William Gibson and Timothy Leary in conversation, 1989

As part of RU Sirius's Mondo 2000 History Project, he's posted a bit of a recorded conversation from 1989 between Timothy Leary and William Gibson. RU writes:

We were working on our first Mondo 2000 issue. It was going to be the cyberpunk theme issue and we’d gotten interviews with the major cyberpunk SF writers, except Gibson. Gibson’s management wouldn’t put us in touch with him. And then we heard that he was coming to the Bay Area and we turned up the heat, but his press agent had him set up for interviews with major outlets only and we were nobody and it was just a brick wall. So somehow, Mu wound up on the phone with Leary complaining about this and Leary offered to let us transcribe a tape of him and Gibson in conversation about ideas for the game spinoff that would accompany the release of the film of Neuromancer — all of this being planned then — back in 1989. Leary was going to lead the development of the game… at least conceptually. (Well, it was all conceptual, ultimately.)

So, the next day, we all showed up at a Gibson appearance in Berkeley radiating some kind of weird intense energy and Gibson was drinking warm beers and glancing nervously over at us while he signed books. We probably looked to him like some weird cult preparing a kidnapping. And after the line of autograph seekers cleared out, (Mondo 2000 publisher Queen) Mu strolled up with this insane bezoomny rictus grin that she has and told him that we were running this interview that Leary had done with him. And he literally held the side of the desk like waves were making him seasick and shouted, “That was no interview! That was a drunken business meeting!”

William Gibson and Tim Leary in conversation

• [Mujokan]

  Unfortunately they had to compete with Wired.

  • [David Hall]

    In my head all I can hear now is William Gibson speaking in Ira Glass’s voice.

  • [Eddie K]

    Not exactly a competition. Mondo 2000 is Wired’s Evil Older Brother.

    Kind of an archetypal, balance of the universe thing.

    I have all the Mondo 2000s, some High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, and a handful of Boing Boing zines. Very cool and exciting. A great time.

    Everything was booming and everything seemed to be
    progressing nicely and according to plan, as I recall.

• [hypersomniac]

  Fun fact: When Leary was imprisoned, the only book he read was Gravity’s Rainbow, or legend has it.

• [hbgvfcdxsz hbgvfcdxsz]

  i lost respect for leary when he gave LSD to 10 year olds. Here is a clip of the boy talking about it. It’s better than reading the bible 6 times!!
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fErEDnGMO44

• [Jon Pruente]

  The game actually did exist. I played it on my Amiga, back when. It’s one of the few games I’ve ever played to the finish. 

• [velvetcyberpunk]

  Wired is a good mag but it doesn’t hold a candle to Mondo.

• [frankiestout]

  So, you’re saying that reading the Bible six times is preferable to taking an LSD trip? People who have read the Bible six times have killed many orders of magnitude more people than those who have simply taken LSD.

• [CountZero]

  They could have just contacted Gibson on Twitter. Oh, wait…