Review of Douglas Coupland's Microserfs

Douglas Coupland did a real good job of capturing geek culture as it was in the 90s in his 1995 novel Microserfs. The novel is about a few tech geeks who work for Microsoft and then form a start-up in Silicon Valley in the early and mid 1990s. The book is about the personal feelings of the group as they strive to come to grips with the reality that they are busy shaping, attempting to exist in a paradigm that no one, least of all them, are prepared for.

The tecky life that was all about getting in on the bottom and creating something from scratch, the tecky life that threw all the young computer geeks who played D and D and watched Star Trek as children, the tecky life that made the boys who could never get dates and made them the big shots of earth, are well portrayed in Microserfs.

The book is really about the personalities, the humanity, the real-worldliness of the people who spent years trying to find themselves, while transforming the digital world. There is a culture that transcends the zillions of lines of code that were written in CA in the 90s. There is a culture behind all the money that was poured in to start-ups. The culture is of people who needed to be understood.

It is a really good novel. It sums up the culture well, and deserved to be as well received as it was.