Publisher HarperCollins has chosen underground celebrity and cyber poster-boy R. U. Sirius to co-write the book Design for Dying with the late Timothy Leary. Until he finally succumbed to cancer on 31 May 1996, Leary gave his death a public staging, complete with announcements of his impending suicide (which never occurred) and a popular Web page featuring QuickTime tours of his "de-animation room."
"Timothy threw a year-and-a-half-long multimedia public relations house party for the notion of dying in public. It was both astonishingly strange and good-natured," Sirius says. Leary's prankster-like approach to nonexistence has included sending delayed email messages to friends and collaborators such as author Robert Anton Wilson.
A former editor in chief of Mondo 2000 magazine, Sirius has long been a public admirer of Leary's, and HarperCollins editor Eamon Dolan calls Sirius a "perfect match" for Leary. Sirius replaces Leary's original collaborator, writer David Prince, who departed the project for undisclosed reasons.
"What I love about helping Leary make his statement," says Sirius, "is the way he takes anti-authoritarianism into deeply essential areas involving autonomy over giving birth, dying, and changing your brain. Leary relates the nature of all things back to a hopeful, hacker's approach: gaining maximum freedom and pleasure from the situation of being human."
Sirius has recently returned to Mondo 2000 to guest-edit two issues, the first of which will be published this month. Design for Dying is due out in May.
