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Overview
Generation A is set in the near future in a world where bees are extinct, until five unconnected people all around the world— in the United States, Canada, France, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka—are all stung. Their shared experience unites them in ways they never could have imagined.
Generation A mirrors Coupland’s debut novel, 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland’s writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. Imaginative, inventive, and fantastically entertaining, Generation A is his most ambitious work to date.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781439160374 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Scribner |
| Publication date: | 11/10/2009 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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 dothey 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.
ZACK
Mahaska County, Iowa
Cornfields are the scariest things on the entire fucking face of the planet. I don’t mean that in a Joe-Pesci-being-clubbed-to-death-with-an-aluminum-baseball-bat kind of way, and I don’t mean it in an alien-crop-circles kind of way, and I don’t mean it in a butchering-hitchhikers kind of way. I don’t even mean it in an alien-autopsy-remains-used-as-fertilizer kind of way. I mean it in a Big-Corn-Archer Daniels Midland/Cargill/Monsantogenetically-modified-high-fructose-ethanol kind of way. Corn is a fucking nightmare. A thousand years ago it was a stem of grass with one scuzzy little kernel; now it’s a bloated, footlong, buttery carb dildo. And get this: cornstarch molecules are a mile long. Back in the seventies, Big Corn patented some new enzyme that chops those miles into a trillion discrete blips of fructose. A few years later these newly liberated fructose molecules assault the national food chain. Blammo! An entire nation becomes morbidly obese. Fact is, the human body isn’t built to withstand high-dose assaults of fructose. It enters your body and your body says, Hmmm . . . do I turn this into shit or do I turn it into blubber? Blubber it is! Corn turns off the shit switch. The corn industry’s response to this? Who–us? Contributing to the obesity epidemic? No way, man. People simply started to snack more in the eighties. Now be quiet and keep drinking all that New Formula Coke.
Man, humans are a nightmare fucking species. We deserve everything we do to ourselves.
But who the fuck gets stung by a bee in a combine tractor in the middle of a cornfield in Mahaska County, Iowa? Me, fucking me.
By the way, welcome to Oskaloosa and all the many features that make Oskaloosa a terrific place to visit. There’s something for everyone here, from the historic city square with its bandstand to the George Daily Auditorium, the award-winning Oskaloosa Public Library, William Penn University and three golf courses.
I stole most of that last paragraph from the Internet. What the town’s home page forgot to mention was my father’s meth distillery (“lab” makes it sound so Cletus-&-Brandeen), which got busted by the DEA a few years back. Dad and the DEA never got along too well.
Six years ago Dad got wasted and in a moment of paranoia stole the Oskaloosa Library’s bookmobile, abandoning its carcass in the 14th hole sand trap of the legendary Edmundson Park and Golf Course. Then, in the delusion that he was destroying DEA monitoring equipment, he torched it, in the process losing his eyebrows, his driver’s licence, his freedom and his visitation rights to my two half-sisters, who live in Winnebago County.
Once out of the clink, he went right back to business and when his meth distillery was raided, the back of his head was toasted by a canister of boiling toluene. He spent six weeks in the correctional facility’s hospital unit until he got into reason able enough shape to walk around. My uncle Jay, a lawyer and Freon broker from Palo Alto, was able to post bail and had Dad flown out to California for OCD counselling. Dad picked up drug-resistant staph from a set of improperly cleaned in-flight headsets that infected his burn scar; by the time they touched down at SFO, maybe a quarter of his head was eaten up. So then we buried Dad, and Uncle Jay sold half the farm and bought me the world’s most kickass corn harvest ing combine, Maizie.
Since then, Uncle Jay has sent me a reasonable paycheque in return for me not making meth (and following Daddy’s path), as well as for me doing a slightly more than half-ass job tending the corn (our family legacy), and for me to piss into an Erlenmeyer flask in front of Iowa’s creepiest Romanian lab technician (just in case I forgot the former two conditions). The urine was tested on the spot to see if I’d shaken hands with someone who ate a poppyseed bagel since the previous Tuesday; it’s not fun being treated like a disgraced Olympian athlete, but Uncle Jay made cleanliness a condition of keeping Maizie. I mean, everyone I know–hell, the whole country–is baked on drugs, clueless as dirt and morbidly obese. Normally I’d have been the perfect candidate for all three, except, 1) I can’t do drugs if I want my cheque, 2) I’m not entirely stupid and am at least curious about the world and 3) I believe corn is the devil. Try finding rice and soy grocery products in Mahaska County. Good luck. They might as well add that fact to Oskaloosa’s online civic profile: Oskaloosa’s grocers sell a wide array of products into which manufacturers have invisibly inserted a vast family of corn-derived molecules. Should your child decide to go vegetarian or adapt any other questionable dietary lifestyle choice, our grocers and mini-marts will thwart their teen desires at every corner.
Okay, here’s the thing I didn’t mention about the raid: the DEA also found a fake-vintage saltine cracker tin containing two dead men’s index fingers. Dad had been using them to loan authenticity to a long-running cheque fraud scheme, but there was a third finger the DEA didn’t find, which I traded soon after to a DEA server maintenance girl named Carly who was running some scam of her own. In return for the finger, she gave me a killer blowjob and access to the DEA’s real-time geosynchronous surveillance satellite cameras. I could have made something long-term with Carly, except she demanded that I cut off my ponytail and donate it to Locks of Love. Farewell, Carly. Why did I want access to a real-time satellite camera? For my art, of course. Details to come shortly.
So the day I got stung by that goddam bee I was out in Maizie, a harvester so luxurious it could shame a gay cruise liner. I was naked, and why not! The ergonomically sensible operator’s cab was fully pressurized and air-conditioned; unibody cab frame, rubber mounts and sound-absorbing material reduced noise levels to near zero. All-round visibility allowed me ample time to throw on some shorts if I saw a visitor arriving on the farm.
I was also listening to some trendy band from Luxembourg or the Vatican or Lichtenstein or the Falkland Islands, one of those places so small that a distinct pie slice of its GDP derives from the sale of postage stamps to collectors and music sales by nanotrendy indie rock bands.
I had my four plasmas on 1) the NFL, 2) some whacked-out Korean game show where people dress in animal costumes to win prizes that look like inflatable vinyl alphabet letters, 3) the DEA real-time satellite view of my farm and 4) a two-way satellite link to an insomniac freak named Charles, who works in the satellite TV media-buying wing of BBDO in Singapore. Charles pays a hundred bucks an hour to watch me work nude in my cab. Did I forget to mention that? Welcome to the new economy. If I can make an extra buck by getting off some Twinkie in another hemisphere, you know what? I’m in. Charles, you unzip your trousers. Zegna trousers, and I know that about you because I read your secret online profile: lions-and-tigers-and-bears@labelwhore.org.
In any event, the sexy portion of Charles’s day seemed to have been completed, and the two of us were talking. Specifically, Charles was trashing the state of Iowa, branding it “The Rectangle State.” I quickly disabused him of this notion, pointing out that Colorado is technically the rectangle state.
Charles said, “Yes, its overall shape is rectangular, but if you look at a county map of Colorado, it looks like a bunch of ripped paper shreds stacked by preschoolers, whereas Iowa is divvied up into 113 neatly aligned rectangles.”
“Quit mocking my state’s spatial configuration.”
“Wake up, CornDog.”
Okay, maybe, just maybe I was high that day. (Have you ever found a Romanian lab technician who couldn’t be bribed?) My personal rule is that I only get high when the weather sets a new record, and, BTW, my name isn’t CornDog. It’s Zack. And I’m not ADD, I’m just Zack. ADD is a face-saving term my parents slapped on me when they figured out I wasn’t Stephen Hawking.
I hear people asking, Where is Zack’s mother? Is Zack a plucky orphan? No, Zack has an age-inappropriate future stepfather-in-the-making named Kyle who breeds genetically defective Jack Russell terriers with his mother in a shack in St. George, Utah.
Charles, meanwhile, was relentless: “CornDog, what the hell were they thinking when they were divvying up your state?”
On the DEA real-time satellite cam I was zooming in and out of a map of Iowa, shifting scale and superimposing geo-political borders. Charles was right. Iowa is the Rectangle State.
More importantly, I was using the satellite to keep real-time track of that day’s masterpiece, a ten-acre cock and balls I was chopping out of the cornstalks to send as a long overdue thank-you note to God for having me be born into the cultural equivalent of one of those machines they use to shake paint in hardware stores. I didn’t have to please Uncle Jay with harvesting efficiency that year–the whole crop was contaminated with some kind of gene trace that was killing off not bees (a thing of the past) but moths and wasps. In an uncharacteristic act of citizenhood, the corn industry had decided to scrap the crop. I wasn’t too pissed about that–look at the bright side: subsidies! So even though the corn was in tassel and at its prettiest, I could clear those stalk fuckers whatever way I wanted.
The fateful moment occurred shortly after Charles told me about a lap dance he’d won in a pre-op tranny nightclub the week before. One of Maizie’s windows was rattling a bit, so I went and jiggled it on its hinges. I opened and closed it a few times and, shazaam!, that’s when I got stung.
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for Generation A includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Douglas Coupland. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
In the not-too-distant future, the world has become addicted to digital communication and time-warping drugs. Isolation and disconnection have rushed in with the “advancements” of the 21st century as people are incessantly pummeled with massive amounts of data. And, most notably of all, bees are extinct—that is, until five unconnected people from around the globe are all stung.
Abducted by government officials in hazmat suits, these five seemingly disparate individuals undergo a rigorous month of isolation, bloodletting, and bizarre scientific experiments, somehow ending up together on a remote island with a dubious scientist and nothing to share but off-the-cuff stories.
Douglas Coupland revives the narrative format of his renowned Generation X, and crafts a simultaneously humorous and haunting portrait of what the future might bring—ushering in the age of Generation A.
Questions for Discussion
1. Whose perspective/narrative did you enjoy most? (Harj, Zack, Samantha, Julien, or Diana). Was there a particular character that you couldn’t wait to hear talk again? Or did their stories truly merge into a singularity by story’s end?
2. In Samantha’s story, The End of the Golden Age of Telephones, she states, “Mother Nature always makes sure that everyone has a role to play in the world” (p. 239). What did you see as the ultimate role of the five characters stung by bees? Did they save the world? Did they really put an end to Solon?
3. Do you see the world of Generation A as a possible (and imminent) future? Consider the extinction of bees, the mass-addiction to a designer drug, and the heavy reliance on satellite and digital communication.
4. Whose campfire story did you enjoy most?
5. Discuss the similarities that start to appear in their stories. Consider the ideas that begin to pop up in every participant’s fictions: royalty, isolation, language’s loss of meaning, the Channel Three News Team, etc.
6. How did you react to Louise’s arrival on the island? Do you believe what she said about Serge’s intentions?
7. Did you ultimately understand why each person was stung—and how they were related to Solon? Discuss the notion of neuroproteins and the chemical release involved in the group’s storytelling.
8. Is the power of fiction the only thing that saved the group? Can telling stories really detach us from the digital era, and as Harj suggests, “turn the world back into a book?” (p. 297)
9. Was “Trevor’s” tale an autobiographical one? Did you believe a word that came out of Serge’s mouth?
10. Reread the book’s epigraph. Are we in the era of Generation X or Generation A?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Read Douglas Coupland’s seminal novel Generation X, and discuss his approach to storytelling and what each book says about the power of fiction.
2. Attempt your own campfire scenario with some friends. See what kind of stories you can come up with. Do the tales begin to resemble each other?
3. Submit yourself to any number of modern digital networking methods (Start a vlog, play a game of World of Warcraft, attempt an Earth sandwich). How do these activities compare to reading and telling stories?
4. Create your own “neutrality chamber” and see how long you can last before feeling too stifled. Whose voice would you choose to speak to?
5. Visit iTunes and watch Douglas Coupland’s Generation A question and answer series, where he discusses everything from the importance of bees to the most evil letter in the alphabet.
A Conversation with Douglas Coupland
Is Solon based off of a particular real-world designer drug?
No. IT’s a theoretical “what if” kind of drug.
Is there a medication you feel that numbs people in a similar fashion?
Solon doesn’t numb you. It simply makes you stop ovethtinking your near future while giving your head the cool clean sense of accomplishment you get after reading many books at a go.
How do you feel about the proliferation of anti-depressants/stress relievers/sedatives?
I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances. I do have major problems with the way the US medical system has monetized these (amd most drugs) to extract as much money out of consumers as they can. I think Americans would be horrified if they saw that they pay ten times as much for goods and services the entire rest of the planet gets cheaply and easily.
What was your process for crafting this story?
Books arrive in my head all at once and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
Did you write sequentially, or did you treat one character at a time?
Always sequentially. And I never go back and remove chunks or move them around. There’s something abut that I find untrue.
You utilize a number of drastically different narrative voices throughout the novel – was it difficult to change tones and perspectives within the same book?
No. Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
Did you ever find yourself slipping from one character into another?
Never. I’m sitting here trying to think how that would be possible and can’t do so. I’m curious to hear what other writers say on the subject.
There is a large amount of scientific data in the book—namely, the idea of neuro-proteins and the secretion of chemicals from cells.
Yes, but most of it echoes things we’re all familiar with in 2009 …Mad cow, H1N1 …it’s amazing how scientific most of us have become without realizing it.
Did you have to do research for the book, or is this something you’re familiar with?
I’ve got a definite scientific thread in my personality, but I think most people do, and don’t realize it.
Do you believe in the possibilities of synthetic biology?
Artificial life? Absolutely. Any day now. For real.
Who would you choose as your voice if you were in an isolation chamber?
Emma Thompson.
Which character did you most enjoy writing?
Julien the dickhead Frenchman.
Can fiction save the world from ecological disaster?
I don’t think any art form can, but in concert with other forms, a new sensibility can be createdm and that will, in turn, cause change.
How do you feel about eBooks and eReaders?
I haven’t yet seen one. They’re not as common as media stories would have us believe. I’m curious to see one.
As a sort of combination of the shared story and the mass-produced digital networking device, what are your thoughts of the future of literature on a screen?
TV didn’t kill radio, it just added something new to the mix. Same with ereaders, I think.
Do you think people, stranded on an island and forced to create stories, would actually begin to blend their tales into a singular fiction?
I think you made a misreading here. Their tales don’t merge, but from within the 15 stories told, common themese subconsciously emerge, and from these themes the reader becomes a stargazer, looking into the stories trying to find hidden constellations within.
The melting together process is something that occurs later on, after they’ve told their stories.
Would you ever write in a similar format to Generation A or Generation X again?
Only time will tell. I never really know what the next book will be until it presents itself to me, often at the strangest moments.
What drew you to this particular narrative style?
It’s pretty much the style I prefer, although I’d like to go to third person omniscient again soon.
Are you working on another novel?
Yes, it’s for something called “The Massey Lectures” which is a Canadian annual publication (check Wikipedia).