 Issue 14 cover | |
| Editor | R. U. Sirius |
|---|---|
| Editor | Jude Milhon |
| Editor | Alison Bailey Kennedy |
| Publisher | Fun City MegaMedia |
| First issue | 1984 |
| Final issue Number | 1998 17 |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | Berkeley, California |
| Language | English |
Mondo 2000 was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded Wired magazine. [1]
Mondo 2000 originated as High Frontiers in 1984, edited by R. U. Sirius (pseudonym for Ken Goffman) with co-editor and publisher Morgan Russell. R. U. Sirius was succeeded as Editor-in-Chief by Alison Bailey Kennedy, a.k.a. "Queen Mu" and "Alison Wonderland". [2]
Sirius was joined by hacker Jude Milhon (a.k.a. St. Jude) as editor and the magazine was renamed Reality Hackers in 1988 to better reflect its drugs and computers theme. It changed title again to Mondo 2000 in 1989. Art director and photographer Bart Nagel, a pioneer in Photoshop collage, created the publication's elegantly surrealist aesthetic. R. U. Sirius left at the beginning of 1993, at about the same time as the launch of Wired. The magazine continued until 1998, with the last issue being #17.
Mondo 2000 was relaunched as the blog Mondo2000.com in August 2017.
Along with the print version of Boing Boing — with which Mondo 2000 shared several writers, including Mark Frauenfelder, Richard Kadrey, Gareth Branwyn, and Jon Lebkowsky —Mondo 2000 helped develop what was to become the cyberpunk subculture. Writers included William Gibson, Nan C. Druid (pseudonym for Maerian Morris), Paco Nathan, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, Tiffany Lee Brown, Andrew Hultkrans, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Pesce, and Robert Anton Wilson.
Writers contributing since the 2017 relaunch include John Higgs, John Shirley, Giulio Prisco, Hyun Yi Kang, Woody Evans, Michael Pinchera, Rudy Rucker, Prop Anon, R.U. Sirius, and interviews with Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison. [3]
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews.
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb.
Judith [Jude] Milhon, in Washington D.C., best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Loyd Blankenship, better known by his pseudonym The Mentor, is a computer hacker and writer. He has been active since the 1970s, when he was a member of the hacker groups Extasyy Elite and Legion of Doom.
R. U. Sirius is an American writer, editor, talk show host, musician and cyberculture celebrity. He is best known as co-founder and original editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000 magazine from 1989 to 1993. Before that he founded and edited the magazines High Frontiers and Reality Hackers. Sirius was chairman and candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election for the Revolution Party. The party's 20-point platform was a hybrid of libertarianism and liberalism.
Boing Boing is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice won the Bloggies for Weblog of the Year, in 2004 and 2005. The editors are Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, Carla Sinclair, and Rob Beschizza, and the publisher is Jason Weisberger.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group. Most of his artworks are labelled monochrom.
Jon Lebkowsky is a web consultant/developer, author, and activist who was the co-founder of FringeWare Review. FringeWare, an early attempt at ecommerce and online community, published a popular "magalog" called FringeWare Review, and a literary zine edited by Lebkowsky called Unshaved Truths. FringeWare's email list, called the FringeWare News Network, established an international following for the organization, which also opened a store in Austin, Texas.
Bruce Fancher is a former computer hacker and member of the Legion of Doom hacker group. He co-founded MindVox in 1991 with Patrick K. Kroupa.
Kevin Maloof, better known by his pseudonym, Gareth Branwyn, is a writer, editor, and media critic.
Cyberpunk is the fifth studio album by English rock musician Billy Idol, released on 29 June 1993 by Chrysalis Records. A concept album, it was inspired by his personal interest in technology and his first attempts to use computers in the creation of his music. Idol based the album on the cyberdelic subculture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Heavily experimental in its style, the album was an attempt to take control of the creative process in the production of his albums, while simultaneously introducing Idol's fans and other musicians to the opportunities presented by digital media.
Mundane science fiction (MSF) is a niche literary movement within science fiction that developed in the early 2000s, with principles codified by the "Mundane Manifesto" in 2004, signed by author Geoff Ryman and "The Clarion West 2004 Class". The movement proposes "mundane science fiction" as its own subgenre of science fiction, typically characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System; a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials; and a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or a plausible extension of existing technology. There is debate over the boundaries of MSF and over which works can be considered canonical. Rudy Rucker has noted MSF's similarities to hard science fiction and Ritch Calvin has pointed out MSF's similarities to cyberpunk. Some commentators have identified science fiction films and television series which embody the MSF ethos of near-future realism.
Cyberdelic was the fusion of cyberculture and the psychedelic subculture that formed a new counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s.
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, was published by Duke University Press in 1992, though most of its contents had been featured in Mississippi Review in 1988.
Douglas Mark Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist, and documentarian. He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
The bibliography of American science fiction author Bruce Sterling comprises novels, short stories and non-fiction.
Arse Elektronika is an annual conference organized by the Austrian arts and philosophy collective monochrom, focused on sex and technology. The festival presents talks, workshops, machines, presentations and films. The festival's curator is Johannes Grenzfurthner. Between 2007 and 2015, the event was held in San Francisco, but monochrom wants to move the event to Europe.
Patrick Karel Kroupa is an American writer, hacker and activist. Kroupa was a member of the Legion of Doom and Cult of the Dead Cow hacker groups and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher. He was a heroin addict from age 14 to 30 and got clean through the use of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine.