Everyone in Silico

In Jim Munroe's near-future novel Everyone in Silico, San Francisco has been destroyed by an earthquake and replaced by the virtual city of Frisco. Nearly everyone on earth wants to move to this fashionable cyberworld. This is no surprise. The physical world has become a sort of virtual reality: no one has privacy, and everyone is monitored by the corporations. Everyone is both consumer and salesperson, earning money by shilling cigarettes or software to strangers and friends. Why not abandon the flesh for the everlasting cyberspace of Frisco?

Still, not everyone seeks to leave the "meat" world. A genetic-engineering artist known as Nicky creates rat-dog splices to sell to naive tourists and resists her mother's pleas to live in Frisco. Professional adman Doug Patterson watches his city, job, and marriage start to crumble as his coworkers and neighbors move online. When she loses her 12-year-old grandson to Frisco, Eileen Ellis dons her old military bodysuit and becomes, once again, a deadly supersoldier--but this time, she serves no corporate master. And Paul, mysterious soul in the cybermachine, seeks to orchestrate a new destiny for the human race.

Everyone in Silico is the third novel by Jim Munroe, the former managing editor of radical anti-advertising magazine Adbusters. As a book, Everyone in Silico is rather wobbly. The pace is unvarying, the dialogue is sometimes slack, and the climax is diffuse. But like Steve Aylett and Paul Di Filippo, his fellow science-fiction satirists at publisher Four Walls Eight Windows, Monroe is unorthodox, off-kilter, and interesting. --Cynthia Ward