Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs is one of the zeitgeist novels of the 1990s and I know I’m terribly late in reading it. The good news is that time hasn’t destroyed it. In fact the book has stood the test of time (okay, less than a decade but still) and the passing of time has just accentuated how right Coupland got it.

Basically what happens is that a bunch of friends who work at Microsoft in the early 1990s decide to change jobs after one of them starts up his own company. Some things go well, others badly. There isn’t much of a plot as such, and if the story has a moral it’s one of basic human values, not about the hubris of the Silicon Valley (as in Dot.Con).

The best thing from a nerdish point of view like mine is that the technology jargon never fails. I kept turning pages in anticipation of the moment when the author’s lack of knowledge finally shows (as it did in Dot.Con) but with Microserfs that moment never comes. I must have been two thirds through the book before I realized that I had finally stopped waiting for the embarrassment to happen and was properly concentrating on other things.

Definitely worth a read, at least to check out what you missed by ten years if not for anything else. I lapped the book up in one go last Friday so I guess that counts as something. Recommended.