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THE THEMES AND MOTIFS OF CYBERPUNK HAVE been percolating through the culture < for nearly a decade. But they have coalesced in the past few years, thanks in large part to an upstart magazine called MONDO 2000. Since 1988, Mondo's editors have covered cyberpunk as Rolling Stone magazine chronicles rock music, with celebrity interviews of such cyberheroes as NEGATIVLAND and TIMOTHY LEARY, alongside features detailing what's hot and what's on the horizon. Mondo's editors have packaged their quirky view of the world into a glossy book titled Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge (HarperCollins; $20). Its cover touts alphabetic entries on everything from virtual reality and wetware to designer aphrodisiacs and TECHNO-EROTIC PAGANISM, promising to make cyberpunk's rarefied perspective immediately accessible. Inside, in an innovative hypertext format (which is echoed in this article), relatively straightforward updates on computer graphics, multimedia and fiber optics accompany wild screeds on such recondite subjects as SYNESTHESIA and TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES.
The book and the magazine that inspired it are the product of a group of brainy (if eccentric) visionaries holed up in a rambling Victorian mansion perched on a hillside in Berkeley, California. The MTV-style graphics are supplied by designer Bart Nagel, the overcaffeinated prose by Ken Goffman (writing under the pen name R.U. Sirius) and Alison Kennedy (listed on the masthead as Queen Mu, "domineditrix"), with help from Rudy Rucker and a small staff of free-lancers and contributions from an international cast of cyberpunk enthusiasts. The goal is to inspire and instruct but not to lead. "We don't want to tell people what to think," says assistant art director Heide Foley. "We want to tell them what the possibilities are."
Largely patched together from back issues of Mondo 2000 magazine (and its precursor, a short-lived 'zine called Reality Hackers), the Guide is filled with articles on all the traditional cyberpunk obsessions, from ARTIFICIAL LIFE to VIRTUAL SEX. But some of the best entries are those that report on the activities of real people trying to live the cyberpunk life. For example, Mark Pauline, a San Francisco performance artist, specializes in giant machines and vast public spectacles: sonic booms that pin audiences to their chairs or the huge, stinking vat of rotting cheese with which he perfumed the air of Denmark to remind the citizenry of its Viking roots. When an explosion blew the thumb and three fingers off his right hand, Pauline simply had his big toe grafted where his thumb had been. He can pick things up again, but now he's waiting for medical science and grafting technology to advance to the point where he can replace his jerry-built hand with one taken from a cadaver.