I have it on cassette tape it is maybe the most ’90s object I have ever owned, a curio as totemic as a lock of Alanis Morissette’s hair preserved in a flannel-swaddled vial of Crystal Pepsi. As it stands, the only extant Microserfs adaptation I know of is the abridged audiobook, read by Friends star (and soon-to-be Windows 95 shill) Matthew Perry. Had the TV show taken place among the cubicles of “GloboCom” and featured characters speaking in reverent tones of their omniscient CEO “Gil Yates,” something would probably have been lost. Maybe the overall bagginess of the book’s epistolary narrative stymied potential screenwriters maybe adapting a book whose first and arguably most important section is about the office culture of a nonfictional household-name software company then run by one of the richest men in America presented insurmountable legal challenges. 2 Nor did it become a Fox TV show, despite a mention in Wired that one was in the works. Universal Pictures bought the film rights to Microserfs two years after it was published, and IMDb insists a low-budget movie did get made in 2011, but there’s no trace of it elsewhere on the Internet. 1961) the most visible and visibly reluctant spokesman for his peer group pre–Kurt Cobain. Coupland’s most famous book is still his first one, which named a generation (or two) and made Coupland (b. Nobody’s talked about it much in the last two decades. It predates Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, Dave Eggers’s The Circle, numerous other neuroman-à-clefs, score-settling pseudomemoirs and murder-dot-com whodunits, 1 as well as tech-sector TV shows like Silicon Valley and Halt and Catch Fire, serials that pick up where the novels leave off.Ĭoupland’s evocation of the inner lives of programmers turning entrepreneur in mid-’90s Redmond and Palo Alto should, in theory, enjoy the reputational equivalent of what marketers call first-mover advantage. It was published 20 years ago this month, which as far as I’m aware makes it the earliest significant stab by a fiction writer at the Great North American Tech-Company/Start-up Novel. Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs is about the spiritual yearnings and time-frittering activities of youngish coders immersed in the drudgery of the software-development process, and how those activities become an expression of those yearnings.

Microserfs book