I don't know about you guys, but if we have to have a Palmer Eldritch figure in our damnable future, I would much rather it be a Latinx visual artist than Elon Musk. Can we live in Ernest Hogan's World instead of Philip K. Dick's? Just as a treat?
Think before you answer.
Allow me to elaborate.
Pablo is more than "just" a graffiti artist though; once he gets into space by a circuitous route involving the overworked criminal justice system and the jaded art world of a near-future greater Los Angeles, our man only goes and invents an entirely new art form! One that takes his already highly developed color sense and love of movement for its own sake and adds the novelty of zero gravity to what he does and to what the paint does -- and how it makes his "canvas" a truly three-dimensional sphere of influence, as it were, muchachitos.
"Working in freefall," he tells a news camera invading his studio at the center of a space station, "Has added a new dimension to my work."
If you can't tell, I kind of like this book.
All of this by itself would make for a unique and intriguing novel (as far as my reading has gone, we won't really see much attention paid to the idea of art in zero-gravity until the very early 21st century, when Alastair Reynolds will consider the possibilities of vast and intricate glassblown confections that would only be possible in space stations), and there's more than enough character drama with these artists and patrons to have kept me happy, but Hogan had more on his mind. This isn't "just" about what if we sent a graffiti artist into low earth orbit to make art on a space station. For one thing, this is a future in which humanity has started spreading through the solar system -- and encountered another life form right in our backyard. The planet Jupiter, a vast gas giant that could contain 1300 Earths in its volume, that doesn't have what we could regard as a solid surface except deep in its core where it's subjected to pressures that make the floors of Earth's oceans feel both easy and peasy, has something weird living in its famous Great Red Spot! But so far, we have utterly failed to make contact with it. Or have we.
I had to feel -- and create -- ways of flinging paint and moving in freefall. It was like magic, flying and dancing with colorful matching creatures: the protomorphic beastery of a new mythology. This was a second ritual for outer space. I was a shaman for the new frontier. (Italics mine)
While Pablo makes his zero-gravity splatter paintings* in defiance of the arts foundation board who paid his way up the gravity well (they liked his sketched ideas for what amounted to ascemic writing, the beginnings of an imaginary alien alphabet that i can't help but imagining the Beltalowdas of the Expanse series using for secret communications sprayed in plain sight someday), another artist works on a "viral graffiti robot bomb" and other less probable contraptions, the kind of work that might someday inspire a new generation of industrial designers working on machines our species hasn't imagined a need for yet; another of the artists is a floating bombshell of a woman who occasionally remembers to sculpt something between press interviews and photo shoots and three-day drug binges because artists gotta artist.
The sculptor tries having a fling with Pablo to keep the paparazzi excited -- if they get bored, her career could sink her back down to the Mudball after all -- but Pablo is in the Zone, work-wise and anyway, doesn't do drugs. When he was a little boy in East L.A., his parents got a little too deeply absorbed in a neo-Aztec subculture** and got addicted to a new-old drug called ATL and overdosed, leaving little Pablito to discover their bodies. All part of the legend, but he stays true to it and doesn't even really drink alcohol.
Before you can say "volatile and mercurial artist beefs with his patrons," Pablo has manipulated (or been manipulated into; opinions differ, and this story is told from many divergent points of view) his way onto the weird team of volunteers who have agreed to be lowered via special modules into that giant atmospheric storm to try to talk to the beings known to us as the Sirens. Pablo won't be the first; several others have failed and come back as mind-wiped vegetables. He isn't the most qualified; the OG "Sirenaut" was a seasoned spacer with a system-wide reputation, after all. Until he came back with zero control over his bodily functions and whatnot...
No, what Pablo is, is the strangest, the most stubborn and the most egotistical of the candidates. So when he shows up in Jupiter's orbit, the scientific reasearch/entertainment conglomerate*** in charge is ready to launch him on the mission immediately! But first he has to meet the love of his life, telepath and fellow Sirenaut Willa Aboid, whose fate is weirdly bound up with his even though they're not very successful as a typical couple and their romance does not satisfy the audience back home. Once again, Hogan has much more interesting things in mind for this pairing, things that are impossible to discuss without spoiling the fun of discovering what all the weird little hints and foreshadowings sprinkled through the novel actually mean. And while Cortez on Jupiter largely does exist as a self-spoiling text, there's no point in robbing you of the fun of what discovery there still is. Though if I haven't convinced you to check this one out as yet, maybe you deserve it.
Hmm.
Anyway, I'm delighted to see that Hogan, who is a practicing visual artist as well as a Gonzo science fiction writer, is still at it after all of these years, even to having just recently published a short story collection that I'm going to rush to get just as soon as my current embargo (I'm trying to read down a huge accumulation of the evidence that when it comes to buying new books, I have no self-control at all, even if I'm down to my last head of lettuce in the fridge. You may not see my tsundoku room. The fact that I have a tsundoku room is bad enough) conditions are met, aka I have read at least 100 of the print, ebook and audio books that I already own. But then, yeah, Guerilla Mural of a Siren's Song will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine.
*And yes, of course I'm thinking of that OK Go video.
**Anticipating Hogan's next novel, the psychedelic cyberpunk splendor that is High Aztech.
***Why yes, Ernest Hogan anticipated reality TV just like D.G. Compton did.
