Photo: Space Invaders

Douglas Coupland September 18, 1995

"I'll always remember the first time I saw snow. I was twelve and it was just after the first and biggest divorce. I was in New York visiting my mother and was standing beside a traffic island in the middle of Park Avenue. I'd never been out of L.A. before. I was entranced by the big city. I was looking up at the Pan Am Building and contemplating the essential problem of Manhattan."

"Which is --?" I ask.

"Which is that there's too much weight improperly distributed: towers and elevators; steel, stone and cement. So much mass up so high that gravity itself could end up being warped -- some dreadful inversion -- an exchange program with the sky." (I love it when Claire gets weird.) "I was shuddering at the thought of this. But right then my brother Allan yanked at my sleeve because the walk signal light was green. And when I turned my head to walk across, my face went bang, right into my first snowflake ever. It melted in my eye. I didn't even know what it was at first, but then I saw millions of flakes -- all white and smelling like ozone, floating downward like the shed skins of angels." 1

BIOGRAPHY

Douglas Coupland, the writer who coined the term "Generation X", was born on a West German air base and raised in Vancouver where he still resides. His first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), was an overnight success, particularly with Canada's post-baby-boomer generation. A second novel, Shampoo Planet (1992), and a collection of stories, Life after God (1994), quickly followed to equal acclaim. 1995 brings his readers a third and much-awaited novel from HarperCollins: Microserfs.

John Fraser, editor of Saturday Night and champion of Coupland, describes him as the Dalai Lama of the twenty- something generation. Although Coupland speaks for his generation, his voice is very much his own. Coupland's characters, often witty, honest, and introspective, capture the thoughts of an entire generation struggling with the complexity and emptiness of life in the 1990s. Coupland's readers are dedicated and enthusiastic. When an excerpt of Microserfs appeared in both the print and electronic January 1994 issue of Wired, the electronic version was so popular it was "mirrored" on sites all over the Internet. Recently, a World Wide Web version of Vancouver Magazine also featured a Coupland short story entitled "This Bridge Is Ours". A relative newcomer to Canada's literary world, Coupland has established an international reputation: translations of his fiction are now available in twenty-four languages.

WORKS BY DOUGLAS COUPLAND

• Generation X : tales for an accelerated culture. -- New York : St. Martin's Press, 1991.-- 183 p.-- ISBN 031205436X. -- Titre en français : Génération X.

• Shampoo planet. -- New York ; Toronto : Pocket Books, 1992. -- 299 p. -- ISBN 0671755056.

• Génération X. -- Paris : R. Laffont, 1993. -- 233 p. -- ISBN 2221074831. -- English title: Generation X : tales for an accelerated culture.

• Life after God. -- New York ; Toronto : Pocket Books, 1994. -- 360 p. -- ISBN 0671874330.

• 64-94 : contemporary decades : Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. -- Catalogue essays by Sam Carter, guest curator Douglas Coupland, Letia Richardson. -- Vancouver : Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1994.

• Microserfs. -- Toronto : HarperCollins, 1995. -- 208 p. -- ISBN 0002244047.

WORKS IN ELECTRONIC FORMAT

• "Microserfs : Seven Days in the Life of Young Microsoft. Maybe the search for the next great compelling application is really the search for human identity". -- First published in / Première édition dans Wired, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1994). Electronic version originally appeared at / Version électronique parue d'abord à l'adresse suivante : URL: gopher://wired.com.

  This work is also accessible at:

  URL: gopher://tern.csulb.edu/0/colleges/cba/faculty/rlewis/papers/micro
  URL: gopher://gopher.etext.org/0/Quartz/wired/2.01/features/microserfs.gz
  URL: http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/htmldocs/micro.html
  URL: http://www.dts.harris.com/~sabat/microserfs.html

• "This Bridge Is Ours". -- Vancouver Magazine. -- Vol. 27, no. 2 (March 1994). URL: http://www.vanmag.com/9402/This_Bridge.html

WORKS ABOUT DOUGLAS COUPLAND

• Vancouver Village Biography : Doug Coupland. URL: http://www.vanmag.com/People/Douglas_Coupland.html

• Fraser, John.-- "The Dalai Lama of Generation X".-- Saturday Night. -- Vol. 109, no. 2 (March 1994). -- P. 8-9.

¹ Douglas Coupland, "Remember Edith Clearly", Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 93-94.