Living together in a sort of digital flophouse "Our House of Wayward Mobility" they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.įunny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age. FANTASTIC OFFERS on quality books, collections, audio CDs and more - EXCLUSIVE to Book People. Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Buy Microserfs (Paperback) by Douglas Coupland. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them. He writes as a Canadian, publishes as a self-identified Canadian and, from my perspective at least, Coupland has assembled a body of work.Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. As one of the best-selling Canadian novelists of tile last decade, he is deeply aware and vehemently critical of the damage done to Canada by exported "American" culture. Thus, he is a self-identified Canadian writing almost exclusively about U.S. According to the brief biography found in each of his books, Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Sollingen, Germany, but grew, up and now lives in Vancouver. Coupland is indeed critiquing the growth of American monoculture his target doesn't seem immediately clear, and his books are built upon a litany of name brands and pop icons. As I read her review, I feel her fears about Coupland's complicity in the impending homogenization of an all-consuming global monoculture. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.
In it, Halim criticizes Douglas Coupland for his lack of clear focus in satirizing popular culture, his lack of solutions, and his seeming endorsement of the insidious consumerism that ever more quickly creeps into all of our lives. Microserfs 95 likes Like I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. I was so disappointed to find the multitude of typos due to OCR scanning (words misspelled, modified, or just plain missing us instead of vs, etc.) and seemingly zero proofreading. When I first proposed writing this essay, a friend sent me a review of Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) written by Nadia Halim. Microserfs is my all time favorite book, so when I received my Kindle, it was the obvious choice for the test drive of my new gadget.
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