Microserfs is not about Microsoft--it's about programmers who are searching for lives. A hilarious but frighteningly real look at geek life in the '90's, Coupland's book manifests a peculiar sense of how technology affects the human race and how it will continue to affect all of us. Microserfs is the hilarious journal of Dan, an ex-Microsoft programmer who, with his coder comrades, is on a quest to find purpose in life. This isn't just fodder for techies. The thoughts and fears of the not-so-stereotypical characters are easy for any of us to relate to, and their witty conversations and quirky view of the world make this a surprisingly thought-provoking book.

" ... just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s," muses one programmer. "I mean, all those Nerf toys and free beverages! And the way tech firms won't even call work 'the office,' but instead, 'the campus.' It's sick and evil."


From Publishers Weekly
With his nose to the zeitgeist, the author of Generation X again examines the angst of the white-collar, under-30 set in this entertaining tale of computer techies who escape the serfdom of Bill Gates's Microsoft to found their own multimedia company. The story is told through the online journal of Danielu@microsoft.com, an affable, insomniac, 26-year-old aspiring code writer. Together with his girlfriend Karla, a mousy shiatsu expert with a penchant for Star Trekky aphorisms, and a tight clique of maladjusted, nose-to-the-grindstone housemates, he relocates to a Lego-adorned office in Palo Alto, Calif., to develop a product called Object Oriented Programming (Oop!), a form of virtual Lego. Much of the story concerns the the Oop! staff's efforts to raise capital and "have a life" amid 18-hour work days. Dan's journal, like much prose on the Internet, abounds in typos, encrypted text, emoticons-:) for happy and :( for sad-and random snippets of information, a format that suits Copland's disjointed, soundbite-heavy fiction. Yet the randomness and nonlinearity of cyberspace hobble narrative. Amid endless digital chitchat and pop-philosophy, this novel's more serious ruminations about the physical and social alienation of life on the Information Superhighway never achieve any real complexity. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The fun in this abridged audiobook is in the author's (Life After God, Audio Reviews, LJ 6/1/94) penchant for linking together strings of descriptive 1990s pop culture icons and cyberterms in single sentences. For instance, a road is a "beautifully landscaped four-lane corridor of fast food franchises and metallically skinned tech headquarters." But at the same time, the listener all too soon senses a techie sitting at his computer terminal spewing stream-of-consciousness lingo through his word processor and calling it a novel. Whether it is due to overediting by the abridger or poor writing, there is, essentially, no plot. Well, brother Jed drowns in a flashback, Dad gets fired, and Mom has a stroke, but these human elements are injected in an embarrassingly mawkish way. It is also interesting to note how the hard edge in narrator Matthew Perry's voice goes soft in these scenes. The novel was originally serialized in Wired. Purchase only where the author has a large following.Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, N.C.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
"Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with fidelity."


Entertainment Weekly
"The novel's real fun is the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span the 70s, 80s and 90s...and Coupland uses them with relish."


From Booklist
Imagine being lost somewhere between the unreal worlds of The Brady Bunch and the information superhighway. Coupland, coiner of the term Generation X, takes us to the land of twentysomethings in this journal-as-novel about the lives of young computer geeks. Dan, who writes the journal, is one of several people working for guru Bill Gates. When they are not programming, coding, or debugging, the group members spend their time wondering what it's like to be Bill--what it's like to have Bill's genius and money. They live in a group home a few miles "off campus" --that is, a few miles from Microsoft's Seattle headquarters--making it easy to put in the usual 11 hours 7 days a week. They discuss with wonderment the days when companies were lifetime employers, when people envisioned their jobs as careers. But these seemingly depressing truths do not drown the story; the characters are fascinating, and the relationships they develop, though unconventional in every way, are vivid and lovely. There is a new world out there, and Coupland's story grants young people their own reality, their own voice, and consequently, their own tradition. Expect demand from Generation Xers, who will love the novel; others may get lost in the technobabble and the 1970s and 1980s pop-culture references. Mary Frances Wilkens


Book Description
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. 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. 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. 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. Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.


About the Author
Douglas Coupland was born on December 30, 1961, on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany. He grew up and lives in Vancouver, Canada. Girlfriend in a Coma  reestablishes Douglas Coupland as one of the most talented, engaging and important writers of his generation. Profoundly moving, darkly comic, this eerily prescient novel exploring questions of faith, decency and existence is set against the backdrop of a society hurtling toward the end of the century. As People  magazine so deftly put it, "His voice still resonates with the generation he named."He is the author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God, and Microserfs.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Microserfs: a hilarious, fanatically detailed, and oddly moving book about a handful of misfit Microsoft employees who realize they don't have lives and subsequently become determined to get lives inside the lightning-paced world of high-tech 1990s American geek culture. Amid a Seattle backdrop of software corporate cultishness ("B-B-B-B-Bill!") and the financial terror of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech startups, the members of Coupland's quirky ensemble "stick a piece of dynamite inside themselves, like a cartoon cat, in the hopes that when they reassemble their exploded pieces they will be somebody different." Coupland gives readers an intimate, deadly accurate, and very funny view of a way of life that is quickly becoming the dominant way of life: friends, families, and lovers falling through the trapdoors of the new electronic order and becoming involved in an engaging, awkward scramble toward love and success in a brave new world.

FROM THE CRITICS

Entertainment Weekly

The novel's real fun is the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span the 70s, 80s and 90s...and Coupland uses them with relish.

New York Times Book Review

Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with fidelity.

Entertainment Weekly

The novel's real fun is the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span the 70s, 80s and 90s...and Coupland uses them with relish.

New York Times Book Review

Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with fidelity.

Library Journal