Microserfs author turns sights on Google generation
Having characterised the nineties zeitgeist of life at Microsoft in the novel Microserfs, Canadian author and technophile Douglas Coupland has now turned his attention on Generation Xbox.
Due to be released in the UK on 5 June, JPod "updates Microserfs for the age of Google", according to the book's irreverent Web site.
"Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames end in 'J' are bureaucratically marooned in JPod. JPod is a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company," the site explains.
Where Microserfs dealt with the struggles of a group of Microsoft employees to break free from the staid and clinical existence in the Redmond campus and create their own start-up, JPod looks at the lives of tech workers today, making their way uncertainly through the global pillaging of intellectual property, the clueless thrashings of boneheaded marketing staff, the rise of China and the ashes of the 1990s high-tech, high-rolling dream.
You can read an excerpt of the novel below:
The three-hour meeting had taken place in a two-hundred-seat room nicknamed the air-conditioned rectum. I tried to make the event go faster by pretending to have superpower vision: I could see the carbon dioxide pumping in and out of everyone's nose and mouth—it was purple. It made me think of that urban legend about the chemical they put in swimming pools that reveals when somebody pees.
Read more at JPod.info.