[gallery]

In any artscene anthropological digs, lit (short for “literature” – poems, fiction, rants) maintains its traditional scene status by getting the short end of the stick. Due to biases inherent in our delightful Web 2.0, images (textmode, vector and high resolution) are very easy to share, needing only a conversion if indeed any treatment; music is less trivial to put up, especially if initially distributed in tracked form, but still very possible. Getting programs to work (or at least demonstrate their output) in-browser is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. But displaying period text – which should be the most seamless medium to share of all, much as it was considered the easiest (and least “skilled”) computer art form – is rarely, if ever, undertaken. This is a shame, because it was one of our traditional strengths (but, y'know, one of those strengths that is also a weakness.)

Ironically, while (some of) our practitioners of other art forms have kept on chugging along, most of Mist’s lit writers, deprived of the primarily textual cyber medium in which they reflexively expressed themselves, fell by the wayside as writers… to the point where we had a hard time finding any to put in our recent revival artpacks. But but but… it simply wouldn’t be a Mist pack with no lit! (That would be like an ACiD pack without the WE-WILL.SUE disclaimer!) So I had to go a bit further afield and headhunt some relevant words to include in our collections.

Jim Munroe (not all of our contributors rate Wikipedia articles about them!) was never part of the artscene, though he did write for the digital underground. While we were active in Mistigris making artpacks, he was also here in the 604, working for The Media Foundation as managing editor of the influential Adbusters magazine in its heyday. But before then, he was putting together e-zines in the newsgroups and small press scene of Southern Ontario – I asked him if he knew any members of Dark Illustrated, but though they were in the same place, they were not active at the same time. (Fo shizzle he knew BBSes, though – one of them provided the initial textmode setting for one of his video games, “Guilded Youth”.)

His time in Vancouver informed the setting of this third novel, 2002’s Everyone in Silico, a slice of West Coast near-future dystopia. (He’s been working with SF themes regularly, a bit of a Canadian Cory Doctorow (whoops, as Jim reminds me – Cory IS the Canadian Cory Doctorow), but instead of Boingboing, he established the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, a small press indie tour circuit I helped prop up the Vancouver end of back in my days at the Butchershop Floor art gallery.) As I approached him regarding permission for us to reprint an excerpt, we found my timing was perfect, as he was discharging his back catalogue of novels and graphic novels as temporarily-free, forevermore-pay-what-you-like ebooks (hot off the presses: Therefore Repent!, a story of magical hipsters hustling in post-Rapture Chicago while avoiding angelic death squads.) The Vancouver setting and cyberpunk tone of Everyone in Silico made it the perfect candidate for appearing in our artpack – how revelatory, for the kids who grew up in William Gibson’s cyberspace matrix (not just sharing the byways of imagination, for Gibson lived and walked the same streets of Vancouver as we did – we joked more than once about how we should look him up in the phone book and pay him an unsolicited late-night visit, imploring him to autograph our cybernetic implants… and, oh geez, I will just have to write a follow-up post about William Gibson later on) to finally see their own home rendered in some sour future form, not just the world capitols of Tokyo, New York and SoCal. Here we are, we have a future also! It’s not great, but at least we rate mention! Is Vancouver a world class city? Who knows, but the 604 is in effect!

I need not excerpt the excerpt here – you can read our chunk in the artpack, and of course you can also access the entire work as an ebook now for … name your price. Jim’s always got several exciting projects on the go – novels, comics, games and also films (Ghosts With Shit Jobs: required viewing) – and his latest project is recently-launched, a Torontonian historical mystery audiobook puzzle app for iOS, Wonderland, described as a walking stimulator. Jim Munroe doesn’t need an artgroup, he by himself is a veritable creative industry! Check his work out, because for every work I highlighted here, there are three more I was obliged to skip over for conciseness.