The way Coupland moulds his fiction from the throwaway debris of North American popular culture is quite brilliant.
Player One
What Is to Become of Us
Description
Now available in a new edition with a cover designed by the author, Douglas Coupland’s CBC Massey Lectures is an innovative exploration of the modern crises of our time.
Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcockian blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, over the course of the five-hour story, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end.
Acclaimed novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland probes human identity, society, religion, macroeconomics, and the afterlife in the inventive 2010 CBC Massey Lectures. Asking as many questions as it answers, Player One will leave readers with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back.
Reviews
Eminently readable, humorous, and philosophical.
As always with Coupland, the ideas come thick and fast, they’re quirky, often funny, and frequently profound.
[Player One] feels essential because this is a novel obsessed not only with time, and the curse of experiencing the world through linear time, but with stories and the breakdown of storytelling as a way of making meaning in our lives.
