‘My life is lived day to day,’ Dan tells us, ‘one line of bug-free code at a time.’ The housemates worship Bill Gates and have thrown themselves into their jobs. He works at Microsoft, so does everyone he knows. Dan lives in a geek houseshare in a dreary Washington byblow. Microserfs is a story of personal liberation. Wow, they didn’t even have Facebook back then? Readers his age today might feel the same for Dan and his 1990s geek friends. There’s a moment where Dan, with a condescending pity, reflects that for people of his mother’s generation Pong was their only video game experience. His characters applaud the latest plodding IT discovery with an enthusiasm that seems laughable from a modern standpoint.

The narrative abounds with references to now obsolete systems and process, that seem bewildering in retrospect. Like the best novels, Microserfs is dated and like the best writers, Coupland knows it. 1995 was the infantile stage of an interactive technology that would accelerate almost beyond understanding in the twenty-first century. The results are scattershot but can be interesting, profound, and sometimes unbearably moving.Ĭoupland’s image is apposite. As the group relocates to California to start their own cutting-edge-of-technology company, the plot turns slightly soggy, but the writing maintains its satisfying level of mind candy.A little way into Douglas Coupland’s 1995 Silicon Valley novel, his protagonist Dan Underwood theorises that ‘what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine’s subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?’ To develop this Dan begins to write random thoughts and phrases into his journal each day, which he saves in a subfile named ‘Subconscious’. Everything from the Archies’ Betty and Veronica to the sign is up for grabs, and Coupland uses them with relish.

Written in the form of a journal (on a laptop, natch), the novel’s real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. When they’re not working or stuffing their faces with junk food (”I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap’n Crunch…”), they are hanging out in group houses and reveling in their geekness. The Microserfs are a group of successful, code-crunching twentysomethings, extremely disgruntled with both their round-the-clock hours on Microsoft Corporation’s campus in Redmond, Wash., and the cult of BILL (as in Microsoft owner Gates).

Douglas Coupland pegged a generation with his 1991 book, Generation X, then went on to write three more au courant novels.

Microserfs book