I probably shouldn't rate this book as highly as I have, out of respect for those who didn't actually live through it.

For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, though, and who were of that small fraction of the population who were in on the ground floor of the digital revolution, as it transformed from lawless frontier to settled territory, Coupland's book was like a flag waving for a country which we hadn't quite known we were citizens of. These days, of course, absolutely everyone is online, everyone plays video games, and everyone can craft a little subculture off and away from the popular centrist monoculture offered by Big Media. But back in the 80s, that kind of thing got you labeled a nerd, a geek, an outcast and loser. Given the fact that, outside of sci-fi cons and dial-up BBSs, most of this nerdism was solo activity, it could feel at times like you were the only geek on the planet. This was not a good thing.

What Coupland did was really suggest, for pretty much the first time, that there were now enough nerds in the world, and enough ways to connect them through shared interests and personality traits, to form communities of their own. Microserfs is fiction, but like Uncle Tom's cabin, it was fiction which suggested a blueprint for how the hopelessly dorky might someday find happiness with like-minded geeks.

Fiction. A little slice of the mid-nineties, Microsoft, and Silicon Valley.

This was was my first Coupland book and it wasn't what I was expecting. Apparently I was prepared for shallow postmodernism or something smugly impressed by its own cynicism. I don't know where I got that idea, but this is an optimistic book, full of human moments, love and friendship, and the things that drive us to succeed. I was surprised at how sweet it could be at times.

It's also got plenty of computer talk: programming, Microsoft vs Apple, the Cult of Bill. Also LEGO! It did get a bit showy at times. I didn't care enough to decipher the two pages of binary, or pick through the page without vowels, but the book is framed as a series of journal entries, and it works on that kind of self-indulgent level. The sometimes short, choppy entries reminded me a lot of  Kurt Vonnegut's writing style; Coupland's narrator even has the same habit of ending sections with a single exclamation.

Microsoft!

Five stars for making me feel like I was back in 1993, and for not turning this group of geeks into a joke. This is, as corny as it sounds, a story with heart, as well as hardware.

A novel in journal form about a group of Microsoft employees who leave the company to found a Silicon valley startup.

Douglas Coupland is what I think of as a zeitgeist writer. He captures the spirit of the times we live in by setting his novels in those places that history will look back upon as trend-setting, avant-garde cultures. Silicon Valley in the 1990’s is a prime candidate, if not the clear winner. Though it hasn’t lost any of its luster, Silicon Valley doesn’t hold the same power over mediatic senses now as it did then, simply because it’s now been around for a while.

Reading about the 1990’s nerd culture is a nostalgic trip. If you were there at the time, and happened to find yourself in a field not too distant from technology and (here’s a 90’s term for you) multimedia, you find yourself nodding your head frequently while reading this, sometimes laughing out loud.

The characters are a hodge-podge of geekism from the era. There’s a bodybuilder geek (two of them, actually), a suave marketing geek, a recovering anorexic, an ageing previous-generation IBM software guy, a hermit-like visionary, a geek mother, a closeted gay geek, a Canadian rough-and-tumble geek, and of course the narrator, a run-of-the-mill generic geek whose importance in the story is to be relatable, therefore not too extremely geeky.

These characters find themselves living together in the Valley and forging their group into an extended family, discovering themselves and the world outside of Microsoft communally. The narrator is the quintessential flaneur in that he seems to be the kind of person who everybody confess themselves to, and as such becomes the eyes and ears of the reader as the author does a far-ranging show and tell of life in the 1990’s, tech and corporate culture, Seattle, San Fransisco and the Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, technology, relationships, mass media, gender, etc. It slides and hops from one thing to the next, through brief anecdotes and heavy interpretation from the narrator or another character delivering analysis in thoughtful a partes.

The result is a lightly-toned, yet intricately weaved, information-heavy traversal of an economically ebullient period of history. It’s about technology, but it’s mostly about people and how they relate to it, how they tie it in with their past and their sociological makeup. The characters come to life fast and believably, and their diversity makes their commonality even more appreciable.

Often touching, always (alarmingly) smart.

Oh and, without giving anything away, I add that the ending blew me away. Nerds are people, too.

2023: Third reading: It's not so much that the times have changed. It's that I have changed. The reason this book is so great is that it's about people. It still serves as a fantastic time capsule, but these characters will always be interesting and so this will never age out.

2007: This is my second time through Microserfs. The times have changed. My first time was during the glory years of the 90's. It's a great story and no less great years later.

1995: First reading. No Goodreads back then, kids.

bill bill bill bill

queria tanto!!! um dia terei esse livro físico e serei muito feliz pq vou poder marcar ele de lapis colorido e marcar os dialogos fofos e reler varias vezes e mostrar pros meus filhos (ler pro meu gato)

Came closer to tech culture verisimilitude than any other book I can think of. Feels interesting and prescient early on, like a more culture focused William Gibson, then in the end devolves a little bit into lazy navel gazing. Ending feels abrupt and unearned. Enjoyable read tho.

I haven't read any Douglas Coupland in a long time. But I still remember how it felt to read Generation X long ago as a teenager. It was a very different experience reading this book, written in 1994, in 2008 now that the internet is an entirely different beast that permeates our daily activities. I enjoyed it, but it really dated itself. It was a fun exercise in reading it to see how far whe've come with technology.

@trent you should never read this book but that being said 5 stars

realistic in its plot, characters, and writing style. You feel like Dan’s friends and relationships are your friends and relationships, and all the characters are rooting for. A bit slow in the middle but fun twists toward the end, plus a really heartfelt conclusion (I almost cried at DOTTR). Some references I didn’t get but it does make you feel smart as you read it. If nothing else, it definitely proves I couldn’t work in tech.

Comparable to Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which is a massive compliment to the author and the book.

Even though he's not relevant anymore and hasn't been for a long time, I´m done for good with Coupland: second book read, second one I really disliked. This book has been sitting in my bookshelf for too long, and since it has always been sort of a cult-book about the tech-industry, and since I needed some light reading not too deep, I decided to give it a try.

Douglas Coupland is a talented writer, he knows how to write a book, no doubt about it; why he decided to use his talents to write these lame novels is beyond my understanding.

As with Generation X, this book is really much about nothing; in Generation X it was all about a bunch of shallow anecdotic stories of a group of clichéd twentysomethings living together in the early nineties, which is supposed to be a somewhat satirical portrait of the GenX youth of the times. In Microserfs it is all about a bunch of shallow anecdotic stories of a group of clichéd "code monkey" twentysomethings living together in the mid nineties, which is supposed to be a somewhat satirical portrait of the high-tech culture in the pre-bubble days.

The story is very outdated, and the characters and humour sometimes are somewhat geeky, but those are not the sins of the book. There's nothing wrong with geeky inside jokes and stereotypes --as Gordon Gecko might say "geek is good"--, but the humour on this book and the dialogues/stories/situations of the characters are not geeky, they're plainly dumb and stupid.

My boyfriend sent me mechanical poetry today.

Where is the numberless
attraction?
When will the partner upset?
The scent happens like a fat
Cable
Why the wonderful shame?

He programmed a poetry generator using random words and common syntax in poetry. The results are not wildly different from what the very human me writes with word magnets on my fridge. He’s not ashamed that the first poem he ever sent me was ghost written by a bot.
“It’s my cyborg plugin! WE ARE ONE”

Yeah. He’s re-reading Microserfs. Which I lent to him 2 years ago. Microserfs is a bubble, it’s dated, it’s not even that much about programming. Nothing of note happens.
It’s very much about belonging to a community. A certain culture with its own language, certain things that we find cool even though they’re not obviously so. You have to “get” it.

Nerdy, fun and you get to learn about eating flat meals that can be slipped under your door.