ometime in the near future, the heterogeneous and exotic citizens of Los Angeles are preparing to celebrate Dead Daze, a bacchanalian holiday that's a fusion of Halloween, the Mexican Day of the Dead and Mardi Gras. Last year's celebrations resulted in mass rioting, and the authorities are hoping this year won't be worse. Unfortunately, they haven't reckoned with the unthinking mischief of a hacker named Alberto "Beto" Orozco.
Beto has stolen an experimental "god chip," which can bootstrap a deity out of the web, or mediasphere. Honoring his heritage, Beto chooses to incarnate the Aztec trickster god, Tezcatlipoca, whose name means literally "smoking mirror." On the very eve of Dead Daze, Beto's success is undermined when the uncontrollable deity takes over the human's body. From this point on, Tezcatlipoca—calling himself Smokey Espejo and using the confusion of Dead Daze as a springboard—embarks on a quest to bring all humanity under his sway, while also enjoying all the conventional perks of godhead, such as plentiful drugs and women, as well as obeisance and musical self-indulgence.
Arrayed around and against Smokey are a colorful cast of outsiders and lowlifes: Phoebe Graziano, Beto's occasional, bisexual girlfriend, and her lover, Caldonia. The inventor of the god chip, Xochitl Echaurren. The private Hoodoo Investigators, Tan Tien and Zobop Delvaux. Beto's wimpy coworker, Ralph Norton. The state-certified street gang known as Los Olvidadoids. And the mysterious cabal calling themselves the Earth Angels, who want the god chip for their own purposes.
Over the space of a mere 48 hours, the rogue Aztec god will wreak havoc across the landscape of Los Angeles, growing more and more powerful—especially with the addition of a direct mind-machine interface into Beto's unwilling cortex—outwitting his opponents at every step. Only the radical tactic of fighting fire with fire has a chance to thwart him—assuming Smokey's enemies can move fast enough.
A trickster of SF's avant-garde
Any fans of William Gibson, Rudy Rucker or Neal Stephenson owe it to themselves to learn about the marvelous Ernest Hogan. Author of two previous novels—Cortez on Jupiter (1990) and High Aztech (1992)—Hogan brings his own idiosyncratic, Latino slant to such perennial cyberpunk concerns as AI godlings, fermenting underworld street tech, pop music as religion and biological exuberance as salvation. His books and stories are exultant romps across the edge of tomorrow, where women masquerading as gorgons and goddesses consort with men whose artistic and creative impulses often get them into hot water.
Hogan's current novel—for whose publication the small press known as Wordcraft deserves much praise—moves at white-hot speed across his future American landscape, which is a far-out yet recognizable extension of our current clime. A new drug simply called "Fun" is the fuel that powers giddy mental ascents among the citizenry into some kind of temporary Terence McKenna mushroom utopia. Bodies are blithely modified with feathers, implants, melanin boosters and other "ribofunk" enhancements. Meanwhile, in the White House, the first African-American president struggles to maintain some semblance of rationality and progress across a country that's a mix of Ron Goulart and Norman Spinrad craziness. The synchronization between Hogan's wild characters and his equally outré culture is perfect.
And how is this story told? Certainly not in any boring, conventional prose. Hogan coins numerous neologisms and employs multiple points of view to create a shifting kaleidoscope of narrative, one that is nonetheless never confusing and always engaging. True, sometimes his Vonnegut-style faux naivete is layered on a tad too thickly. And the fact that Beto as a character is utterly submerged and lost after the takeover by Tezcatlipoca means he is essentially a cipher. But none of this really matters, given Hogan's inventiveness and nonstop sexy shenanigans.
Hogan's Texcatlipoca coins a saying, repeated several times: "Reality is the only game worth playing." This motto reminds me of something the fabled Firesign Theater might have come up with, and Hogan proves himself a worthy peer to these surreal tricksters.
