Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
Microserfs is one of those types of books that is somewhat difficult to properly categorize, because to do so would cause one to start using contradictions as the basis for its review. Some examples: this book is dated, yet it still reads (and feels) like a book that is still pertinent in the here and now of the second decade of the 21st century; this book is a work of fiction but much of the time it feels like nonfiction; the characters in the book, for the most part, are quite insulated yet they also seem fully fleshed out and level-headed too; there is not a terrible amount of character complexity in this novel, but you do feel as if you know these people.
In summary: this book does excel at being a microcosm of the early ’90′s tech arena—itself a series of charming and bewitching contradictions, in which practicality was overlooked in favor of stock purchase plans and level-headed business acumen was ditched in favor of the “we can do anything now, we’re in the midst of a technological revolution”-type naivete with which countless suburban kids dreaming of one day becoming an astronaut in the ’60′s used to have instilled in them. (Except that, you know, not everyone gets to be an astronaut. And the flying car and the kitchen that will make your food for you while you’re at work is a myth too. Just a heads up.) The moment that the first version of the Mosaic browser was released, there were quite literally a million new ideas born overnight. A practical graphical web browser coming to fruition was, in many respects, on par with man’s taming of the moon.
But because the release of the Mosaic browser was not a televised event, the Internet became a series of buzzwords and acronyms, all of which came together to create a hyper-frenetic world in which many people believed that quite literally anything was possible. And since few people in the mainstream knew how most of the tech stuff worked anyway, they pretty much had to nod in agreement with it all not unlike many in the ’70′s had to just nod to most of the theoretical technology that NASA spoke of; they did send a man to the moon—all limits were off, right? There are many, many similarities to the space boom of the ’60′s and the computer boom of the ’90′s but the biggest difference is that the space boom was brought to you (mostly) by the government. Which is to say that there was not a stock bust when people lost interest in aeronautics.
Microserfs does a very good job of putting you inside of the 1993-94 versions of Redmond, Washington and Silicon Valley. The book uses a digital epistolary (blog) format via the main character Daniel. Daniel and his friends, Todd, Bug, Karla, and Abe, all live in a “geek house” near the Microsoft campus in Redmond. All of them (and some other friends) eventually leave Microsoft to follow one of their co-workers, Michael, when he decides to form his own start-up in California. The strength of Microserfs is how it handles the characters’ lives once they have moved to the Valley. A lesser book would have focused on the new business, or become an allegory for the blind and vapid desire of all of them to make as much money as possible.
Instead, the book focuses on how all of these characters begin to grow as a group and as individuals. Their identity of being directly tied to their work or their project eventually begins to bend. Daniel and Karla have a real relationship. Bug announces his homosexuality. Todd, the bodybuilding geek, meets another bodybuilder and they have a child together.
Another strength of this book is that it can be externally projected upon in a few different ways. A friend of mine loaned me this book and one of the things he told me was that he thought it provided a good glimpse of the hedonism of the ’90′s. I never got a strong whiff of hedonism in these pages but at the same time I can completely understand why others would detect it. Microserfs is an elastic, dynamic book containing everything from glimpses into the tech sector of the early ’90′s to the kind of crazily intelligent observations about technology that stoners in the ’70′s might have said with embarrassment but were now being said with total honesty:
“[a description about a video game Michael developed] It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.
“However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code—into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.
“Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were all allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said that it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.”
In many ways, this book is elastic as the mindset of the ’90′s itself. And while I like that the book ended on a solid personal note (everyone rallying around and helping Daniel’s mother after her stroke), and while I thought that, conversely, the ending was ruined slightly because it relied a bit on a hammer-to-the-head type of observation about technology (as in Look, technology can help the sick in different ways!), I also fully realize that trying to be humanistic without irony is not an easy thing to do. And if that is this book’s only failing, then it is ultimately a minuscule flaw.
