Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours

by Douglas Coupland

Five disparate people are trapped in an airport lounge during a global disaster: Karen, waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool blonde; and, finally, a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals their true selves as the world as they know it comes to an end.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Contemporary, Post Apocalyptic

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2010

About the author

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.

--------------------------------------

Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....

Reviews

[Daniel C · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this book had decided to just go ahead and be a novel, it would've been great. If it had decided to just go ahead and be a series of essays on existentialism and the transformations (and implications of) humanity and society, it probably would've been great, too. Instead, it tries to be both, and only gets halfway with either.

The book is -- at first -- about five people who meet in a hotel bar during a major, global crisis. They each get a chance to tell their tales -- including a mysterious narrator named "Player One." At this stage, the book is very engaging. The characters are all at thresholds of differing types -- Luke is a pastor who's lost his faith, Karen is there to meet an internet hook-up, Rick is about to hand thousands of dollars over to a celebrity savior, and Rachel has finally decided to get pregnant to prove that she's human -- and it's fun to see the "flawed narrator" tool used in four different ways, their flaws all multiply colored through everyone else's eyes.

Unfortunately, the global crisis traps them in the hotel bar, and they spend the rest of the book all ruminating on life, existence, the soul, and purpose. Even this wouldn't be so bad except every - single - character has the same poetic, insightful, intricate thought processes when they start analyzing what it means to be alive. The failed gardener/bartender, the MILF, the depressed pastor, and even -- to some extent -- the mentally robotic mouse breeder: they all use the same cleverly contrived tone of voice to discuss religion, society, nihilism, and the like. By the end of the story, it is painfully obvious that every character is nothing more than a mouthpiece for our author, who -- at that point -- has said "to heck with it" with character development and story and has gone full bore with his philosophizing (much of it coming across as little more than erudite thumb-twiddling, although that may just be because there's so darn much of it that it becomes mind-numbing after time).

The story, almost unforgivably, is tied up with a hasty narrative ribbon, with one character quite literally explaining everything to the reader, as if Coupland was bored with the book and just didn't want to bother with actual writing. The last fifth of the novel is a glossary of terms that, while interesting, don't really add to either the book or the philosophies it analyzes. I'm not sure what the purpose of this section was -- some of it is definitely meant to be funny -- but it didn't do much for me.

It's fantastic when a book gets you to think about life more deeply and in challenging ways, but the best books do this through interesting stories, complicated characters and character development, and in intricate plotting and planning. This book sets up an intriguing premise and then tosses it all aside to give each character a chance to preach the same basic message of modern disaffection and doubt. That's not good writing or good philosophizing. It's a lazy example of both trying to wear the other's hat.

[Mon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to write about any of Coupland's novel because they are much more than mere plots and characters smudged together. This hits its peak in Player One, possibly the clearest manifestation of Couplandism: where do we go after Postmodernism. When was Generation X published? Let's Google that. 1991. Will the future generation remember a time when information required more physical labour? Look, I can't even get to my review without quoting Coupland, this is how much I love him. So it has been two decades since his first book, and the transition is striking. The premise is purer and more minimal, the characters well defined as he finally ditched using first person narratives (no offense Doug, but you really aren't a good enough writer for that yet). More importantly, this is a synthesis of all his previous attempts at clarifying his philosophy - it's a combination of Life After God's postmodern religion, Hey Nostradamus's terrorism, Shampoo Planet's denial of the past and Girlfriend in a Coma's So-now-let's-pretend-it's-the-future-what-the-hell-do-we-do. Intentional or not, a lot of material in this book, including character profiles and dialogues are recycled straight from his earlier works. I couldn't help feeling slightly ripped off for $13.50. But it's all very art school isn't it? Appropriation as part of postmodernism. It works much better when Coupland cleans up his half-finished rants and integrates them into a stew of social criticism. One thing, or perhaps the best thing of all, is that Coupland offers hope in his work. Not the obvious Bald-font-36-Helvetica in-your-face Obama sort of hope, but a subtle 'hey I know it's shitty now, and probably will be shitty because we're surrounded by shitty people, and you will most definitely fail, and be broken in the process. But that's ok. Why? Because you're here asking that question'. This really shouldn't be called a novel, it's a bunch of quotes and thoughts put together loosely bound by a post-apocalypse theme. Maybe he should just stop pretending and have a list of Tumblr-ish ideas and illustrations. What was I saying before that? I don't remember. Oh well. This is what the 'save' button is for isn't it.

P.S. I love Coupland. Unless he screwed it up royally (I'm not sure how he could go about that) I knew this is going to get 4/5 stars from me. Probably because he's such a product of art school yet he went on to satirise its exact nature. Now, you don't see Damien Hirst or Vito Acconci doing that do you?

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just another terrific read. This is ultimately an exploration on some of the bigger, philosophical questions on life: what is this concept of time? What happens before we're born and after we die? And so on. And Coupland does this with his innate lyrical language, and his trademark wit.

The premise of the story is: Five people, all of whom end up in a Toronto Pearson airport lounge, find themselves locked inside the lounge while the world around them implodes. Oil prices instantly skyrocket, and what follows is a sort of nuclear-esque fallout as people lose their goddamn minds over the shortage of oil.

It's extremely prophetic, in my mind. I think Coupland brilliantly satirises the extremes to which humans will go when the world oil supply suddenly dries up and the prices sky rocket. Perhaps he exaggerates the outcome, but perhaps not... I think he accurately assumes that the dominant religion on the planet are not the religions we commonly think of - the dominant religion is the Almighty Dollar.

And as these five people grapple with this dangerous situation at hand, they question the larger questions about life, as I suppose we all might at some point when the world inevitably falls apart around us. But the topics, which could be dark, are palatable because he uses humour throughout. And I enjoy Coupland's humour, because it's smart, but it's also rather dark at times. My type of laugh.

Anyone who's read my reviews on Coupland know I rave about his writing. He's simply a good writer. So no remarks there.

Yann Martel, on the back cover of this hardcover version I have, blurbs: "In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early 21st century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland." I think this accurately sums up how I feel.

[Patrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

One star for the shot.
One star for the appendix.
One star for Coupland's ability to glorify the sadness of humanity.
One star for God's opinion on evolution.
One star for sentences like, "personality is a slot machine, and the cherries, lemons, and bells are your SSRI system, your schizophrenic tendency, your left/right brain lobalization, your anxiety proclivity, your wiring glitches, your place on the autistic and OCD spectrums - and to these we must add the deep-level influences of the machines and systems of intelligence that guided your brain into maturity."

[Rayroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's kind of strange that I read Player One in two days before the ten year anniversary of 9/11. Player One has many parts that I found great and moving, parts similar to other books by Coupland I have read. This time around it all clicked with me and I was taken back and moved. I seem to feel a little less alone when I read a Douglas Coupland novel and have a better grasp on our complex, mordern and digitally connected world. Read it if you're feelig a little alone and blue and in a mood to think deeply about yourself and our mordern world.

[Paul Eckert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Player One is a novel that Douglas Coupland wrote as a series of one hour lectures to be given at the CBC Massey Lectures. Because of this, I believe there are probably different ways of approaching this story from a critical point of view, either as a lecture (meant to inform) or as a novel (meant to entertain). I read it as a novel, so that’s the basis of my review.

The premise of Player One is about five people who have converged in an airport hotel bar in Toronto, all for different reasons. Luke is a pastor who recently lost his faith and ran away with all the cash in the church’s bank account. Rick is a down-on-his luck sad sack who works at the bar after a series of bad choices and bad breaks. Karen is a single mom who’s flown across the country to meet an internet hookup for the first time. And Rachel is a beautiful young girl with severe autism who is trying to pick up a man to impregnate her to prove to her father that she is a human. Along with the characters are chapters from an entity only known as Player One.

A catastrophic event happens, and all the players are forced to band together to protect themselves from the events outside, not to mention a crazy sniper on the roof. In typical Coupland fashion, the characters wax poetic about everything, from the drudgery of their jobs to the confusing effects of time on our lives. While doing what they can to survive, they are also trying to figure out what the first part of 21st century life meant and what humanity will become once the dust has settled. Each character examines their life and tries to come to grips with the life decisions that landed them in their current situation and what they will become in the emerging new world.


There’s probably as much that is awkward and stilted about this story as there is touching and meaningful. The characters all have some sympathetic flaws, and these flaws influence their philosophical dialogue. As sympathetic as each character is, they strangely all seem to be worrying about the same things, namely how humans perceive time and whether a person’s life can be seen as a story. Several of the ideas seemed to be repeated in each character’s perspective, which was a little annoying. These moments felt more like Coupland stuffing his personal ponderances inside the character’s head. However, there were enough original thoughts to make each characters plight ring true. Each character seems to represent some aspect of modern humanity: apathy, loneliness, loss of faith, and objectivity. My personal favorite was Rachel, who wants to understand the aspects of humanity that she can’t understand, things like faces, humor, stories, and metaphors. Maybe it’s because her thoughts dealt more with looking at humanity from an ‘alien’ perspective more than throwaway sentiments about time.

A lot of the ideas in Player One are recycled from Coupland’s other works. I noticed a few paragraphs that had been lifted from previous novels. I’m willing to forgive this however, seeing as how this was technically a lecture about post-modern humanity. However, if Coupland publishes another book where the characters go on monologues about the effects of time, I might barf. It’s an interesting question, and it’s relevant to the story, but it seems to be repeated way too often and in the exact form as other novels. Within the context of this story, the questions of time often feel forced. Again, Rachel’s character (ironically) seems to be the most striking commentary. She is aware of her amygdala “double-recording” life-changing events, and her super-ability to sequence also provides a thought-provoking look at humanity’s perception of time. But most of the other characters’ quibbles with the passing of time felt out of place and a bit like filler material.

With all the discussions of “big questions” looming over every character’s head, we are reminded us that not all questions are “big.” As the playwright Craig Wright once said, “The real questions are simpler, but they're much scarier. The real question isn't 'Are we free?,' but 'Do you still love me?' The big question evaporates when we're face to face with the real question." Thankfully, Coupland deals with this in a subtle way that can almost go unnoticed. However, the resolution to the “little” questions are what make the conclusion to this story satisfying, and in turn it provides shines on the “big” questions. As with most other Coupland novels, the characters have been drastically changed, and now they stand on the brink of a new existence, ready to try all over again.


Despite its flaws, Player One was a great read. The plot is actually the most terrifying I’ve read from Coupland, and it gives the story an ominous tone that brings more weight to everything the characters discusss. The way each character changes in the face of a life-altering event was worth the price of admission. It’s the greatest hits of Douglas Coupland, and they’ve all come to play in one story.

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got mixed feelings about the book. Neither female character read as completely believable to me, and yet they were both far better realized than the men, who were mere sketches.

Here's partly why. Our MC is in an airplane:

"[Karen's] a little too warm, so she undoes two buttons at the top of her dress, hoping that if anyone sees her they won't take this as a sign she's a slut."

Snap poll: friends, does this accurately describe your thoughts at any time in your life?¹

The other woman is on the autistic spectrum, but this seemed played as a caricature: Temperance Brennan on steroids.

I did enjoy the narrative structure, even the end, which pissed a lot of people off. The connections and experiences which link the characters were done well. The whole existential pondering thing seemed like it had been pulled off cheesy motivational websites ("For every person currently alive, there are nineteen dead people who lived before us.") Maybe that's the whole point.

I grew to enjoy the book more as I got deeper into it, and it finished of a 3.5 for me, rounding down for the autistic character begging God to: "send me a sign that this is how it feels to be a woman"


¹I once dumped a boyfriend, kissed his best friend, then slept with his flatmate. That's when I worried people would think I was a slut. I was 21. Karen is 40. *eyeroll*

[David S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something disturbing about writers as intelligent as Douglas Coupland. Underneath the brilliant psychological dialogue, the haunting charismatic cast of underachievers, and the creative plot that is impossible to predict, lies writing that is so fresh and honest that it is scary truthful. Player One is that book, depicting the tale of five characters trapped in a cocktail lounge during a world changing event. The discussion topics: humanity vs. everything else and whether we are worth it. Douglas speaks in prophetic voices that are so dark and logical that it is hard not to lose hope in what we are and what we are to become. But there is also a sweetness to his apocalypse like the tsunami that is coming is made out of milk chocolate or the bombs that spill out of the sky are confected gum drops. It loosens the blow and in the end somehow gives us hope.

With that being said, the ending felt tacked on, an after thought almost, like Coupland got tired of predicting his own dreary futures and just stopped. It makes this reader wonder if he did it on purpose, forcing us to endure one final apocalyptic meteor crashing into the Earth or a giant hand reaching up and turning off the sun.

[Jean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too bad books don't get remakes like films sometimes do. This book deserves one. The ideas, questions and characters in this novel are remarkable, confrontational and thought-provoking and the book is sprinkled with wit and good-to-know facts. Did you know that for every living person, there are only 19 dead people? But this book is like the Singapore sling Karen is drinking: too many ingredients for such a small container. 246 Pages is just not enough to offer more than a sketch of the issues at hand: loneliness, social media, people wanting their lives to be stories, disconnection, normalcy, the burden of individualism, religion, oil, rapture to name but a few. Was Coupland in a rush when he wrote this book? Or does he think by now, we should be able to fill in certain parts for ourselves (Aha, we're dealing with a father-complex here and a midlife-crisis there)? Or did he choose this form to match the content: events and short sequences instead of a complete and elaborate story?
The 'future legend' at the back has some brilliant entries, such as 'Rosenwald's theorem': the belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.

[Henrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had forgotten how much i love to read Coupland, I had also forgot how much he tends to make me feel uncomfortable and think about the meaninglessness of it all.

We get equal doses of deep thoughts, great humor, weirdness, love, technology, death, failed romance, sex, more death, love, joy and happiness.
That sums up all of his books, doesn't it?


The book is... Seriously, the synopsis says what can be said without spoiling it.
Just read it already, OK?

[Tricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coupland is always a good read, but I felt that this book was particularly special. It created a bridge between fiction and philosophy. The five characters at times felt like a representation of our vast society but also sometimes felt like the conflicting personalities of one person going through turmoil. I really liked it and I feel like it might be one of those books you can read every 5 years and get something different out of it every time.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently I stole the soapbox in another person's review of Shampoo Planet to pontificate about my personal reader's theory of Douglas Coupland. JPod was the first Coupland novel I read, and it is also my favourite. We all react to Coupland differently—i.e., JPod is my favourite, but some of my friends hate JPod with a passion and love Girlfriend in a Coma or Eleanor Rigby. Despite the fact that Coupland always deals with the same themes, his variations are subtle and diverse enough to create those kinds of reactions. And so, for me, JPod created in my mind the Platonic form of the "perfect Coupland novel", and every other experience I have with Douglas Coupland is like a junkie attempting to replicate the first perfect hit: I need something as good as JPod.

Player One comes close. As a story it doesn't endear itself like JPod. Yet its short length conceals a profound message, Coupland's attempt to answer the novel's subtitle: What is to become of us? Coupland delivers the novel in real-time over the course of five hour-long lectures that collectively form the 2010 Massey Lectures. You can't listen to them for free, unfortunately, but you can purchase the series on iTunes or CD if you care to listen to Coupland read the story aloud. I stuck with the printed version, but I kept in mind the novel's intended purpose. As I read, I imagined it would be like to hear those words projected in a dark theatre as a shared experience with hundreds of other people, or to hear them over the radio. (There is something profoundly connective about radio that even the Internet doesn't match.) This added an atmosphere to the entire experience of reading this book.

The OED's first recorded use of zeitgeist is from 1848, but this must be a mistake, because I feel like that word must have been invented to describe what Coupland is doing. He is chronicling the zeitgeist of our generations, this strange transition between the industrialized twentieth century to the post-industrial information society of the twenty-first century. And I really can't do his books justice in trying to go into more detail here, because I feel like deconstructing his work would just destroy the magic.

As anyone who has read more than one Coupland novel can attest, comparing Coupland Book X with Coupland Book Y is difficult because of how much Coupland reuses his motifs and themes. Still, I have to say it: Player One has a lot in common with his previous novel, Generation A. I liked Generation A but didn't love it, and now I want to go back and read it again to see if I missed anything. Both novels have several protagonists, with the narrator alternating among their limited perspectives. Both novels put the protagonists together in an isolated place and have them share stories and form bonds. Both are set in a somewhat apocalyptic world—Generation A more "post-apocalyptic" than Player One's decidedly apocalyptic setting. Finally, both involve a study empathy as part of a larger exploration of what it means to be human. This is the question that recurs throughout Player One: what separates humans from animals, from everything else in the cosmos? What makes us unique as a species—are we unique? Or are we merely just another expression of life—is the universe programmed to generate life over and over in a near-infinite variety of combinations?

If we want to analyze the characters in this book, we can do so in terms of how they empathize. Rachel is easy: she doesn't. Her various medical classifications mean she lacks the ability to express or interpret emotions, irony, humour, etc. She can't appreciate art. Her reason for going to the airport hotel lounge where our five characters end up is typical Coupland absurdism. Rachel is probably the character we would identify as the most "different" of the four, because of her medical condition. Sometimes though, she feels like she's the most human.

Luke and Rick are very similar because, as they themselves observe, their jobs both involve listening to people's confessions. Luke was a pastor, until he stole the church's renovation fund and skipped town the same afternoon that he lost his faith. Rick is a recovering alcoholic tending bar. Priests and bartenders alike listen to things people don't feel comfortable confiding in ordinary conversations: bars are a home to a tension between anonymity and intimacy that must be very welcoming at times.

Karen empathizes with everyone: her fifteen-year-old "she's going through a goth phase" daughter, Casey; the kid with the iPhone who takes a photo of her on the airplane; Warren, the man she flew out to meet in the bar after meeting him online; and then when the price of oil skyrockets and the world ends for a day or so, she empathizes with everyone in the bar. She even empathizes with the sniper who kills Warren and whom they eventually tie up inside the bar. I really like Rachel, but if I had to pick a favourite character I might choose Karen. Coupland gives her two excellent lines:

I think if people had real courage, they'd wear their Halloween costume every day of the year. At the very least, you'd make a lot more friends more quickly. Like, 'Hey, I like togas, too!' Or, 'Star Trek? I'm in.' Your costume would be a means of filtering down to the people you'd probably like the most.

I love this because that's exactly what we do online, and it's why I find it so much easier to be social online than I do offline. When interacting offline, it is very difficult to share information with other people. Until we start talking, clothing and body language are about the only indications of who we are and what we like, hence Karen's idea that we should all wear our Halloween costumes. On the Web, however, the "profile" is king. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, or my own website, when someone visits my profile, he or she can learn immediately whether we share similar interests. It's a very effective filtering mechanism.

Karen also asks her Internet date Warren whether he feels like his life is a story and then mentions that she thinks "the story part" or her life "is over".

Karen has noticed that young people no longer seem to care if their lives are stories. Not Casey, and not that little pervert on the flight earlier that afternoon. He'd probably no more view his life as a story than he would view his life as that of a sea cucumber. He and Casey inhabit a world of screen grabs, website hits, and precisely tabulated numbers of friends and enemies.

I think my life is a bit like a story, but Coupland has still hit upon truth here. When critics label my generation "apathetic" or "lazier" compared to previous generations, they are judging us using obsolete criteria. Anyone who grows up using the Internet actually learns differently from people who came before; our brains are wired differently. This has happened before: urbanization changed the way people think as children grew up in the suburbs instead of on a farm. Now it's happening again. Knowledge is no longer linear, no longer acquired by rote, and yes, we generally don't retain facts the same way that older people do, just as people in the twentieth century couldn't hold a candle peasants from the twelfth century (pre-literate oral memory for the win!). We don't memorize; we contextualize. Our lives are not linear; they are circular, elliptical, hyperbolic, and hypertextual. We are turning the Web from interconnected repositories of knowledge into an extension of our own minds.

And this is why I think that one of the reasons Coupland's more recent novels, such as JPod and even Generation A, resonate with me more than his older works. He has started to include the Internet and the Web in his meditations upon humanity. I spent my adolescence online. It is now a part of me and of my experiences in a very intimate way—after all, I'm using it now to convey these thoughts to anyone who happens to read them. Plenty of writers have meditated upon the effects of the Web on humans and human consciousness, and posthumanism is old hat in the science fiction community. Yet few do it the way Coupland does … Coupland studies these changes in a way that is almost spiritual. He is interested in how this technology alters us as beings and as a society of individuals.

Indeed, Player One is a microcosmic study of individualism in the digital age. What does it mean to be an individual when there are so many of us? What does it mean to be an individual if we are all connected?

And we're all waiting for It now, aren't we? Good old 'It'—the It who rains, the It we mean when we ask what time is It? I suppose It is the arrival of the Sentience. The arrival of the metamind that is us and yet much more than us. It is the Sentience that will eclipse us, that will encourage us, and shame us and indulge us. It is out there waiting. I'm certainly waiting—it's why I'm here, talking to you before I enter the New Normal, too.

I think it's possible and tempting to interpret Coupland's writing as prophetic at times, like in the passage above. Yet I am always wary of applying "prophetic" to people's words, because we are terrible at predicting the future. Rather, I think Coupland is merely describing and interpreting present-day trends. This is where he sees us going from where we are right now—not our inevitable future but the already-changing and shifting present. Because he's right that we are waiting. Some of us are literally waiting for the Singularity, or its religious equivalent, the Rapture. (I used to think I might be one of the former, but now I am not so sure.) Others are just waiting to see what is going to happen in a world of almost 7 billion people. This is what should happen:

Here's to all of us reaching out our hands to other people everywhere, reaching out to pull them from the icebergs on which they stand frozen, to pull them through the burning hoops of fire that frighten them, to help them climb over the brick walls that block their paths. Let us reach out to shock and captivate people into new ways of thinking.

With four characters in five hours, Douglas Coupland succinctly gets at what makes us human—part of what makes us human. We are different from other forms of life because we have the capacity for self-preservation not on the level of the individual or the pack but of the species entire. This has driven us to develop the tools to direct our own evolution, to direct the development of our consciousness, our minds, and our bodies. And it is making us increasingly connected, because as the world grows more crowded, how could we become anything else?

At times the extent to which Player One extrapolates this idea of inter-connectedness approaches Lovelockian proportions. Various characters float or espouse a Gaia-like hypothesis about the Earth or the universe. You don't have to agree with every idea in Player One—and I think, from the way he characterizes them on occasion as "woo woo" or "New Agey", that Coupland is not serious about them either. He includes them, rather, because they are essential to the subjects being discussed, and in order to challenge and provoke thought. I'm glad I don't agree with everything in this book, because it means I'm not praising it simply because it reflects what my pre-existing beliefs and opinions about life, humanity, and technology.

My edition of Player One clocks in at 246 pages. The last 31 of these pages are "Future Legend". Many of the terms described therein will be familiar: invariant memory (Platonic forms), memesphere ("the realm of culturally tangible ideas"); or, they will feel familiar even if we didn't have the vocabulary to articulate them so succinctly, e.g., "karaokeal amnesia" ("most people don't know the complete lyrics of almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear"). It's possible to read this glossary from start to finish, but it would be a chore (trust me, I tried). The book is over at this point, and this is an appendix, Coupland's demonstration that we have stretched our vocabulary to its limit and must invent more terms to describe the shift happening in our own lifetimes.

Last year I took a course called Philosophy & the Internet (online, obviously). In the second week we read a blog post by Clay Shirky: "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", in which Shirky points to the Internet as the death knell of print newspapers and argues that this is evidence we are in the midst of a revolution. Discussion sprang up over whether we agreed with this assertion. I was very vocal in my support of Shirky and this idea that we are experiencing a revolution. Even if I weren't, however, I think Player One would have convinced me. In five hours in an airport hotel lounge, Douglas Coupland could totally do that. What's even more amazing is the sense of unbridled optimism he manages to bundle along with his argument. Player One happens during a crisis of global proportions, and at the novel's end the world is not as it was; oil remains expensive and rationed, but people somehow adjust—they always do, is Coupland's message. The end of the world proves to be the dawning of a new world, and like the old world, the new one is a mixture of the good and the bad, of happiness and suffering, of crazy families and criminals and mothers and priests. Despite the fact that there's a sniper on the roof, a body outside the door, and a chemical explosion poisoning the air around the lounge, Coupland manages to persuade us that it's all going to work out fine. Somehow, against all odds, these people are going to make it out alive, and life will go on.

I needed that. Sometimes the panoply of information that reaches me is overwhelming. We are nearly 7-billion strong on this planet, but problems always seem to scale better than their solutions. Don't get me wrong: there are no assurances in this book that we will ascend, as a species, to a better place. There is still every chance that we will collectively stumble, faceplant, and give way to the next big evolutionary thing. But I feel like with Player One, Douglas Coupland is saying, "Not today." There is a very good chance we will, as a species screw up—but there's always a chance we won't. It's a very infectious sort of optimism, the same kind of optimism that's the reason I love Doctor Who so much. ("Let's get in a big blue box and see what's out there! Let's poke it with a stick! Let's be so very human!")

It's also an optimism that has to steep, which is why I am glad I write reviews. Initially Player One left me with a warm but vaguely befuddled feeling—typical "Coupland, man, he's weird". So I sat down to write about how I liked Player One, but…. And then, as I sometimes do when writing reviews, I discovered that there isn't a "but". At every turn, despite my most valiant efforts, it eluded me. That is a powerful thing for any book to do.

[Tim Gingrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story starts simply enough: five individuals trapped for five hours in an airport hotel lounge, which coincidently corresponds to five chapters, which each neatly correspond to an hour in real time.

But no sooner does Douglas Coupland set up Player One’s orderly world than he relinquishes that simple world to chaos.

It comes in the form of a news ticker on the lounge’s television – and things go downhill at the speed of cable news: a bomb is detonated at the OPEC summit, crude oil skyrockets, a mushroom cloud, an unknown assailant…

Just a few hours ago, everything was so normal (a word on which Player One declares all out war). The single mom was waiting for her Internet hook-up, the bartender was looking forward to shaking the hand of a self-help guru, the renegade pastor was wondering how long it would take his flock to find the church fund missing, and the autistic knock-out blonde was Googling mice breeding.

All the while, the reader is visited by the voice of Player One. Player One is not bound by human limitations of time or space. He (or she?) jumps between tenses and perspectives, fast-forwards the story at will, and considers the drama unfolding in the airport hotel lounge with both uncommon insight and strange detachment, leading the reader to the inextricable conclusion that whoever or whatever It is knows the end of the story.

“Much of what normal people think of as art is simply the establishment of repetitive structures that become interesting when they are broken in some way,” one of the characters realizes.

Player One is a textbook example of how writers deal with big events by focusing on the little lives of the people caught inside (i.e. almost any war movie). The book quickly leaps from the limited worlds of its characters to an omnipresent narrative about the underpinnings of the universe, the purpose of life and the nature of time.

Player One is about what it really means to be human – no small task. What sets Player One apart from other stories with such lofty goals (2001: A Space Odyssey, Tree of Life) is that Coupland manages to bring it all back together into a neatly packaged Hollywood ending where the bad guys get what they deserve and the good guys live happily ever after (relatively speaking for an oil-depleted dystopia). That he does so may be anathema to some critics. It may also be Coupland’s own way of critiquing a race of beings who are conditioned, programed, destined or doomed to wrap their humanity, their very existence, around a story.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Massey Lectures are an annual event in Canada where noted scholars give week long lectures on political, social, cultural, or philosophical topics. Douglas Coupland's contributions to these lectures is, rather than a standard long essay, the novel "Player One". The novel is divided up into 5 "hours" where the novel happens in real time and during the lecture week Doug will read 1 "hour" a day. For the rest of us who aren't going to the Massey Lectures we have this book.

Four strangers stranded in a second rate airport lounge unexpectedly find themselves sheltering in it for their lives after Armageddon happens outside. The price of oil skyrockets bringing all transport to a screeching halt and all semblance of civilisation comes to an end. The four strangers are an alcoholic bartender, a single mother on an internet date, a disaffected preacher who stole $20,000 from his church fund, and a young woman with autism. Then there is the fifth character, the strange "Player One" who narrates the events from a distance. But what is going to happen to them? Will they survive this disaster? What about the rest of the human race, and the planet?

The novel will be quite familiar to those who've read Coupland before. There are a number of issues that his characters address that he's addressed in previous novels: humans and their impact on the planet, human culture, the meaning of life, religion, the afterlife, the Smiths, and identity. But given the context of this novel, this summary of Doug's career is what the Massey Lectures is about - the speaker's views on these big issues. In that sense the book is a success with the novel displaying a number of Doug's ideas as well as his storytelling ability and sense of humour.

But as a new novel...? It feels kind of contrived. Take the premise that Armageddon is brought about by overpriced oil. Would this happen? First of all, yes we are going to run out of oil but not for a while and we have the time and knowledge to develop alternate fuel sources. There won't be a breakdown of society in this hysterical fashion. Then there's the fact that despite a number of interesting incidents happening - one of which is a sniper on a rooftop - the novel never really held my attention. It's all about the characters chatting about these big issues and so there is a lot of lofty assertions made without the story ever really changing. So it's kind of dull to read as the story is mostly static. The characters are also never really that interesting. They sound more or less like any of Doug's characters from previous novels.

There's also 30 pages of Doug-isms, that is words or phrases Doug has coined and a definition to go with it, like the footnotes from "Generation X". They're not that clever (nothing to match the catchiness of "McJob" or "Gen X") and clustered together as they are at the back, it just feels a bit heavy-handed.

What is to become of us? Probably not the extremes posed in this book nor is our planet as doomed as Coupland would like to think. It's not a great book following the brilliant "Generation A" but it's not a bad read. Because Coupland throws in so many ideas and thoughts that there's always going to be something for everyone but it feels like a short story stretched to novel length and as such is a bit dull. Game Over. Continue? 9, 8, 7, 6....

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wouldn't have believed it myself, but Douglas Coupland, one of my favorite writers in his heyday, makes a strong and moving return to form in "Player One". I first heard the ending of this, possibly the most stirring and poetic part, broadcast as the radio lecture one night while driving around, and went on a desperate search for the book at a Borders within the next few days when I found out the beautiful passages I was hearing were from my once-beloved Coupland!

The scenario of five strangers trapped in a second-rate airport hotel bar for five hours while a bizarre apocalyptic situation occurs allows room for many of Coupland's strengths and pet themes to thrive. He devotes portions of the book to each of these characters, and in Ulysses-style fashion, we get inside the heads of each of these characters and learn some of the pivotal events that shaped their lives within the five hours of real time it takes place; a priest on the run, an alcoholic bartender, a lonely single mother on an Internet date, and a beautiful autistic woman. The autistic voice was the only one that didn't feel quite as authentic to me, but it's a minor flaw in an otherwise powerful narrative device. Coupland's dialogue can sometimes come off as overly philosophical and meandering, but he found a great framing device where it actually works: in the face of impending death, it's entirely convincing that people would suddenly want to reveal what they think about God, what they've learned from life experience, and how they relate to other people to complete strangers. And these are the things that Coupland really excels at capturing, these big feelings condensed into little pop culture references and observations.

If you've never liked Coupland this book certainly won't convert you, but if you've ever admired certain aspects of his work and wondered where he went wrong, this may be the one that draws you back in.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would be hesitant to call Player One a return to form for Douglas Coupland. Without a doubt it his best novel since Hey Nostradomus! but it really reads more like a "lost" novel from the Generation X - Girlfriend in a Coma era. In Player One, Coupland does what he used to do best--lovingly craft believable, realistic characters and puts them into a world that is fantastic, yet not entirely out of the realm of possibility. Gone is the forced self-indulgence of jPod and shorter, quicker narratives of Eleanor Rigby or the Gum Thief.
While what is going on their world is interesting and has repercussions for the four main characters, they are truly the stars of the show. Through a welcome blend of the storytelling aspect of Generation X and the introspective ideas of what it means to be human in an increasingly fast paced post-modern society of Girlfriend in a Coma, Coupland gives us a glimpse into 5 hours of the lives of four (former) strangers who initially couldn't be more different from one another. As they deal with the world crumbling around them, we get a glimpse into their inner workings and personalities.
Ultimately the reader is left contemplating the ideas of individuality and whether or not it really is something worth attaining or just a manufactured by product of our society and societal norms.

[Taiba Al-Najjar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Monumental approach to "what it means to be human".
Would have liked it to be longer. The character's voices were gripping and i found myself growing attached to all of them in the short time it took me to finish our journey.

At first I couldn't decide between a 3 and 4 star rating, but that Legend convinced me that it deserves a star all on its own.
So a 4 star rating is what this book earns from me.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more to form for Coupland. I have no idea how these were Massey lectures, but an enjoyable read about the almost end of the world.

[René · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in French, which is dumb because it was written in English originally, but I found it in a bookstore and couldn't resist, so here we are. A lot of terms had me shaking my head in confusion, before realizing that the terms had no translation. New words don’t spread virally in French culture like they do in English-language cultures around the globe. For instance, there’s no French translation for “MILF” (the translator used “maman sexy”, which is poor and guts the expression of its acronym funniness). New words aside, the translation has a good rhythm to it and doesn’t bog down the dialogues like many English-French translations do.

The setting is an airport bar, where as fate would have it a mixed bag of people find themselves for various reasons: an autistic young woman, an ex-preacher, an alcoholic barman. As fate would further have it, some catastrophe hits, it's not properly explained and doesn't need to be, suffice to notice that oil prices have skyrocketed, media broadcasts have stopped, there are toxic chemicals blowing outside and the people inside the bar can't leave. Eventually they are joined by a religious nut and a scared teen.
Oh, and one of the characters is Player One, who is inside the bar's video game. He's a pompous ass, but he's cool.

Conversations flow between the motley group, touching on the state of the world, obviously, since it's ending or seems to be, and eventually sink down into their personal histories as the setting favors the end-of-world cathartic confessions. There is such a variation in the characters' outlook and constitution that it becomes apparent that only a catastrophe forcing people into this space and threatening their very being will overcome cultural and ideological barricades, creating odd yet touching bonds, like a contained nuclear explosion revealing other states of the matter at its core.

I really enjoyed the paradoxical converging of the different mindsets and found the characters believable and engaging.

[Arwen56 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sembrano i ragionamenti di un gruppo di adolescenti in pieno delirio pseudo-intellettualistico. Una roba del tipo “Da dove veniamo? Chi siamo? Dove andiamo?”.

L’aria fritta proprio non la reggo e questo romanzo, che pur aveva buone premesse, lo è. A mio modesto avviso, ovviamente. :-)

[Vonia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark and depressing if you let this book get to you. Has existentialism written all over it, with a little more philosophizing than I cared for. One too many tangents regarding the meaning of our lives (apparently when one ceases to see theirs as a story, there is no more meaning), reincarnation (Karen discusses how she used to play a game when she was younger where they would have to pretend to die by mentioning what they reincarnated as. Interestingly (but so true!), not once in all those years did anyone elect to come back as another human being.), and what happens to us after death. But most of it was intellectually stimulating and intriguing to read.

The book is divided into five chapters. Each chapter is divided into five parts, each describing events from the perspective of one of the five main characters: Karen — A divorced mother of one daughter, and a receptionist at a psychiatrist office, who travels from Winnipeg to Toronto to meet Warren, whom she met in an online forum; Rick — A divorced father of one son, and a recovering alcoholic, who works as a bartender at the Toronto Airport Camelot Hotel. He has been saving money to enroll in an empowerment program operated by Leslie Freemont; Luke — A pastor of a church in Nipissing, Ontario who lost his faith in religion, stole $20,000 from the church and fled to Toronto; Rachel — A young woman who operates a business that breeds lab mice and lives with psychological conditions on the Autism soectrum. Among her psychological conditions is prosopagnosia, as well as an inability to understand humour, metaphors, irony, or social cues. She wants to become pregnant to prove to her parents that she can lead what they consider a normal life. Player One — A disembodied voice, (Rachel's online avatar), who watches the events and comments on the character's past, present, and future actions and circumstances (I love her narration when her turn in the chapters comes: "Here is Player One with your story upgrade"). The secondary characters: Warren — The man who Karen is scheduled to meet at the hotel bar; Leslie Freemont — A self-help guru who operates the Power Dynamics Seminar System. He arrives with his assistant Tara to accept Rick into the program; Bertis — A religious fanatic, the son of Leslie Freemont, and the sniper on the bar's roof; Max — A teenager who tries to covertly take photos of Karen during their flight. He finds the group as he flees the chemical fall-out.

The most significant theme throughout the novel is that of change. Specifically in regards to technology, identity, and social interactions. An apocalyptic novel, depicting the crumbling society we know today as the world. A utopia is suggested. But it seems far more likely that a dystopia will emerge in the coming weeks.

Honestly, the "Future Glossary" included at the end is what made this book a winner. Coupland was obviously having fun with it; many entries do not relate to the story at all. And I had a good many laughs while reading the substantial entries.

Looking forward to reading what else Douglas Coupland has to offer.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Player One tells the story of five people trapped in an international airport during a global disaster. Over the next five hours, these lives are changed forever; a single mother waiting for an online date, an airport cocktail lounge bartender, a pastor on the run, a cool blonde bombshell incapable of love and a mysterious person known as Player One. The novel follows the interactions of these five people as they react to the chaos as we slowly find out just what happened.

Douglas Coupland masterfully explores human interactions in the midst of a disaster as well as looking at things like human identity, religion and sociology in this sharp and to-the-point novel. Coupland is a bestselling author that writes some very easy to read post modernism and is often dealing with topics such as religion, Web 2.0 technology, human sexuality, and pop culture. This is my first Douglas Coupland novel but it isn’t the last of them. He reminds me a little of a modern Kurt Vonnegut with his philosophical approach to science fiction. Think a modern Cat’s Cradle where the disaster dealing with modern issues rather than those of the atomic age.

I’m finding this novel really hard to review because honestly, I don’t want to give anything away. This is the kind of novel you enjoy more if you don’t know too much about it. I don’t want to give the impression that this is a heavily philosophical novel, Coupland writes in a way that is accessible for readers of all ages. Almost like a YA novel but for a more serious reader you have all these ideas worth exploring; this is the stuff I have the most fun with. I just love a complex novel that seems basic on the surface but if you are willing, you can spend hours trying to analyse.

I don’t think this reads like a post-apocalyptic fiction, but it does feel like this is the right genre. The entire novel takes place in a bar over five hours and feels more like a postmodernist novel rather than anything else. I’m not going to spend time trying to work out what genres to fit this into but rather just wrap up this review.

I know this is a little short but I really don’t want to give too much away. Just tell people to try it, maybe not the type of novel for females but if you like Vonnegut or like the sound of this novel then maybe this is for you. I’ll be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this book. I’m sorry this is a weird review but better to say too little than too much. It’s only 200 pages long so won’t take too much effort to try.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coupland doing his thing: philosophical, engaging, funny, sexist. Actually, some of the sexism wasn't so bad here - although he can't seem to help describing women's bodies more than men's, he does label and describe sexist behaviour by some of the men in the story - and although I started out anxious about Rachel (lots of red flags for a really terrible stereotype of autism), it became clear that a) this isn't meant to be a portrayal of autism as such, and b) a whole heap of her traits are not about her not being neurotypical but about her being raised by a jerk.

[Ina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ik kreeg een beetje een claustrofobisch gevoel bij het lezen van dit verhaal. Ik voelde me opgesloten met de hoofdpersonages in die coctailbar. Het boek is onderverdeeld in 5 delen namelijk de 5 uren dat ze opgesloten zitten nadat de olieprijzen ineens de lucht inschieten en gans het land lam legt en er een soort apocaliptische toestand ontstaat. Zo leren we Karen kennen, een gescheiden alleenstaande moeder die er terecht kwam om er af te spreken met haar internetdate Warren, dan heb je de barman Rick die zijn eigen problemen heeft, Luc een pastoor die net zijn parochie beroofd heeft en op de vlucht is geslagen en dan heb je nog Rachel die denkt geen mens te zijn omdat dit door haar vader ingeprent is geweest omdat ze een probleem aan de hersenen heeft waardoor ze geen metaforen kan onderscheiden, mensen identiteiten, gevoelens, humor. En dan heb je haar Avatar namelijk number one die ons eventjes een beeld van de toekomst geeft die daarna door de verschillende personages in diverse hoofdstukken aan bod komt. Tijd , maatschappij, technologie , geloof, het komt hier allemaal aan bod maar het maakte mij een beetje kierewiet. Geen slecht boek maar echt geen hoogvanger voor mij. Maar het is wel goed geschreven maar niet mijn "dada"

[Melissa Wohlgemut · Rating 1 out of 5]

Either I'm not smart enough or this was self-aggrandizing nonsense.

[Mairi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Player One is an "end of the world" book that takes place in an airport hotel cocktail lounge over five hours. Five strangers find themselves in the cocktail lounge for personal reasons, one just stole $20,000 from his own church, another is here to meet a date they met online, another is waiting for an internet preacher to arrive and shake his hand, another has severe autism but is here to defy her father and prove she is human, and the final is the mysterious Player One who can see a little into the future each hour.

I toyed a lot between marking this 4 or 5 stars, and settled on 4.

I really, really enjoyed it (well, as much as reading about the end of the world is enjoyable). It's got all the right kind of dysphoric existentialism I expect from Douglas Coupland and after this author penned a book on my favourites list (Life After God), I couldn't wait to read this one too. It's an interesting take on our digital age, what it means to be a complex, multifaceted member of the human species. It's about lonely people who have lived meaningless lives and are forced to face this at the end end of the world.

So why only 4 stars? It didn't completely hold my attention. I think I read somewhere that it was originally written to be a series of lectures, and I did kinda get that vibe. It was thought provoking and meaningful, sure but it also had a few imperfections.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I read a Coupland book, although I've read most of them in the past, and I had forgotten how good he is at describing a situation accurately, even if the situation is crazy. The characters then are classic normal people, who then are not so normal if you look at them closely. I was just a little disappointed with the ending, but maybe with age he has mellowed out like Stephen King.

Era tanto che non leggevo un libro di Coupland, anche se in passato li ho letti quasi tutti, ed avevo dimenticato quanto fosse bravo a descrivere una situazione in modo preciso, anche se la situazione é folle. I personaggi poi sono le classiche persone normali, che poi tanto normali se le guardi bene non sono. Sono rimasta solo un po' delusa dal finale, ma forse con l'etá si é addolcito come Stephen King.

[Darrell Reimer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alright, so I lied — or spoke too soon, at any rate. After Generation A I was determined to never again pick up another Douglas Coupland novel. But then the CBC announced Coupland as last year's Massey Lecturer; to clinch any potential listener disappointment, they immediately added that Coupland would be “lecturing” in a novel format. Well . . . I suppose that was indeed a “novel” approach to take, if only by CBC standards.

The Massey Lectures are a platform for a Canadian blowhard-at-large to summon his (and occasionally her) most pertinent insights gleaned from a respectable life's work. This frequently requires the person to resort to, in their case, extreme truncation, often producing the most accessible and thought-provoking work in their entire ouevre. Even when the personality invited is someone I've wearied of, I make it a point to tune in, or read the essays when the event is over. I'm always grateful for the experience.

As I was this time, too — although just barely. All of Coupland's foibles and weaknesses as a fiction writer are on full display. Some years back a former copy-editor of Coupland groused (anonymously, of course) that the job had been akin to shepherding a beginner's creative writing class. With that kvetch freshly resurrected in memory, and compelled by the recent internet fixation with marginalia, I picked up my pen and treated the book as a proof-text. The exercise produced pages like this and this, and a happier feeling for me as a reader.

Do I really need to comment on content? Coupland glosses over issues of identity, distraction, consumption and the capacity for empathy, the post-Protestant religious impulse, extinction and a few other fixations that keep nagging at him, but which he can't seem to give cogent voice to except through the mouths of superficially distinct characters engaged in an extreme form of group therapy. These “episodes” suggest a solipsist narrator of particularly high sensitivity, who is continually astonished by the intrusions other people make.

Does that sound to you like a bad thing? Then you probably should avoid this book. Otherwise, take it for what it's worth. Just remember: pens are required when reading Coupland.

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spontaneously picked this book up from a shelf at the library dedicated to authors who took part in the recent Reykjavík International Literary Festival. I'd never read anything by Douglas Coupland and loved the idea of Player One's compressed timeline, as well as the motley cast of characters. The book starts gorgeously—it almost reads like a one act play, with snappy dialog and full passages that you can't help but read out loud to the person next to you—but the momentum dissolves rather abruptly after the apocalypse actually takes place. The Player One conceit is a bit heavy handed and the worlds' end observations made by the various characters (or the narrator) cease to be all that unique.

Nevertheless, there is a wonderful fluidity to Coupland's writing, a run-on rhythm which is really fun to read. Moreover, most of the characters (with one or two exceptions) are authentically, creatively quirky, and feel like real, if slightly enlarged, personalities. And I also have to give Coupland credit for writing a novel set in the present which features a number of pop culture and technology references without feeling immediately stale or dated.

And so, in deference to the early strength of the book and the aforementioned run-on rhythms, I'll quote an early passage which is part of the introduction to the character Karen, a recently divorced woman traveling to Toronto to meet with the man she hopes will become her lover:

There's a teenage boy across the aisle in the row ahead of Karen who has glanced her way a few times on this flight. Karen is flattered to think she might be considered hot—albeit a "hot mom"—but then she also knows that this horny kid probably has some kind of sin-detecting hand-held gadget lurking in his shirt pocket, lying in wait for Karen to undo more buttons or pick her nose or perform any other silly act that was formerly considered private, a silly act that will ultimately appear on a gag-photo website alongside JPEGs of baseball team portraits in which one member is actively vomiting, or on a movie site where teenagers, utterly unaware of the notion of cause and effect, jump from suburban rooftops onto trampolines, whereupon they die.

[Carolyn Gerk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is a breeze to get through. It masquerades as a quick light read, so long as you don't internalize the issues and questions Coupland features. The pressing issues that plague the characters in a rapidly evolving world that shifts from what we know to what we fear, are as such: What makes us human? Who or what is God? What is time and how does it affect us? And does any of it really matter?
That being said, these heavy topics are wrapped up in a smooth lyrical flow of words that sucks us into the thought processes of the main characters. I enjoyed the characters. Their individual stories are the ones to follow, and the major plot points are just the stage.
Full of some very interesting ideas that many of us may have considered but are not so talented as to be able to articulate, Player One is interesting, and, despite its often overwhelming bleakness, kind of fun. I have never read anything else by Coupland, but this novel leaves me wanting to.
THe Future Legend at the books end is a clever addition.