"James E. Gunn - The Dreamers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

one really knows today how the brain remembers). Robert Jordan and James McConnell, while still
graduate students, began doing experiments with planarian worms at the University of Texas, studies that
McConnell continued while a professor at the University of Michigan. His work and those of others was
published in a publication whimsically titledThe Worm-Runners Digest.

Other researchers picked up the research: Holgar Hyden, George Ungar, David Krech.тАж All that, if the
reader is interested, is summarized (in quotes from journal and magazine articles) in the middle channel of
the MnemonistтАЩs ruminations. The final statement in that brief history, in the MnemonistтАЩs last section,
speculates about the future potential of chemical memory. Such speculations are the spark to the rocket
of the writerтАЩs imagination.

I included references to chemical memory in my novelKampus , in which they became pills of instruction
that students could pop instead of going to class тАФ though there they became a metaphor for getting
knowledge тАФ or information тАФ without having to work for it. But they also contained a central core of
possibility: that learning itself could be encapsulated, so that one could learn to be a computer technician,
say, or a surgeon by popping a pill. If that became possible, civilization would be transformed more
radically than it was by the industrial revolution or by science.

The Dreamersassumes that the chemical memory revolution has already occurred. All the everyday
problems of existence have been resolved. Now chemical memory is being applied to the arts, and
people have the opportunity to indulge themselves in the ultimate escape fiction: the living of other
peopleтАЩs lives through memories that have been encapsulated for them.

But there still will be a need for a few people who hold themselves apart from the common pool of
pleasure, who must make decisions, create dreams, and supply the basic materials for the dreamers and
their poppets.

Even in the 1950s and early 1960s, the concept of chemical memory was viewed skeptically by most
biologists and physiologists, and today has been discarded. An article in the January 2001Analog by
Kyle Kirkland, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, dismisses chemical memory and
describes what scientists today think about the way memories are recorded in the brain. Synaptic
physiology, he wrote, is one of the most important areas of neuro-science research. Just because you
canтАЩt inject other peopleтАЩs memories, he goes on to say, doesnтАЩt mean that you canтАЩtreplicate them. But
chemical memory always was more potent in what it implied about the human condition than in what it
might achieve in the real world. [Science fiction, editor John W. Campbell once wrote, exists in the gap
between the laboratory and the marketplace.] Memory is what makes us individuals, and the creation of
memories is what, when it structures our dreams, we call art.

James Gunn



To Steve Goldman,
my best reader

Contents
The Mnemonist I

The Historian