explain myself. Recombo as in recombinant DNA, mixing stuff up from all over, coming up with something different, with the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Chicanos have the term rasquache that overlaps with the concept. Maybe it’s more than a concept or style. It’s more like a way of seeing, and a way of living. It scared some folks. Then there are those who like the idea of recombozoid monsters running amok, transforming the landscape. And then again, some of us are recombozoid monsters.

TFF: You’re working on a new edition of your Chicano cyberpunk novel Smoking Mirror Blues at the moment. How much will you rewrite or revise from the first edition?

EH: Actually, this will be the third edition of Smoking Mirror Blues. The first was in 2001 from Wordcraft of Oregon. In 2012, I did a self-published ebook. I went over it with a fine-toothed comb, and did some minor changes—changed a few technical terms that have become dated, and such, but I essentially left it the way it was originally published. I will be doing a new introduction that will tell the long, twisted tale of where the book came from, and how it came to be written, and eventually published. It’ll also tell of how my career crashed and burned and my life went off in an unexpected direction.

TFF: What is the most amusing, surreal or unexpected writing prompt that reality ever gave to you?

EH: My relationship with reality is all tied in to my creative process that these things happen on a day to day basis. I go through life, and the interaction spawns art and writing, like the wreckage left behind after a kaju monster attacks. It makes my life pretty surreal. Like the homeless schizophrenic who bristled like he wanted to fight and told me, “I’m watching you, CLOSELY!” a little while ago. Maybe he wanted me to write about him.

TFF: Have you ever found or left a message in a bottle? Would you like to?

EH: Being a writer is like putting messages in bottles all the time. I find them when ever I find something I enjoy that’s not a product of the multinational corporate entertainment industry. Communication is often one way, or takes a long time. Navigating timespace can be a bitch, but it’s worth it.

TFF: What ancient divinity would you like to meet and what would you ask them?

EH: I do hear Tezcatlipoca whispering in my ear from time to time. It’s where my wilder ideas come from. I try to talk to him, but he doesn’t listen, just goes around causing trouble. Life would be so dull without him. Or maybe it’s just my bad attitude.

TFF: One day you open the door to go to the grocery store and a holographic version of yourself at the kerbside yells at you, “No time to explain—get into the car!” What do you do?

EH: Get on of course. Actually, this is similar to an unfinished story about my alter-ego, that’s titled, “Bring Me the Brain Of Victor Theremin.”

TFF: You’re a writer and a visual artist. What’s the relationship between your stories and your drawings? Do you have characters hopping from pages to sketchbooks and vice versa?

EH: I started out wanting to be a cartoonist, like a lot of writers of my generation. I never could manage to land a good, paying cartooning gig. Also, society doesn’t like people who can do too many different things. “Make up your mind! This is the age of specialization!” they would tell me, so, for the sake of professionalism, I tried to keep my writing and drawing separate, but the artificial barrier keeps breaking down. I recently wrote a story—actually, more like a novella—about the Calacanaut, the skull in a space helmet that I use as a personal icon, that will be published soon in a yet-to-be-titled anthology. Another border breaking down…

TFF: Can you tell us anything about the upcoming art gallery show you’re involved with?

EH: It’s evolving and mutating as I type this… After I published some covers of some of my old sketchbooks in Chicanonautica, my column for La Bloga, it caught the attention of Josh Rios, an academic/artist. He used the word “dadaistic.” We started corresponding, and he included some of my drawings in a installation/performance he did at Sector 2337, in Chicago, and some of my drawings even sold. Since then he’s used some of my drawings—and writing—in another show, we keep corresponding, and things develop… This latest “show” or whatever the proper word is, will take place in Mexico, so I’m in the process of getting a passport, because they’re supposed to pay for expenses, and all that good stuff. At this point, I don’t feel that the details are solid enough to reveal in a public forum. Thing change in the talking stage. I’ve been through this before, and it’s best to wait for things to get settled, but once they do, I’ll be ready to go full-throttle self-promotional.

TFF: What would be the most important thing for you to hold onto if civilization started to break down in your city?

EH: My city? Some people think it’s already happened here in Glendale, Arizona, the Detroit of the Southwest. My wife and I find it just fine, though we may choose to retire in some other town. If things got bad here, we’d probably just move. If we had to leave forever, in a hurry, I’d probably grab artwork and sketchbooks, and maybe some books that I want to read. My writing is backed up online, but maybe copies of my books would come in handy. Oh yeah, our electronic gadgets, if they still worked.

TFF: You mentioned that you’re currently looking at some unfinished novels, to see which you want to write next, which can have shorter pieces cannibalized from, etc. Can you give us any sneak previews?

EH: All of my unfinished novels have bits that could probably be cannibalized for sneak previews. I could look through them, if you’re interested…

Thanks for joining us, Ernest. We’d love to take you up on that sneak preview some day!

Ten-years-after Tuesday: Xiomara's Flying Circus

Xiomara’s Flying Circus
Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus, ten years on

by Ernest Hogan

This flash sequel takes place ten years after the events of “Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus”, Ernest’s story in We See a Different Frontier, and was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of TFF. If you want to see more fiction like this in the future, please support our fundraiser, where you can pre-order the celebration anthology and pick up other exciting rewards, for a few more hours only!

Mr. Burroughs must have thought he was Tarzan the way he treated Xiomara.

“You’ve done well for a hot little tamale. In just ten years, you’ve gone from a señorita in a dirty little town in Mexico to to owning a movie studio in Hollywood.”

He reached under the table.

I reached for the pistols under my silly embroidered waiter’s jacket

Mr. Burroughs’ bodyguard, a big lug who was too stupid to play Tarzan didn’t even notice me. He believed me when I said I “no espeak mucho English.”

Xiomara slapped Burroughs’ hand. “Please, Señor, we are in public!”

“We might as well be in Tijuana by the looks of this place. And call me Ed.”

“Ed. A funny little name.”

“We can’t all be something exotic like Xiomara.”

I hate the way gringos mispronounce her name.

“And I will be be the perfect Dejah Thoris!”

Mr. Burroughs licked his lips and grinned.

“So, Señor Burroughs, do we have a deal?”

“I’d love to have you make A Princess of Mars!”

“I’ll have my lawyers send you a contract.”

“Yes, yes. But first, I though we would seal this deal in another way.”

He panted a sloppy kiss on her lips, tore her dress, and squeezed a chichi.

I reached for my guns.

One of Xiomara’s eyes told me to wait.

“Señor! You are a married man!”

“My wife is more interested in making love to a bottle than me. And you inspire me!”

“Cabrón!” said Xiomara.

Mr. Burroughs whistled. His bodyguard aimed his gun at Xiomara’s face.

Her fist smashed Mr. Burroughs’ huevos as I put a bullet into the bodygaurd. Then I vaporized Mr. Burroughs with the Tesla death ray.

Cháirez and Holguín, who flew with me for General Villa, and now owned this restaurant, came out from the backroom, with guns drawn.

“Any problemas?” asked Cháirez.

I vaporized the bodyguard.

“Nada,” said Xiomara. “He thought my naglas were part of the deal.”

“That chingdera makes life easier,” said Holguín.

“Too bad,” said Cháirez. “It would have been a great movie.”

“It will be,” said Xiomara. “I’ll talk to his widow.”

Cháirez and Holguín hooted. “Viva Princess of Mars!”

“Princess?” said Xiomara. “I’d like to make her more of an empress.”

Postcolonial SF/F Twit-fiction writing contest

If you haven't yet read the postcolonial speculative fiction anthology edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad, We See a Different Frontier, here is a chance to win a copy, and a great bunch of other goodies, simply by writing a <140-character microstory.

The rules of the contest are simple:

1. Write your colonialism-themed SFF microstory from the perspective of the colonized (full story guidelines as per the original CFS) in 124 characters or less.
2. Tweet your microstory with the hashtags #twitfic #WSaDF by midnight UTC, November 6th, 2013.
3. Multiple entries per author are allowed.
4. Stories will be judged by Amal El-Mohtar, Fabio Fernandes and Nisi Shawl.
5. One winning microstory will receive a paperback copy of the We See a Different Frontier anthology sent in the mail (an alternative prize of a pb of Outlaw Bodies may be offered if you already own a copy), plus a signed copy of Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues, the new Crossed Genres superhero anthology Oomph, and the steampunk anthology Journeys in the Winterlands.
6. Runners-up prizes will include e-books of WSaDF or Outlaw Bodies, and Oomph.
7. The winning microstories may be reproduced by Futurefire.net Publishing in promotion for the anthology, but beyond that they belong to the authors.

Guest Post: I Didn't Know I Was an Alien, or: How I Became a Recombocultural Sci-Fi Guy

text and art by Ernest Hogan

It's the 21^st century. Modern media interconnects the world. Suddenly, we have a global civilization, and it is diverse.

Actually, that's an illusion. Civilization has always been diverse. Unless you are part of an isolated tribe that never contacts the outside world, you have to deal with cultures not your own. It's a basic survival skill going way, way, way, way the hell back.

This illusion is part of the colonial tradition. The conquerors come in and bring “civilization” to the natives, who are expected to cooperate if they don't want to be wiped out. In my part of the world, the Wild West, AKA Aztlán, AKA The Southwest (of the United States of America), it gets interesting – especially since I'm of Mexican descent, with some Irish thrown in, and I accidentally have the same name as the controversial Father of Ragtime.

I find myself to be a vintage, veteran multicultural (though I prefer the term “recombocultural” for reasons I'll explain later) science fiction writer.

Some folks would say speculative fiction – and they may be right, but let's get to that later . . .

I didn't intend to become Mr. Sci-Fi Recombozoid. It was thrust upon me, like my ethnic identity and place in society.

I was a wee tot way back in 20^th century, in the Fifties. I was born in East L.A. – some folks call it the Barrio, my parents called it the Neighborhood. For me it was the flowers in my grandmother's garden that towered over my head. I thought the whole universe was like that.

Science fiction came in through the television set. Space Patrol and Commando Cody taught me about the larger universe. Later, Forbidden Planet landed at a local drive in. My developing mind learned early about crossing borders, and new frontiers.

At first the monsters scared me. I was plagued with nightmares, but couldn't stay away. Eventually, I came to love the monsters. They were easier to identify with than the whitebread-kid mold that the media was trying to stuff me into. I found it was easier to tell the kids at school that I was Martian rather than explain myself.

Those were the days of Godzilla multiculturalism: Japanese monsters, Mexican vampires, Russian space epics, European sleaze, and Filipino horrors were mixed in with the low-rent Hollywood fare. We can't forget that after Bruce Lee, guys in the ghettos and barrios felt they could be heroes, too.

It was the fabled Sixties. Besides comic books and monster movies, there was the space program, UFOs, ESP, LSD, and a world gone mad on the evening news. After the Chicano Moratorium riots, I found out I was part of a minority group.

Before that, Chicanos were invisible. Teachers would talk about “Mexicans” – as if we weren't in the room with them. Suddenly, we were problem. It was easier being a Martian.

So I let my overdeveloped imagination go wild. I wasn't just into science fiction – I was into surrealism, satire, underground, art films, low-budget obscurities, anything weird and out of the ordinary. Cultural mutations became a life-long obsession. Science fiction was a focus, but never a limit to my interests.

By the Seventies, my reading went to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison. Dangerous Visions and the New Wave were a big influence – yes, “speculative fiction.” I also read translations from other countries when I could find them. I was always happy to find a new kind of sf.

I also reveled in writers like William Burroughs, Ishmael Reed, and Hunter Thompson.

I boldly started writing and trying to sell my work, I didn't limit myself. I tried to come up with the most daring, outrageous stuff I could, inspired by the diverse world I lived in.

Yeah, it took me years to get good – but even after I improved, I noticed that the genre and I were going in different directions. After Star Wars, science fiction became popular, but suddenly, everyone thought they knew what it was – traditional melodrama in funny clothes – and it wasn't what I was doing.

It was also assumed that the audience was white and male – all heterosexual nerds.

I was told things like “You have blacks and hispanics in there – you have to be careful, they get offended, you know.”

My name – that I share with a black historical figure – had them thinking I was white.

By the Eighties, I began to sell stories. These were out in the fringes, but I had my foot in the door. Some readers were confused as to what I was doing in their sci-fi magazine.

And I wasn't just submitting to sf markets. I sent my stories everywhere – especially if they paid well. It just happened that most of the places that have published me have the words “science fiction” as part of their title. There seems to a tolerance for strangeness in some of these places. It also may be a hold over from when science fiction was a catch-all term for things you didn't understand.

When I sold Cortez on Jupiter, I didn't mention anything about the Chicano or Aztec stuff. Or the Spanglish. I played up the science fiction elements. I had learned how to get away with things.

When it came out, I got good reviews (The best [first novel] I've read in science fiction since Neuromancer. – Locus), and bad (an avalanche of excessive verbiage and abominable prose style – Locus, a few pages later). But nobody called it dull. And some folks really liked it.

When my second novel, High Aztech, came out, the publisher did not promote it. The ad in Locus showed the cover, but had no text. No review copies were sent out. People told me that they had to call the publisher and cuss them out to get copies.

Still, High Aztech gained an audience. People still discover it and put good reviews online. You could say it has a cult following.

And in the introduction to the glossary for the Españahutl slang is my first use of the word recombocultural. I coined to explain what I do in my work, that was rapidly being label multicultural – a term that was becoming maligned, and associated with political correctness. The recombo is as in recombinant DNA, emphasizes that what I am writing about are the cultural mutations that happen when cultures come together, fuck & fight, damage chromosomes, and generate fascinating new monstrosities.

But, back in the Nineties, they weren't ready for diversity. The New York-based publishers wanted formula entertainment for their sci-fi consumers that didn't present disturbing concepts. They assumed that the audience was white and middle class. Non-white characters were either pale or only showed the back of their heads on the covers.

Ideas became scarce. I kept meeting readers who said, “I like science fiction because I always know what's going to happen.” I wondered what I was doing trying to write in this genre.

Also, word spread about my ethnicity. It seemed like I was being treated differently – like the most talented leper they ever met. Like an alien. And it didn't seem to matter if I was legal.

I could still sell occasional short stories to far-out fringe markets, but New York wouldn't touch my novels. The rejections followed the same format: They would praise my work as highly original, then tell me that it wasn't what they were looking for. Then they'd inform me about the latest hot, new trend – military sf, sexy vampires, zombies . . .

After years of rejection, I published my novel Smoking Mirror Blues through a small press. I got a hint of why New York wouldn't touch it when an artist refused to do the cover because of a tantric sex ritual in the beginning. There was also a Chicano mad scientist, lesbian lovers, religion, politics, and the world-as-we-know-it reconstructed to illustrate conflicts that are shaping the future. Yet it has attracted a following.

As the 21^st century lurched along, I gave up on New York. They still saw me as an unpublishable alien. The audience is now seen as being young women who are sexually attracted to the undead. And publishing is going through a crisis, with the economic turmoil and the arrival of the e-book. They say they only want to publish bestsellers, but nothing seems to be selling.

In the midst of it all, I see young writers coming on the scene, doing the sort of thing that I have been doing for decades. I hope they get treated better than I was. My advice to them is to write the most exciting fiction they can, inspired the world they live in.

Projects like We See a Different Frontier show promise by doing things in a non-traditional manner. We need these experiments. I expect to see traditional publishing dropping dead very soon.

Empires are falling. Colonies are rearranging. Cultures are mutating.

Recomboculture is in the air.

I have given up on being “commercial.” I am releasing my novels as ebooks, and working on ideas that the dying publishers wouldn't dare touch – like my science fiction bullfighting novel. I have seen the audience, and they are diverse.

The funny thing is, I am not alien – I am native. I am impure, a Chicano, a mestizo, a mongrel. And that is the future.

Ernest Hogan's Cortez on Jupiter is available as an ebook from Amazon and Smashwords. Smoking Mirror Blues and High Aztech be available later in 2012. Links to short fiction that can be read for free can be found at his blog, Mondo Ernesto.