Brains and Mecha
Hello!
Well, I asked Tumblr what they wanted to hear more about this month, and the response was that people wanted to hear more about Carapace and Chrysalis. And then I realized that I don’t think I’ve told all you lovely newsletter subscribers about this project yet at all? I think all I’ve said that I spent New Years Eve watching Pacific Rim for a secret project, and that’s it.
Allow me to un-secret it.
Tumblr heard about it first because Tumblr’s where it started. There were a few posts talking about the ways piloting/embodying a mecha (giant robot, mainly found in anime, and mainly used for fighting other giant robots or sometimes giant monsters) could mess with a pilot’s sense of their own body and identity.
We know, by now, how weak I am for any narrative that interacts with identity and embodiment. If Names in Their Blood didn’t tell you, a few months of my newsletter certainly would. This is my jam.
The first mecha show I watched (Gundam Wing. Yes, I know I’m dating myself with that) had mecha piloted with a dizzying array of satisfying clicky toggles and dials and clutches, alongside a sort of poetically mediated soul connection. But, neurologically controlled mecha have been in vogue for decades now- sometimes they have some nice analogue controls to give the audience more to watch while action scenes are going on, to make them more visually exciting.
But, mostly, it’s about hooking a multistory mechanical body right up to the brain, and that narratively tasty mingling of humanity and machine.
I saw those tumblr posts speculating about the effects of this direct brain/mecha hookup come across my feed several times, because I follow people who also love these kinds of things. And, eventually, I realized that I was drawn to the sort of horror element of the thing. The body horror of your body map and your senses being rewritten for a purpose. Usually, that purpose is military.
Very simply- this was a good game and I wanted to play, too. I’m a lot more willing to entertain complex brain/tech interactions with far future scifi, and with scifi that isn’t pretending to be science news. Plus, motor and sensory brain structures are at least a lot closer to standardized than things like memory and abstract thought.
But I already have an ongoing multi-book series. I couldn’t just add another project on my own and swap back and forth. That’s just not me.
Collaboration was the clear answer. And, right downstairs, I knew I had someone who loves the same themes and tropes as me, and who has experience writing dark stuff. So I walked right into my wife’s office, in the middle of a workday, and said “Do you want to write a neuropunk body horror mecha story with me?” and got an instant “Yes”.
We have a romance for the ages. Very drift compatible.
Fun fact about my wife- she has a bachelor’s in neuropsychology, and would likely have stayed in that field if academia as a professional field wasn’t so disastrously on fire. Add that to my masters in counseling and you see a collaboration between two people very excited to think about brains and how they work.
And, of course, how they sometimes very much do not work.
Our first course of action was to assemble a big pile of neurology books and grab a great big roll of paper, and start making lists of ways to disrupt a human brain. Something as complicated as a brain has so very very many ways it can break. The possibilities are endless! Every tiny thing you can do is mediated by your brain, and so things can break so much more granularly than you expect.
I remember, back in college, reading about an artist who had a tiny stroke and lost specifically not only the ability to process color but the memory of color. His eyes were fine. His ocular nerve was fine! But he broke the specific area of his brain that actually used that information, and then the insight that that had happened.
Since then, I’ve been particularly drawn to the biological basis for insight. Narratively, you can’t go wrong. You have characters who watch their abilities shifting, growing or degrading, like in Flowers for Algernon.
Or, you can have characters who can’t access that awareness.
Most people think of insight as a matter of psychology- something you can just think your way through, within the realm of mental health therapy. But every aspect of that process is still managed by that jiggly electric jello between your ears. For example, after some forms of brain damage, you can develop Alien Appendage Syndrome- which is when a person, with otherwise no psychosis at all, loses the capacity to recognize one of their limbs (usually a hand or arm) as their own or even as attached to them. Patients may panic, screaming because the are understandably terrified that somebody has left an arm in their hospital bed!
There is no logic-ing through this. You can’t run functional software through absent hardware. These are reasonable people of any level of intelligence. There is no well established treatment. If the brain needs to do something, and it can’t, you’re stuck.
Carapace and Chrysalis is about that fragile and imperfect flesh entering into a fraught relationship with a multistory pillar of technology and power in which each half of the pair has the capacity to mix with, damage, save or destroy the other.
So you can likely expect more newsletters to come about the brain and it’s many weak points.
Carapace and Chrysalis is also about terraforming, minimum wage worker conditions in modern America, our shared fondness for bugs and rocks, vintage anime, and who knows what else we’ll manage to sneak in. It’s nice to be excited about so many things.
I really am terrible at marketing. I should be talking about the research that went into Names in Their Blood, since that’s only been out for two months.
But I’d previously posted some concept art for Carapace and Chrysalis (it’s not a comic or anything, I just process things visually so this is part of my novel writing) and people liked it, and someone even did a small animation of Chloe, apparently excited by our idea of praying-mantis inspired mecha. So, that just fanned our enthusiasm for the project.
I am still working on book 3 in the Second Sentinels series. It’s going well!
So, in conclusion, I’ll see you next month, and please remember I have a book out and that as a newsletter subscriber you can access my bonus novella for free, and have a bit of very early concept art from Carapace and Chrysalis.
Sorry about the lack of cat pictures. I’m on Instagram right now for at least a little while, to experiment with whether I can get the algorithm there to acknowledge me, so feel free to get cat pics there!
See you next time!
Lee Brontide