The Happy Mutant Handbook
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The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates (1995), is an offbeat self-help book that advises the reader how to engage the world's absurdity by mutating into a surrealist dada cyber-reality hacker.
Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair, Gareth Branwyn, and Will Kreth edited this small anthology of independent articles, including contributions from Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey, John Shirley, and R. U. Sirius.
Included are intervews with social activist Patch Adams, political poster artist Colin Berry, prankster Joey Skaggs, appropriation artist Craig Baldwin, software developer Tom Jennings (inventor of FidoNet and founder of TLG, "The Little Garden", the world's first Internet Service Provider), Church of the SubGenius founder Ivan Stang and cartoonist Jim Woodring.
Many underground and subculture scenes are chronicled, including comix, zines, cults such as Church of the SubGenius and Discordianism, reality hacking, the Billboard Liberation Front, Schwa, and quite a bit more, including articles on fringe artist Stanislav Szukalski, Wham-O toys, Biodiesel, obsolete computer systems (including Coleco Adam, Lotus HAL, Magnuson, Borland Turbo Prolog and IBM Topview), the Cacophony Society, the Burning Man festival, and the lawsuit that broke up the husband and wife art team of Margaret and Walter Keane. The book exists primarily as a celebration of weirdness.
Sinclair, Frauenfelder, and Branwyn were editors of the popular bOING bOING zine (now a blog), and this book was an extension of that enterprise. An odd batch of stickers was included in the publication.
[edit] Reference
Frauenfelder, Mark; Sinclair, Carla; Branwyn, Gareth; Kreth, Will editors. (1995). The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates. New York, Riverhead Books (Penguin Group). ISBN 1-57322-502-9
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