All of the Douglas Coupland books I've read describe a smooth chronologiocal curve of decline from bold, inventive beginnings to trite, heavy-handed melodramatics. This was early enough (1995, 3rd novel) to be pretty tolerable, but it is the last: by 1998 he'd release the completely insufferable Girlfriend in a Coma.

Oh well. I'd say that his post All Families Are Psychotic stuff might be better, except I've heard that in JPod, he wrote himself into the story to deus ex machina straight up and show everyone what's what. A perfect metaphor/example for why I can't stand the guy.

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.

One of the best books I read in 2016- so many amazing one liners and multi dimensional characters. A glimpse into the beginning of the tech world that is now a part of all our lives but once was for nerds only.

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.

Fun and interesting, plus he almost makes a point!! The themes of transhumanism are undercut by close-mindedness. Characters: wow our immense privilege allows us to construct our own identity from all these component parts (like legos!) also characters: lets pause to laugh at the clocky transvestite

Dove sono oggi i Microservi?

Il libro viene pubblicato in America da Harper Collins nel 1995, e tradotto da Feltrinelli l'anno dopo.
Formalmente è il diario di un classico nerd che lavora come programmatore alla Microsoft, e decide di fondare, con alcuni amici, una sua start-up.
Libro sicuramente "generazionale", ne ho apprezzato questi aspetti:

- La veridicità del contesto: la mamma bibliotecaria volenterosa, il papà ingegnegnere licenziato da una ristrutturazione aziendale, "troppo giovane per andare in pensione e troppo vecchio per imparare nuovi trucchi". Nel racconto
emerge più volte il tema dei colloqui per una nuova assunzione a cui papà si sottomette speranzoso.

- Il ritratto generazionale: la passione per i Lego, per certi cartoni animati, per le Barbie, per Star Treck, per i videogiochi, per alcune cibarie non proprio naturali (da noi si direbbe: nutella, sofficini e altre deliziose schifezze)

- Il tratto ironico, e mai moralista, con il quale è raccontata "dal di dentro" la vita in Microsoft: l'importanza del denaro, la competitività calvinista (e quindi non sleale) fra colleghi-ragazzi, la figura mitica di "Bill", sovrano assoluto e imperscrutabile, il cui invito a pranzo, arrivato tramite email, può diventare l'evento che ti cambia la vita

- Il tentativo di sperimentare nuovi modi di scrittura: alcune parti del racconto sono pezzi di codice, altri parole in libertà (in realtà spesso in libera associazione, che ricordano le tag clouds, ma allora non usavano). Altri brani sono stralci di email tagliati-e-incollati

- Un certo senso di malinconia, spesso sincera, (ma volte un po furbetta e autocompiaciuta), e di autentica fragilità che pervade tutto il libro; il minimalismo nei sentimenti (ancora piu' minimo di quello "canonico" di Leavitt, perche' per niente lirico), la sensazione di vivere una vita del tutto innaturale, il desiderio irrealizzabile di avere una "vita propria" esterna al lavoro da programmatori, che e' anche gioco, ma che diventa -proprio per questo- assolutamente pervasivo di ogni momento quotidiano (ben prima del "sempre online" e dell'outing di massa dei social network 2.0)

Citazione
EMAIL DI ABE "Il sistema tech fa crescere qui ragazzi intelligenti e asociali che provengono da famiglie con genitori divorziati e accesi sistenitori della cultura del valore. Noi siamo in una nuova industria: non ci sono persone veramente anziane. Siamo l'avanguardia dell'adolescenza protratta" (pag. 357)

Ma la domanda sorge spontanea: dove sono, adesso, questi post-adolescenti americani descritti da Coupland?
Travolti dalla bolla dotcom?
Tra i nuovi poveri che campeggiano ai bordi di Los Angeles dopo aver perduto la casa?
Negli staff di Obama?

PS
Do un'occhiata alla dedica: il libro è dedicato (tra gli altri) a Louis Rossetto, ed a tutto il gruppo fondatore del vecchio Wired (pre-Anderson), quello degli editoriali di Nicholas Negroponte: quella storia lì (luci e ombre) è raccontata in: Wired : A romance / Gary Wolf. - Random house, 2003, che non ho letto.

umm... this book was disappointing. it is boring and boring and boring. i read it 'cause i wanted something light after all the heaviness of am homes.

there's a scene that i can't resist pointing out where somehow someone sends the main characters all an email about how every multiple of six minus one is a prime number and they all had to waste work time proving or disproving it. but. yeah. it is dumb. it takes about 2 seconds to disprove because it never should have been mentioned in the first place. fucker.

it might have been an OKAY book if it were a true story about a bunch of people i REALLY like but as a fictional account, um, yeah. dumb.

enough invective for now. apologies.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel centered around a group of brainy computer code writers in the early 90s. Coupland infuses pop culture and philosophical musings into a tale that begins at Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus and ends in Silicon Valley. Parts near the end were genuinely moving, to my surprise. The diary format made this a very fast read, and references to 1990s technology at the dawn of the oft-referenced Information Superhighway seem like just another part of history at this point. It's a love story and life story about geeks, but no real techspertise is necessary to grasp and enjoy this page-turner.

@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.

I read several books in a row that made me cry, and this was one of them.

God knows why - it's not like Coupland is attempting to write a great tragedy. I think I just really liked the characters, liked the way they interacted and how much they cared about each other. The book does a great job capturing the Silicon Valley nerd culture in the 90s, how it seemed to exist suspended in its own bubble world. It's science fictional without being science fiction - showing the way lives can come to be mediated by technology, the way it changes (for worse and for better) the way people find connections with one another. It can be hysterical at one moment and very sad the next.

I like the way Coupland writes.

Addendum: I was going to leave it at that, after trying and failing to describe exactly the effect the book had on me, then I went and read some other reviews of it, and David's hit it right on for me: "I think Coupland's work... recognizes a landscape dominated by disposable culture, and neither revels in it or reviles it, but instead takes a straight Buddhist approach, accepting it as spiritual matter because it is there, the way the mountains or rivers are there; Coupland is on the spearhead of writers grappling with spirituality in late-stage capitalism, as the Plastic Age turns mercilessly into the Electronic Age."

I was reading Microserfs, a novel about coders in the 1990’s, when I suddenly had a great idea. What if I used technology to write down my thoughts and totally zany random observations while I was reading the book? Then I could post my e-thoughts onto a Goodreads review board and get all of the likes and +1’s. This struck me as very one point oh, so here it is.

Random thought: Replace IBM with Microsoft, Microsoft with Apple, and Bill for Steve and you’ve got Microserfs for the 2000s.

If Microserfs was a Jeopardy board the categories would be:
-Pop culture references from the 90’s
-Technology firms in the 90’s
-Animals vs. Human Beings: What’s the difference?
-Annoying Formatting that tries to be “clever”
-THE FUTURE
-Play Doh and Legos
-The word “post-modern”
-Mind Body Dualism

Douglas Coupland probably did some research but it’s clear he’s not much of a nerd. I am not a coder, but even I know that if a product is not ready seven days before it ships, our hero probably would not be wandering around talking to people or preparing to take vacation time. He would be sitting in his cubicle for 14 hour shifts, trying desperately to make the deadline. Realism!

This is a random list of words that makes up my computer’s subconscious. Pretend they’re all formatted funny for no reason:
-Manifesto Novices' Chase
-Handyside v United Kingdom
-Trimix
-Randall Dougherty
-The Basel Convention


Here’s a passage that makes no sense: “Abe is against the pure gung-ho-ishness of pure research. He says that Interval [a technology firm] reminds him of an intellectual Watership Down.” I read that book cover-to-cover and I still have no idea what this reference means.

As I was coding on my Pentium 286, totally e-flaming all my net superhighway buddies, I realized that every one of the characters in this novel were getting significant others and getting in shape- they were getting a life. Dan was getting a life. Todd was getting a life. Susan was getting a life. Even Abe was getting a life. I didn’t care about any of them. It was just like an episode of Melrose Place. But then this startlingly banal observation was suddenly interrupted by an even more banal instant mail I got from my web e-mail servers. “What makes life worth living?” I was asked. Only one answer. Exclamation points at the end of paragraphs, of course!

Here is a list of all the italicized words on one, just one, page of this book:
-Remember (this counts as half, because for some reason the middle is italicized and the ends are not)
-reels
-just
-he’s
-his
-dating
-not
-truly
-me
-harder

I talked with Doug on the phone today. He said “This format is a great way to disguise the fact that nothing interesting is happening in this book.” I agreed. He said “In the future, we need to be one point oh. The future is like play-doh and our consciousness will be transferred into machines. I like buying stuff from Japan.” I sent him a wicked flame saying people don’t ever talk like this, and even if they did I would not want to hear them. I said to him that it kind of reminded me of Don Delillo. People were just standing around spouting philosophy one liners divorced of any context or meaning at each other. I told him I guess sometimes you get good stuff but most of the time it's a bunch of references and gibberish about machines, bodies, getting a life, and postmodernism. He broke down crying. Shiatsu massages!

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.