Ken Goffman, R.U. Sirius, also know as Ken Goffman was the editor/co-founder of Mondo 2000, one of the most visionary and influential publications of late 1980s and ’90s. He’s looking to use Kickstarter to finance a “collective memory project” about the magazine and its history, for posterity. It’s certainly a worthy subject to my mind. Goffman’s project would take the form of a physical book and possibly become a documentary, too. Kickstarter has a podcast interview about the project and the history of Mondo 2000.

This project stemmed from your original desire to do a memoir, but seems to have become something much more.

Originally, I had the idea that I could work with the idea of memory and perception in the context of writing a memoir. I probably didn’t remember my life that accurately, and perhaps not that interestingly, but if I made my memoir open-source and brought people who had their own memories of interacting with me in their own lives — during the late ’60s/’70s and the period when I was doing Mondo 2000 and earlier magazines — then something really interesting would come of that. It’d be a literary experiment and an exploration of memory and psychology.  That’s where it started.

On one level it seemed really self-indulgent; in another way, it seemed like a fairly original project.  There’ve been a lot of books where it’s “as told to,” starting with a book called Edie by George Plympton, where they go around and talk to a whole lot of different people and quote them verbatim about some person’s life and what they witnessed.

My feeling was this would dig a little bit deeper, more interactive and more probing. Eventually, largely as a result of thinking about raising capital to get started on Kickstarter, trying to get the equivalent of the small amount book companies give for an advance, I decided I needed to narrow my focus.  People would be interested in doing this just with Mondo 2000 and the magazines that preceded it.  So it was narrowed down to a period from 1984-1997, starting with a magazine called High Frontiers that mutated into Reality Hackers and then Mondo 2000.

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium’s First Magazine by Jack Boulware (SF Weekly)