Generation A
Authors: Douglas Coupland
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Science Fiction, #General, #Computers, #Satire, #Bee Stings, #Information Technology
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Also by Douglas Coupuland
Dedication
A Note About the Type
Generation A
1. HARJ
2. ZACK
3. SAMANTHA
4. JULIEN
5. DIANA
6. HARJ
7. ZACK
8. SAMANTHA
9. JULIEN
10. DIANA
11. HARJ
12. ZACK
13. SAMANTHA
14. JULIEN
15. DIANA
16. HARJ
17. ZACK
18. SAMANTHA
19. JULIEN
20. DIANA
21. HARJ
22. ZACK
23. SAMANTHA
24. JULIEN
25. DIANA
26. HARJ
27. SAMANTHA
28. JULIEN
29. DIANA
30. HARJ
31. ZACK
32. SAMANTHA
33. JULIEN
34. HARJ
35. ZACK
36. SAMANTHA
37. JULIEN
38. DIANA
39. HARJ
40. ZACK
41. SERGE
42. ZACK
43. HARJ
Footnote
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409066828
Published by William Heinemann 2009
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Douglas Coupland 2009
Douglas Coupland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
William Heinemann
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434019830 (Hardback)
ISBN 9780434020003 (Trade Paperback)
ISBN 9780434020126 (Limited Edition)
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Design by CS Richardson
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays, St Ives Plc
ALSO BY DOUGLAS COUPULAND
FICTION
Generation X
Shampoo Planet
Life After God
Microserfs
Girlfriend in a Coma
Miss Wyoming
All Families Are Psychotic
Hey Nostradamus!
Eleanor Rigby
JPod
The Gum Thief
NON-FICTION
Polaroids from the Dead
City of Glass
Souvenir of Canada
Souvenir of Canada 2
Terry
A NOTE ABOUT THE TYPE
Generation A
is set in Monotype Dante, a modern font family designed by Giovanni Mardersteig in the late 1940s. Based on the classic book faces of Bembo and Centaur, Dante features an italic which harmonizes extremely well with its roman partner. The digital version of Dante was issued in 1993, in three weights and including a set of titling capitals.
To Anne Collins
“Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. Suddenly you’ve become a novel idea and you’ve got people wanting to join in. You’ve gained credibility from nothing. You’re the talk of the town. Develop this as a story you can sell.”
Malcolm McLaren
“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Syracuse University commencement address
May 8, 1994
HARJ
TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA
How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It’s a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Imagine a tropical sky, ten miles high and a thousand years off on the horizon. Imagine air that feels like honey on your forehead; imagine air that comes out of your lungs cooler than when it entered.
Imagine hearing a dry hiss outside your office building’s window. Imagine walking to the window’s louvred shutters and looking out and seeing the entire contents of the world you know flow past you in a surprisingly soothing, quiet sluice of grey mud: palm fronds, donkeys, the local Fanta bottler’s Jeep, unlocked bicycles, dead dogs, beer crates, shrimper’s skiffs, barbed wire fences, garbage, ginger flowers, oil sheds, Mercedes tour buses, chicken delivery vans.
. . . corpses
. . . plywood sheets
. . . dolphins
. . . a moped
. . . a tennis net
. . . laundry baskets
. . . a baby
. . . baseball caps
. . . more dead dogs
. . . corrugated zinc
Imagine a space alien is standing with you there in the room as you read these words. What do you say to him? Her? It?
What was once alive is now dead.
Would aliens even know the difference between life and death? Perhaps aliens experience something else just as unexpected as life. And what would that be? What would they say to themselves to plaster over the unexplainable cracks of everyday existence, let alone a tsunami? What myths or lies do they hold true? How do they tell stories?
Now look back out your window—look at what the gods have barfed out of your subconscious and into the world—the warm, muddy river of dead cats, old women cauled in moist saris, aluminum propane canisters, a dead goat, flies that buzz unharmed just above the fray.
. . . picnic coolers
. . . clumps of grass
. . . a sunburnt Scandinavian pederast
. . . white plastic stacking chairs
. . . drowned soldiers tangled in gun straps
And then what do you do—do you pray? What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story—something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.
And so I pray.