Customer Reviews

Smoking Mirror Blues (Wordcraft Speculative Writers Series)

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It's too bad that Ernest Hogan hasn't been able to release more than a few books. His specialty is Aztec mythology, and here he brings the forgotten Aztec god Tezcatlipoca to an ultramodern and multicultural near-future Los Angeles, where geek programmers and video game designers have created an artificial intelligence version of this trickster god. Tezcatlipoca gains awareness, promptly injects his constructed consciousness into the real body of tech nerd Beto Orozco, and via the ultra-wired constructs of this society (a supercharged version of a William Gibson universe) he quickly transforms Beto into an omnipotent and omni-famous neogod. Here Hogan engagingly explores the kind of modern information landscape in which Tezcatlipoca would feel at home as the bringer of chaos (though he's a bit low on the required organizational skills), while he's also just the type of playful god that such a technocool-obsessed society would embrace. An interesting twist from Hogan is the presence of monotheists who wish to destroy this new Aztec god because they believe him to be satanic – just like the old conquest that wiped out Tezcatlipoca and his colleagues the first time. Hogan's writing zips along at blinding speed, jumping around between different scenes almost by the paragraph, and he has very impressive skills at hilarious slang, rip-roaring dialogue, and just slightly unbelievable multicultural characters. Hogan has his finger on the pulse of both the past and future of sci-fi, and let's hope that he finds further opportunities to unleash his innovative ideas. [~doomsdayer520~]

This book is great. I really had no idea what it was about when I bought it, but I was highly impressed when I read it. Ernest Hogan has a writing style that keeps you fascinated and makes the plot flow in new and interesting ways. The story is amusing while still remaining able to be taken seriously. Best of all, Tezcatlipoca is well represented and quite accurate! All in all, I'm highly impressed. It's nice to see something new and different for a change.

I've read a few writers of the cyber-punk genre (William Gibson, Lewis Shiner) and while the cyber aspects were apparent, I never really saw the punk aspect. In Ernest Hogan's Smoking Mirror Blues he puts the punk in cyber-punk. Hogan deconstructs the world we know and recreates a slightly askew near future that is recognizable as an extrapolated world based on our present.

Hogan's El Lay is a cool world where melting pot has simmered over and new compounds have been created in the forge of sex, death, and a Rock `n` Roll culture taken to the extreme. Beto Orozco with the help of a stolen computer program to recreate and personify gods of ancient cultures, creates Tezcatlipoca, the trickster god of the Aztecs. In his computer and through integration with a fully compatible medias here Tezcatlipoca is soon sucking down information about the culture and deciding it's a culture a god like him can thrive in possesses Beto and is soon out in the world during a Dead Daze (day of the dead) celebration, that seems aided by steroids or FUN, the drug of choice for the celebrants of Dead Daze.

As Beto's Tezcatlipoca becomes the star of Dead Daze and literally a rock star whose music threatens to enchant a society that is already doing a death dance on the edge of chaos. Realizing the danger, the Tezcatlipoca entity represents to society, a mélange of the recombozoid world are banded together through circumstance and personal reasons to try and stop Beto/Tezcatlipoca.

Smoking Mirror Blues is a mashup of cultures, slang, Rock `n' Roll, sexuality, the internet, gods ancient and newer (media?); you name it Hogan has thrown it in to this fast moving and breathtaking trip through a decadently embracing El Lay.