Microserfs: a hilarious, fanatically detailed, and oddly moving book about a
handful of misfit Microsoft employees who realize that they don't have lives and subsequently
became determined to get lives inside the lightning-paced world of high-tech 1990s' American
geek culture.
Amid a Seattle backdrop of software corporate cultishness ("B-B-B-B-Bill!") and the
financial terror of San Francisco and Silicon Valley tech startups, the members of Coupland's
quirky ensemble "stick a piece of dynamite inside themselves, like a cartoon cat, in the hopes that
when they reassemble their exploded pieces they will be somebody different."
Coupland gives readers an intimate, deadly accurate, and profoundly funny view of a way of life that
is quickly becoming the dominant lifestyle: friends, family, and lovers falling through trapdoors
of the new electronic order and becoming involved in an engaging, awkward scramble toward love and
success in a brave new world.
"What Coupland does brilliantly is give us a view from the inside by letting his characters talk
until we feel like we're part of the group."
PC Magazine
"An accurate look at a thriving subculture."
The Boston Globe
"The novel's real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that span
the 70s, 80s and 90s...and Coupland uses them with relish."
Entertainment Weekly