Microserfs
Douglas Coupland seems to have captured the zeitgeist (as far as I can tell) of tech culture of the mid 90's. His characters, who all work at Microsoft at the beginning of the book, migrate to Sunnyvale to form a start-up around a new (for 1994) object-oriented programming interface called Oop!, in which the user creates things out of Legos.
On an emotional level, the book is about how these geeks, who have no life except coding while slaving away under Bill Gates, form a community and fall in love and find themselves and whatnot. On a philosophical level, it's focused on how technology has affected our culture in the late twentieth century and will continue to do so.
At times, the non sequiturs got to me, as they seemed little more than a forum for Coupland to pass along musings of his own or that he might have picked up here and there. Also, the ending was a fairly shameless melodramatic ploy, but one that fit perfectly.
Coupland seems fairly hopeful about the potential of the internet and computers to play a positive role in human development, even saccharinely so. One character in particular likes to spout off about how computers are the essence of humanity stored offline in non-organic form.
The metaphysics are at times hard to swallow and some of the characters' observations are have become less clever in the eleven years since publication, but it was enough to encourage me to keep reading Douglas Coupland.
On a related note, the reason I chose Microserfs was that it was the first recommendation at Coupland's author profile at Guardian Books. They aren't always perfect, but the hundreds of bios, critical summaries, and suggestions of where to start make for an accessible and compact sort of literary guide.
On an emotional level, the book is about how these geeks, who have no life except coding while slaving away under Bill Gates, form a community and fall in love and find themselves and whatnot. On a philosophical level, it's focused on how technology has affected our culture in the late twentieth century and will continue to do so.
At times, the non sequiturs got to me, as they seemed little more than a forum for Coupland to pass along musings of his own or that he might have picked up here and there. Also, the ending was a fairly shameless melodramatic ploy, but one that fit perfectly.
Coupland seems fairly hopeful about the potential of the internet and computers to play a positive role in human development, even saccharinely so. One character in particular likes to spout off about how computers are the essence of humanity stored offline in non-organic form.
The metaphysics are at times hard to swallow and some of the characters' observations are have become less clever in the eleven years since publication, but it was enough to encourage me to keep reading Douglas Coupland.
On a related note, the reason I chose Microserfs was that it was the first recommendation at Coupland's author profile at Guardian Books. They aren't always perfect, but the hundreds of bios, critical summaries, and suggestions of where to start make for an accessible and compact sort of literary guide.
Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005
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