The alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo anthology

Peter Timusk a.k.a Pierre Anoid

Name: Peter Timusk
Country: Canada
Web & eMail: www.crystalcomputing.net

Some basic facts and time lines

Pierre Anoid is the made up name of a real person. The country he resides in a bilingual French English country and the pen name was originally Peter Paranoid a punk rock stage name. Who better to write cyberpunk fiction than a punk rocker who worked with computers in the late seventies. After all early cyberpunk borrowed heavily from real life punk rock.

This real person read main stream science fiction in the seventies and actually watched Star Trek in the 60's when it was first being broadcast. He wanted so much to be writer in his early twenties but he couldn't write worth beans in those days. Well actually he wrote a government report for money but he wasn't capable of fiction because he was really a hacker with schizophrenia.

As he aged and became a stage hand for the national theatre company of Canada he gained strength and clear thinking. He wrote poems all along (www.timusk.com/Petes). But then madmen are notorious poets and vis versa. As the nineties neared their zenith he was able to start to write basic stories. He is currently working on three short stories other than "A day in the life", which is part of the Chatsubo anthology.

His involvement with Usenet goes back to 1994. He is the semi-official web master for the newsgroup alt.support.schizophrenia. He also has web sites for his poems and other stories. His goals with writing are not financial but rather he would like to create a full novel one day full of aliens and strange green planets. He is a statistician by trade as well as studying computer crime. He lives with his girl friend in a mid sized Canadian city. He plays music socially with friends. Besides writing fiction he writes computer philosophy and other more dry topics on the web. Visit his web site at www.crystalcomputing.net to read more about the real person he is.

About the story "A day in the Life"

The title, of course, comes from a Beatles song. But it could be the title of anyone's description of a day IMHO. I was trying to show those who still don't know, that a lot of information, the drivers license plates in this story is stored in computers. Also many politicians right now when this story was penned were at once for the Internet(the new deal in the story) and also for less social welfare. At the same time the new deal is fiction, because in RL, either the government drags their collective heels getting on-line or the non-profits are in no way united in their approach to the on-line world. Not to mention that the typical welfare recipient does not access the net at all.

The story though is actually very autobiographical. Although it contains a bit of distopia(getting splashed) it also contains in the new deal my old skin of sci-fi utopia. It also reflects certain green party values.