Product Description

They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day "coding" and eating "flat" foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to "flame" one of them. But now there's a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #476776 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-01
• Released on: 2008-11-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
"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." (Entertainment Weekly )

"Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with fidelity." (Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review )

About the Author

Douglas Coupland is the author of twelve novels, including Generation X and Microserfs, and several works of nonfiction, including Polaroids from the Dead. He lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

Customer Reviews

Webserfing
"SPACE!... Not your final frontier in this instance, but there's lots of it here and its not a bad deal."

They are a subspecies of the homo sapiens. They're weird, wacky and wonderful: the geeks, who dwell happily amongst us and help keep society humming along. Douglas Coupland addresses the geek pride in an unusually cheerful little novel focusing on a workplace gang of geeks (like a flock of birds or pride of lions) known as "microserfs."

It's in diary form (interspersed with big quotes, web addies, and bits of code), by a young man named Dan. He and his pals work for Microsoft, and their jobs dominate most of their lives (despite this, he does get a girlfriend). Despite the machine-dominated jobs they have, these "microserfs" decide that they want personal lives and reinvent themselves.

If you own a computer and use it for something slightly more advanced than playing solitaire or checking the football scores -- like many members of the population -- you might like "Microserfs." In fact, enoying it is almost a certainty if you talk about Legos, eat flat foods, and ask questions like "Is our universe ultimately digital or analog?"

One thing that might put off some readers is that Coupland sprinkles the diary entries with seemingly random stuff -- aPzroc, burnt arborite, Champaign-Urbana, countless ones and zeros, two pages filled with the word "money." But it's cute, funny, and somehow it adds to the real feel of the geekiness of this novel.

But it isn't just cute -- the characters are pleasantly well-rounded and likable, and while Coupland's books often have a sort of sad feeling, this one is relatively cheerful. Even so, while pointing out the problems with a geek's life, he explores the dimensions that show that they people too, and the poignant moments are among the best in the book.

Geek pride! I enjoyed reading about the "Microserfs," a unique facet of Douglas Coupland's vision of the world. Entertaining, geeky, and thought-provoking in little spurts.