Space Cowboy Books’ new magazine Electronic Brain aims to ‘move humanities forward through experimentation and unabashed risk taking’

Jean-Paul L. Garnier, owner of our local Space Cowboy Books, has a new magazine out called Electronic Brain that takes a multidisciplinary approach to the periodical form.

After several years of editing multiple long-standing science fiction journals, including Worlds of If and Galaxy Magazine, Garnier has built a new hybrid magazine from scratch that might be the most unique one to date.

While backboned in science fiction, Electronic Brain is a book-form magazine that explores the vast variety of humanities including but not limited to speculative writing; poetry, graphic novelization, theater scripts, interviews, and even musical scores comprise the first issue out this week.

“The idea behind Electronic Brain is that the Internet has altered culture in a way for both readers and for creative types that has made everyone have narrower focuses to try and stick out with a niche.

“Having owned the bookstore in town for the last 10 years, I realized that that is just not how people read, and I don’t think it serves creative people well either, so I wanted to create a magazine that’s not necessarily genre specific but that covers all different types of humanities with a little bit of sense of humor too… The idea being that most readers and most people in general have wide cultural taste and I wanted to do something that has a little bit for everybody instead of something so specific which I think sort of pigeonholes culture in a way that’s not real. It’s how the internet works but that’s not how it works out in the real world,’” says Garnier.

At 130-pages, Electronic Brain features these disparate art forms completely unabridged, unlike a typical magazine with more bite-size features and side bars made for fast consumption. Among its diverse contents, Tara Campbell’s play “Vinnie the Pacifist Virus,” Michael Butterworth’s poem “Ghosts,” and Rocco Harris’ musical score each take up 20 +pages a piece.“

Another thing I wanted to do differently with this magazine is give every different form a lot of breathing room. A 20-page poem or a 27-page (musical) score is not something you would normally see in a magazine. The author of the score Rocco Harris said ‘You know you can abridge this if you want,’ but I said, ‘No I want the complete piece.”

I think especially in our bite sized internet world, giving things breathing room is super important and I don’t want to hinder the artist by limiting the amount of space they can take up with whatever type of story it is they want to tell,” says Garnier.

With both legends and newcomers to the sci-fi adjacent world, Garnier says he approached the contributors asking for pieces they might have had “hidden away in their desk somewhere,” possibly forgotten about since they didn’t fit neatly into their usual venues or audience’s expectations. But by featuring these overlooked or reappropriated pieces in this new magazine, Electronic Brain creates certain congruence out of artistic chaos, which Garnier states in the introduction, “attempts to move the humanities forward through experiment, unabashed risk-taking, and a love of all things new and challenging.

Electronic Brain is available for purchase at Space Cowboy Books in downtown Joshua Tree, located in Sun Alley Shops, or online at spacecowboybooks.com

The post Space Cowboy Books’ new magazine Electronic Brain aims to ‘move humanities forward through experimentation and unabashed risk taking’ appeared first on Z107.7 FM Joshua Tree.