1991 - Scanning the Brain Box: Transverse and Axial Cross-Sections (An Anti-Manifesto) - Richard Kadrey

Texto

A doctor told me about an incident in medical school where his teacher held up a model of a brain and said, "This is the human brain. We don't know shit about it." While that's a bit hyperbolic, you get the point. Compared to other organs of the body, we don't know much about the brain because the only time we can get really up close and personal with it is when its user is dead, and then the brain isn't doing anything very interesting.

On a related front, English Lit types at various unnamed west coast universities occasionally ask me to talk to their classes about what it is to be a science fiction writer, and could I please explain what cyberpunk is. I always refuse the latter, pointing both teacher and class to Bruce Sterling's introduction to the Mirrorshades Anthology and explaining that I have nothing to add. I do, however, talk about how I write. And for this I use the Brain Box.

The BB is a personal external manifestation of what that anatomy teacher wanted--a wide-screen, all color, all singing, 3D look inside a live person's skull. In this case, mine. It's really just a box of research of materials--books, magazines, catalogs-- but all of them are important to me. They represent a set of personal and professional obsessions, and as such are a pretty good indicator of my state of mind at any given moment. When I wrote my first book, Metrophage, the BB contained arcane medical texts, military hardware catalogs, anarchist tracts and collections of Buddhist Sutras.

As I've worked on my new novel, the Brain Box has pulled new texts and ideas into its orbit, like some chaotic attractor: the history of European exploration in the Amazon, psychoacoustics, South American Indian mythology, music and chaos theory. . .

What follows are a few highlights from the Brain Box, Release 2.0. These texts were not selected because they help me understand the world better, but because they confirm my belief that EVERYTHING is infinitely weirder than we give it credit for, all we have to do is see it properly. The Brain Box is my anti-manifesto-- a Surrealist Starter Kit. Just add your own obsessions and stir.

Have fun and remember the advice given by the trumpet Magus, Louie Armstrong : "You gotta forget about the wrong notes and the right notes and just play it the way it wants to be played. If I had a minute for every wrong note I've turned into a tune, I'd be around here until the great trumpet blows the last lick."

(For the sake of space, I'm not going to mention obvious stuff like New Scientist, RE/Search or Loompanics, since these are reviewed elsewhere.)

Technical Publications

Contexto

Apareció publicado dentro de la sección "Manifestos" en Gareth Branwyn, Peter B. Sugarman (eds.) (1991) Beyond Cyberpunk!A Do It Yourself Guide to the Future. Louisa, VA: The Computer Lab. (a HyperCard application). Pero no sé si es la primera edición.

Enlaces

Primera edición:

URL: http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/Manifestos/BrainBox.html

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20220224215654/http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPgraf/Manifestos/BrainBox.html