Oh god, when did Douglas Coupland get so OLD? I tripped across his site today shortly after discovering that he's writing a new book, jPod (the website is a little weird). jPod is a followup to Microserfs.

I was already a Coupland fan with Shampoo Planet, but Microserfs really touched a nerve (one of those good nerves). When I read it, I couldn't believe that some random author from Vancouver could get so close to the Geek Dream with his writing. Microserfs described the state I wanted to be in at the time -- exploring my creativity for a small firm. Of course, Microserfs was fiction, as was The Dream of working for a small creative firm.

It will be interesting to see how Coupland revisits the tech industry in jPod. Everything is so Web 2.0-ey these days, full of flash and large fonts, but very little substance (funnily, an almost-inversion of Web Bubble 1.0, which was full of flash and small fonts, but very little substance).

Structurally, Microserfs was a very interesting novel. Coupland's diary-style writing predated the blog movement by a few years, but managed to capture it quite well (don't ask me how this sentence is supposed to work grammatically; the point is he wrote blog-style before blogs came about). Given that blogs are so prevalent now, what will the structure of jPod look like? Will it incorporate Internet-based audio/visual media? Will there be working URLs listed within the text that give deeper meaning? I know if I were writing something along the lines of Microserfs/jPod, I would absolutely create blogs for the characters and perhaps even podcasts.

The book is being published in June 2006, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.