Everyone in Silico is Canadian wunderkind Jim Munroe’s third novel. After his well-received satirical first novel, Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask, he formed a publishing company, No Media Kings, and successfully self-published two novels (Angry Young Spaceman and Everyone in Silico) in Canada.
Now available in America through publisher Four Walls Eight Windows, Everyone in Silico is sharp, funny and so scarily prescient that the reader might suspect Munroe had advance notice of the recent big business shenanigans that have captured the news. Munroe’s Vancouver of 2036 comes alive with his descriptions of people of all ages struggling to survive in a post-scarcity economy. Advertisements are not just omnipresent, they are individually filtered and, for everyone but the super-rich, inescapable.
Leading the cast of characters is Doug Patterson, who trawls society looking for what’s cool, what might be cool and especially, what’s going to be cool. His wife and daughter are pressuring him, wanting to know when the family will put their bodies into storage and sign up for Self, the ultimate online virtual community. Doug would sign up in a minute . . . if he had the money. But the last few years have been tough, and he’s not on top of things the way he once was.
Then there’s Nicky, who bakes rat-dogs in her gene-oven and sells them as dogs to rich, susceptible tourists; Paul, an aging revolutionary still working at his old ideas of bringing humanity closer to the earth; JK and Chase, who might have something to do with Vancouver’s resurgence of greenery; and Eileen, a grandmother looking for her grandson who may already have uploaded himself.
Everyone in Silico can be seen as a present-day allegory of control, as well as a generously hopeful, possible future. It runs along at top speed, dips into subcultures (gene-sculpture, music, black-ops government programs), skips through the boardrooms and powerplays of megacorporations, and pulls together stories from all levels of society into an adventurous trip that you won’t want to end. Gavin J. Grant reads, reviews and publishes speculative fiction in Brooklyn.
