The Techie Life

 

From The Phoenix Gazette (June 26, 1995)

Douglas Coupland's new book "Microserfs," available from HarperCollins for $21, hacks into the culture of the techies who are slowly taking over the world.

Coupland, who coined the phrase "Generation X" in his first book, describes their ways through the diary of Dan, a programmer at Microsoft in his late 20s. The story starts to rev when Dan and his friends move to Silicon Valley, where they develop a new computer game and find love on the Net and at the gym. These are media-addled, brilliant people, as likely to ponder artificial intelligence as they are to waffle over watching "Melrose Place" vs. "Star Trek: Voyager."

If the book has a problem, it's that it lacks subtext - the characters are too talkative and introspective. But the story is dead-on in its impressions and ends with a scene that merges love, life and computers.

The geeks turn out to be people, too