But be warned, if you’re not a cyberpunk, prepare to enter thus world slowly. Mondo’s cyberpunk universe derives from the work of science-fiction novelist William Gibson, whose best-selling books depict a bleak world controlled by multinational corporations, where the heroes rebel and turn technology to their own ends by crashing computer systems or finding exotic drugs. Mondo’s language is English but the meaning can be elusive. The first three issues of the slick quarterly roamed across cyber-lifestyle, with articles that ranged from artificial sex via computer to how to legally purchase drugs designed to make you smarter. Together with the plain brown paper Whole Earth Review–the magazine for cyberhippies-Mondo is filling a niche. One San Francisco critic calls it the Rolling Stone of the ’90s. Analyst Paul Saffo, of the Menlo Park, Calif., Institute for the Future, goes further: “This is the kind of magazine that engineers read in their teens and influences what they build 20 years later. It’s an idea time bomb.”
And there are plenty of ideas. Recent Mondo issues included a bizarre conversation between Timothy Leary and William Burroughs, a description of aphrodisiacs that might work, a report on computerized break-ins at automatic teller machines and a speculative piece about “wire-heading”- implanting electrodes into the brain’s pleasure centers. Presiding over thus are two top editors who prefer to use odd pseudonyms: Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius.
“We’re technologic renegades,” says editor in chief Sirius (real name: Ken Goffman). Cyberpunks come in all genders. Queen Mu (real name : Alison Kennedy), “Domineditrix” of the magazine, says that 40 percent of its readers are women. “people either get it or they come up a complete blank. But there’s a real cult that follows us,” says Sirius. “Mondo,” says one fan, Stephen Beck, a computer manufacturer in Alameda, Calif., “is Blind Your Vocabulary,’ using jet fuel instead of motor oil.” Now Mondo is going mainstream: it has a HarperCollins contract to produce “A User’s Guide to the New Edge.”
The New Edge, as it were, is full of contradictions. The classic Berkeley hills mansion out of which Mondo works is funded partly by Queen Mu’s inheritance from her parents. The decor is dark woods, conventional furniture–and plenty of computers. The working drugs of choice are diet Coke and pizza. Off the job, Mu is a student of drugs (henbane, lolina, darnel) used in witchcraft–one of which paralyzed her briefly. She says she’s not a witch but may be a pixie:at one recent party she asked dinner guests whether they’d like toad venom (a psychedelic with dessert. All declined.
What’s next for Mondo? The coming issue will feature the history of transsexualism. “Someday we may be able to change our bodies into anything we want,” says Mu. “Or go into an electric room and say we want a purple chameleon, and a chameleon will appear.” “If that’s the case, then what does the future hold for magazines? “By 2000, magazines will be obsolete,” says Sirius, flipping his shoulder-length hair. “We’ll be the last magazine.” Or perhaps, he’ll be another balding entrepreneur wondering where all the time went.
Photo: Cult following: Sirius (left), Queen Mu and art director Bart Nagel (JAMES D. WILSON-NEWSWEEK)
Where cyberpunks frolic, love, fight and swap information un a shared computer land connected only by their keyboards.
Using computers, touch sensitive gloves and goggles to imitate reality.
Sexual VR; still just a gleam in a punk’s eye.
Now an acceptable term for computer enthusiasts.
The new word for bad hackers who invade other computers or a telephone system.
Legal nutrients and drugs said to enhance intelligence, usually purchased by mail from Europe or Asia.
People who browse through computer databases for fun.
