INTERVIEW: Jessica Barber, author of “Coma Kings”

Jessica Barber, author of “Coma Kings,” discusses the background of her story in this interview featured on SF Signal:

What was the seed for “Coma Kings”?

I’m an electrical engineer, and I occasionally work building hardware for neuroscience labs, so on a day-to-day basis I spend a reasonable amount of time discussing and thinking about brain-machine interfaces. One day a co-worker and I were having a conversation about what we were jokingly referring to as “brain DJs,” the idea being that you’d take, say, EEG recordings of somebody who was in a deep meditative state (or tripping, or whatever), and then induce somebody else to match their “brain waves” using magnetic stimulation (or flashing lights, or whatever). Super fun at parties! So “Coma Kings” sprung from that sort of idea of collaborative hallucination.

Read the rest at SF Signal!