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Douglas Coupland, zeitgeist chronicler, furniture designer and defender of the Helvetica font, may or may not be interested in saving the world.
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Sebastian Shores on 01 Feb 11Coupland's unique style is mentioned. He often goes against the norm, which could stem from his bizarre life he lives himself.
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''Generation A,'' he not only addresses our contemporary spiritual malaise
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is not a sequel to but rather a thematic wink at Coupland's first novel, ''Generation X'' (1991), about young slackers experiencing postindustrial fin de siecle ennui and sitting around telling stories.
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From the beginning, Coupland's novels have explored the vertiginous acceleration of culture as it intersects with media and technology
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teenagers and young adults, dropouts and designers, programmers and cubicle inhabitants, gamers and geeks
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All of it is rendered with the paradoxical combination of empathy and irony that marks Coupland's work. And ''Generation A'' is no exception.
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the novel is set in a near future when bees are thought to have become extinc
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Also extinct are heroin addicts, because, of course, ''poppies require bees.'' Instead, a sinister prescription drug called Solon has filled the gap, treating anxiety by blocking thoughts of the future.
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The novel opens with five separate but highly publicized incidents: its narrators are all stung by bees.
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Each narrator is immediately captured by thuggish government agents, then detained in isolated research facilities and forced to undergo testing to discover what attracted the bees and what portent that might hold for the ailing environment.
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Whatever it is we enjoy about stories, we enjoy them because we forget they are stories. We have given ourselves over to something greater than mere form. And, no matter how cleverly you try, if you point that out to us, you break that fragile spell. End of story.