Delightful!

This was a balm for my soul as I waded through the most stressful work month I can recall.

Following a friend group of Microsoft employees who depart for a Silicon Valley startup in the mid-90s, Microserfs should feel dated, but it surprisingly... doesn't?

Yes, there are "wait what" moments (imagine turning on the TV and NOT having subtitles automatically available?), but Coupland's meditations on man-meets-machine are as relevant as ever. We're still struggling to square these circles in the 2020s.

Also, it's FUNNY. I realised mid-read that Microserfs is that most cursed of novel forms, the... novel-in-flash. To be clear, a novel-in-flash is a concept that exists only in writing workshops, among people who think they can sneeze out a 500-word vignette every day for 160 days and then have a novel at the end of it. Most novels in flash should be called novels in FLUSH because they deserve the toilet, but anyway... Microserfs actually is hundreds of stark, lovely standalone story bricks that fit together into a Lego wall of an overall novel. That's fucken HARD TO DO.

Slight points-deduction for some weird character/narrative choices. (Here, every love is insta-love, especially internet love, but I guess this is the 90s, so no one's watched 300 episodes of Catfish. Dusty is a montrous amalgamation of Coupland's inability to write convincing female characters. Allegedly, there's a character named Emmett in this, but I have no idea who he is?) Anyway, did I mention...

Delightful!

Re-reading this years later was worthwhile for me after having worked for a giant cult-of-personality-driven tech company and lived in Silicon Valley. As with most of the Coupland books I've read:

...it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they're too contrived to be believed, and then real life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.

Another note: is "fishwich" a Canadianism? Coupland (as always) is dead-on about culture. He explores and reveals a lot about what language and technology say about culture (or the progression of the species, as some characters from this book might put it). But there are always these details that are most-decidedly "off." Like referring to the Silicon Valley arterial road El Camino Real as "Camino Real" instead of "El Camino." …or putting a definite article in front of highway numbers that aren't "101" (nobody says "the 280" that I've ever heard). I'm not trying to nit-pick. There's something about these off details that lends credibility to Coupland's critique. The old you-can't-really-understand-something-you're-only-been-a-part-of idea. It makes him seem like more of a visiting anthropologist who has extracted the essence of the people under study while flubbing some inconsequential details because of illegible field-notes.

Loved the book. Glad I read it again. I'd recommend this to anybody who has worked in technology, or wants to understand more about how the tech industry has developed culturally, or wants to be reminded of the 1990s.

I picked this up again after 15+ years for the sake of a bit of comfort reading. It has its charms, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I was expecting. The pop philosophy comes across as contrived and naïve, and I didn't really fall in love with the characters this time round. That said, it captures the early-90s tech zeitgeist pretty well, and is a fun novel for programmers, with a few interesting ideas.

Back in 1993, we ALL talked like Coupland, especially with the geeks that lived in a sealed office next to ours, and came out to service our computers. Their supervisor was named Pierre.

Pierre was a paunchy, funny, gone-a-bit-to-seed guy who, last seen after he moved to his bosses' organization after the relocation of logistics, developed a bad hernia from lifting desktop units for overhaul, before his much needed retirement.

Computers were weighty in that stone age.

Anyway, I so much loved Coupland's style in Gen X, that I got this one, read it, and gave it to a friend during the period of my first signs of office burn out in 1994.

I was working half days, and would frequent our neighbourhood mall before making the bus connection to the office. I bought this, there.

The Old Guard, like my own supervisor, avoided computers. My supervisor - like nearby Jack, a former LCol as he was - delegated most of their computer work to staff.

I was the overburdened staff my supervisor picked.

He couldn't even type. As if I had the time!

***

But we young bucks loved our gadgets!

Those were the happy days when workers were still human before automation was robo-totalized.

For us Coupland was an advance scout in that Brave New World of Microserfs -

And a darned Funny One at that.

But he SAW our future so clearly:

For now we are all, working or retired, only worn-out little microserfs…

Whose computers are Winning out as we Frazzled Humans DECLINE!

***

And what about my wacky ex-nerd buddy Pierre?

Well, I can only picture him in his bucolic retirement home, feet up on an ottoman and comfy pillow beneath his back, listening to his Beethoven and thinking with a chuckle of his difficult evangelizing at Delegate ‘n Disappear of our senior officers -

Who were more apt to joke around over lunchtime suds at the RCAF Mess -

Than get with the program and learn how their computers worked!

Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time never experienced? The Geekiness of the lot behind Oop! makes me feel just that for the 90s: nostalgic.
Microserfs is the first book I’ve read by Coupland. To say I enjoyed the book is an understatement. His ability to blur the line between humor and Just Plain Geekiness has created a new word to describe not only an era, but a group of people: microserfs.

For me Coupland has some 5-star books. This is not one of them. The characters come across as flat and uninteresting. And the story as a whole was kind of dull. One of his earlier books, perhaps that’s what caused the lack of polish.

2006 wrote: A very interesting read that includes a late coming of age, communal living, quarter-life crisis and search of self. Follows the journals and ramblings of a mid- 1990's California code reader. Very intriguing and relateable main character and unique supporting characters, keeps the everyday on-goings of the story fresh. One is able to see how much a group of friendss can change in a small spanse of time, when motivated and working together. Also great ending Mr Coupland, great ending.

My wife read Coupland's 2004 novel, "Eleanor Rigby" and found it to be pretty good. I learnt that he is both an author and a "post-modern" artist. I often see Douglas Coupland books in the scifi section of the bookstore. 1995's "Microserfs" was about coders working for Micrsoft in the 1990's. My son is currently a coder working for Microsoft. I thought, perhaps this might give some insight of his world. This is not scifi, but rather, techfi. Though I've never worked in an office cubical, am not a gamer and rather low-tech (not a cellphone carrier), I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would.

This is my favourite of all of Douglas Coupland's books. Sure, technology has evolved tremendously in the 20 years since it was written, but that special feeling of deep geekery remains. Ultimately, I like this book because it's so life-affirming - it's about hard-working geeks taking a risk and discovering love and life and everything in between. Also, I love it because it's the reason I met my wife, which makes it the BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME.

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.

A snapshot of a time not so long ago, these people are familiar, even if I was never one of them. They are filled, despite their constant craving for some "life" they insist they do not have, with optimism and joy. I don't think I view the modern tech world with that kind of hope and so the whole story reads like one of a bunch of rosy faced kids who have the luxury of not knowing about the current hell world the Internet is today. Oh, for that dream of the nineties!

See, so, at one point, Daniel (the narrator) explains another character's obsession over this device called an "answering machine." He is always anxious to see if he has messages, so he checks it with a zealous frequency. Meditating on this habit, Daniel envisions a world where we are all connected all the time, with no need to check messages or remember things because it will be all available to us automatically. He imagines this to be a key toward ultimate common understanding and peace.

He's just so adorable, I want to squish his naive little cheeks!

Anyway, I enjoyed this little piece of diary work probably more than I should have because it allowed me to live vicariously in this era that I let pass me by while I, I don't know, watched cartoons and read terrible fantasy novels. Also, as I've mentioned before, I'm a sucker for ensembles. At the beginning, Daniel gives us the run down on his housemates and I worried that that would be the end of each of these characters' development as I struggled to remember all of their names, but by the end of the first part, they are all distinct and memorable people.

And then it had a sobby ending which came out of that ol' left field. It's not a sad ending, so don't worry about that. I just didn't expect this book about wo/man-children to be capable of eliciting anything other than a knowing arch of the eyebrow. So, good job, Douglas! Maybe there was a reason I read your Eleanor Rigby, twice, in a row, after all.

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.