Review: High Aztech by Ernest Hogan

by Chriss Cornish published: April 26, 2010 No Comments

This Book Is About

Viva Xoltotl!

Tenochtitlan, once known as Mexico City, is the hottest, most exciting city in the year 2045. Stainless steel pyramids pierce the sky. Aztec fundamentalists, with artificial hearts, worship the sun with blood and lasers. And Xólotl Zapata, renegade cartoonist, is running for his life.

Everyone is after Zapata: the government, the Mafia, street gangs, cults, and garbage collectors. Why? Because 21st century science has developed a virus that can “infect” any human mind with religion – and Zapata is the carrier!

My Thoughts On This Book

High Aztech is a really great and different near-future science fiction novel set in a very realistic future Mexico. Forget Catcher in the Rye, this book should be required reading.

Some of what makes this science fiction book different is that it’s told from a Mexican perspective instead of an American or European one with a lot of subculture development. Also, the main and primary characters are artists; Zapata is a satirical cartoonist, his friends are singers and subversive graffiti artists. The plot is both an exploration of future world culture and an exploration of the origin of religion in the human personality.

The one thing that really makes High Aztech unique, though, is it’s narration style; this is the only book I know of that mixes both first person and third person points of view.

The reason for this? You, the reader, have taken the main character, Zapata, prisoner and are interrogating him because of the religion virus he carries. So, right from the start we have a reason for why the main character is telling his story and a general idea of who the reader is supposed to be. As Zapata tells his story the narration switches from the character’s point of view to the reader’s. It’s sometimes first person with statements like “our records show” and sometimes third person with transcripts or descriptions of video recordings as the reader’s organization (which is never identified) verifies Zapata’s statements.

The wall screen would not come on. I chanted, then I cried.
The airlock hissed again. It did not cut off my sobs.
I couldn’t bring myself to look at who was entering the room. I just cried in front of the blank screen.
A hand landed on my shoulder. Soon there was a voice:
Don’t cry, Xólotl; everything is cuallioso.” …

At 20:01, 12 August 2045, one of our bugs in the High Aztec building followed Patiyonena into Xólotl Zapata’s room …

… PATIYONENE: (Puts her arms around him.) There, there. I told you it would be cuallioso once we go there.
XÓLOTL ZAPATA: The screen, it won’t come on. Please, make it come on.
PATIYONENE: But you don’t need it anymore.
XÓLOTL ZAPATA: I’m falling apart without it
PATIYONENE: You’re well now. …

The thing that I really love about High Aztech, besides it’s unique narrative style, is the world building that the author, Ernest Hogan, did. He didn’t just slap the story down in Mexico. Hogan created a realistic future Mexican culture and subculture, creating future slang and linguistic traditions tied to the past we know. The most intriguing of these is the world’s Aztec religious revival that intertwines technology and religion.

The big screens were showing “Huitzilopochtili, Eat My Heart” again. I caught a glimpse of El Brujito dancing in a feathery costume that owed more to huehue Las Vega than to huehue Tenochitlán; his chest was bare, proudly showing his scar. I was a little shaken up by it, but a lot of my fellow commuters looked at it with envy. It was the number one song in Tenochitlán; a big success sponsored by High Aztech, S.A., and was said to be admired by the President, who rumor had it wants to go through the artificial heart transplant himself, but his advisers won’t let him…

I have to say, though, that at some points in the book Hogan’s Españáhuatl words did get a bit too thick for me and I had to halt in my reading to mentally run through my gradeschool Spanish to find a way to pronounce them. I could always figure out what the author meant from the way the words were used, but it did slow my reading down a lot.

The really scary thing about High Aztech, I thought, is its disturbingly possible view of a future America where Christian fundamentalism is in control and rampant. Complete with witch burnings on the White House lawn and American citizens fleeing across the Tortilla Curtain to Mexico for freedom and jobs.

I actually had to stop reading for a short bit when I got to that portion of the book, it was so frighteningly possible.

Which is what science fiction is supposed to do. Its real purpose isn’t to stick Victorians on the moon (though, that’s cool too), it’s to make us stop and go “whoa, hang on”.