Generation A

By Douglas Coupland

“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


Generation A is a brilliant, timely and very Couplandesque novel about honey bees and the world we may soon live in. Once again, Douglas Coupland captures the spirit of a generation. 

In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined.

Generation A mirrors 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and 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 demonstrates Coupland's unforgettable verve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780307372796

Douglas Coupland

DOUGLAS COUPLAND is a writer, visual artist and designer. He has published fourteen novels, three collections of short stories, and eight nonfiction books; has written and performed for England’s Royal Shakespeare Company; and is a columnist for the Financial Times and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence at the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018 his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence.

Reviews for Generation A

[newskepticx · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I haven't read Coupland in almost a year so I forgot how delightfully weird his books are. But they are strange in way that is completely normal to the Couplandverse. Very interesting theme of the importance of storytelling and our need for stories as human beings.

[thioviolight · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The book started out interesting enough for me and I was able to get through the earlier parts quickly. However, later on, the story started to drag a bit for me. I did manage to finish it, and the story was relevant to the times and not really so bad, but it wasn't as great as I expected. It's only the second book of Coupland's I've read, the first being Life After God, which I much enjoyed and made me expect more from Generation A. However, I've browsed through other reviews of this book, so I'm not really discouraged about trying his other works.

[yougotamber · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a fantastic read this was. Funny, this book reminded me of Chuck Pahalniuk's "Haunted" because it had the same format (stories within the story). Comparing the two... Coupland far surpassed that of Pahalniuk. I probably feel a connection to the book because it brought up many ideas and thoughts about reading itself, it really had me thinking. The main plot line was pretty strong for a book with this format and I think the reason I gave it such a high rating was because it worked so well. The rating probably wouldn't have been so high had I not read "Haunted" before this. Since I have been accustomed to this style it didn't set me back like it has for some other reviewers. I highly recommend this to any Coupland fan or anyone who loves to read. The book focuses greatly on reading, creativity and the connection it has to our brain (although not in a very realistic, scientific way). If you live to read then I think you would enjoy this.

[bookwormteri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bees are extinct. Five people from around the world get stung by "extinct" bees and are promptly placed under sterile watch so scientists can figure out why the bees stung them. What makes them different? Once released, the five meet under "scientific" supervision and tell stories...

[jenmdb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stronger start than any other Douglas Coupland novel I've read but a classic Coupland finish. Interesting ideas about life without bees.

[seldombites · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was a highly entertaining read and I highly recommend it.

[metamariposa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I suppose it's no surprise that I loved this novel; anything pulls together fundamentalist Christian oddities, anti-poverty observations, and anti-cheap corn/Monsanto imagery in the first five pages is bound to appeal to me. Allusions to many other works I love--the internet, Brave New World, media-created phenomenon of H1N1--and allegories of loneliness make this book humorous and appealing to my demographic. (This book strikes me more as allegory than actual Science Fiction; I don't think he's trying to create any illusion of the world described really being an Other from our world right now.) But as the book develops (spoiler alerts) Coupland moves into profound reflections on the place of story and narrative within our world. At the end of the book, as the characters comment on the individualism and alienation from community created in the process of novel-reading, I was squirming uncomfortably as my husband asked me questions that I couldn't answer because I was involved in my own little world in the book. What I love about this book is that it brings in the meta-questions without diminishing the importance of the just plain questions--why are the bees dying? Why don't we want to make communities anymore? How can we stop Monsanto? The questions of "What does novel-reading do to us?" and "Is that important or even a good thing?" are not elevated (theory-style) above the content questions and the skewering of corporate culture. I also finished the book in two days and enjoyed every page-turning minute of it. I found Generation A much more readable and intelligent than The Gum Thief; this novel will give me mental floss for weeks.

[jasonpettus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As I've mentioned here before, about the closest I come to being a literal "completist" of a contemporary author's work is probably Douglas Coupland (I've now read ten of his thirteen novels, and was a pretty obsessive fan at that when I was younger); for those who need a refresher, he's the fifty-something media expert who originally coined the sociological phrase "Generation X" with his 1991 novel, and which ushered in an extra-snarky, extra-pop-culture-laced style of late Postmodernism, which was at first eagerly eaten up by people my age until collectively getting pretty sick of it by the time September 11th rolled around, and which was the direct cause of such Scooby-Doo navel-gazing hacks as Augusten Burroughs and Chuck Klosterman during the nadir of that particular movement. And now that I've read so much of Coupland, I've come to realize that most of his work essentially fits into one of two molds, although of course with at least a slight overlap in them all: there is the "realistic" Coupland, who pens stories that for the most part could actually happen out in the real world, and which directly comment on the times in which they were written; and then there's the "fairytale" Coupland, exactly as it sounds, who writes speculative and sometimes even outright science-fiction tales, and which generally attempt to speak metaphorically about much more universal issues of the human condition. (And in fact, I think it's no surprise that his most popular novel to date, 1995's dot-com story Microserfs, is an ingenious and almost equal blend of the real and surreal, a balance I wish he would find in all the books he writes.)Examples of the former might include his original Generation X, 2001's All Families Are Psychotic, and 2007's surprisingly sad look at the crushing defeats that come with middle-age, The Gum Thief (which I've also reviewed here in the past); while the latter would definitely include 1998's Girlfriend in a Coma (which ends with literally only six people still left on the planet), 2000's Miss Wyoming (in which a former child star miraculously survives a plane crash without anyone knowing, and ends up living in hiding for a year with a stranger she randomly meets one day), and now his latest, the head-scratchingly controversial Generation A, which since coming out last year has garnered an amount of polar-opposite reactions unusual for even him, with everyone who's now read it seemingly either loving or hating it, and hardly anybody ever saying merely "meh." In fact, I'm not even sure what to think of it myself, which should make today's write-up interesting; because in general I liked it quite a bit, but am still not sure if that's only because I'm assigning it too much undeserved goodwill, because of being such a big fan of his in general for so long now.Because to be clear, this is a strange story you're entering when you pick up this book, perhaps one of the stranger ones now of Coupland's entire career; set just a few years after our own times, it posits a world where the planet's population of bees has died out for unknown reasons, which through a snowballing chain of reactions has affected the population of other insects, which in turn has caused mass pollination problems, which itself has caused a global food crisis, as well as a growing amount of environmental disasters. So then when it's discovered that five random young people across the planet have all been stung by these supposedly extinct bees within the same month -- including a rave-loving farmer in Iowa, a "Slumdog Millionaire" call-center assistant in Sri Lanka, a World Of Warcraft addict in Paris, an evangelical Christian with Tourette Syndrome in Canada, and a Boing-Boing-reading flash-mob enthusiast in New Zealand -- needless to say that the world pays attention, including the five being whisked off by black helicopters that seem at first to be owned by the Center for Disease Control, until it becomes clear at their new cleanhouse environment that they are to be subjected to a kind of examination never heard of before, with all corporate logos in their locked hospital rooms (including on the bottom of furniture and on mattress tags) deliberately removed in a way so thoroughly that it seems like they never even existed, and with the five subjugated for hours each day by an artificially intelligent computer to the kinds of snarky, pop-culture-laced cocktail-party questions that Coupland is precisely known for. ("Can you imagine a situation where pain might feel good?" "Do you shoplift in your head?")And yes, as you can already pick up on, this leads to one of the first big problems with the book, and I'm sure is one of the main reasons it garners such opposite reactions in the first place -- because for being five random strangers from different walks of life scattered around the planet, they all seem to share a remarkable amount of interests, to be precise the exact same interests that Coupland himself has, a sort of hyperawareness of tech-based ultra-contemporary pop culture usually only seen in smartass creative-class Caucasians in North America and Western Europe with way too much time on their hands. And it'd be one thing if this remained the case throughout, but near the end Coupland actually offers up an explanation for why these five characters all seem so similar to each other, which I'll let remain a secret but that does beg two questions: of whether a hasty explanation that close to the end justifies our misunderstanding of the situation during the rest (which let's face it, is a storytelling device that usually only works when the ending is a shocking surprise, like is the case with Fight Club or The Usual Suspects); and whether the explanation itself even holds water in the first place, which I suspect that many people will argue does not.This of course is the problem with writing metaphorical fairytales, and why they're trickier to pull off than more realistic storylines -- that since you're deliberately relying on elements that sometimes make no rational sense in the physical world, it requires a much bigger suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, a much bigger allowance for "artistic license" than some audience members are willing to give. And so it's easy to see Generation A as a silly, pretentious mess if you're determined to see it that way -- after all, it features such eye-rolling details as giant obscene crop circles done specifically to piss off Google employees, an aboriginal Southeast Asian who calms himself in stressful situations by repeating mantra-like the unending list of Abercromie & Fitch sweater colors, and a shadowy corporate conspiracy that apparently relies on hundreds of "Simpsons" references for its success, not to mention an entire last third of the manuscript consisting of not much more than the supposedly extemporaneous short stories that our five heroes are supposedly making up on the spot as they sit around a campfire at an abandoned village off the coast of Alaska (don't ask), but that in reality are way too witty and perfect to have ever been composed whole-cloth on the spur of a moment. To truly enjoy a novel like this, you have to be willing to cede these things, to admit for example that such stories could never be made up on the spot but that Coupland is trying to accomplish something grander by including them, or else otherwise, much like an eight-year-old watching "Road Runner" cartoons, you're going to spend the entire length of the novel grimacing and angrily shouting, "Oh, right, I'm so sure!"Like I said, I in particular ended up really enjoying Generation A by the time it was over (which, by the way, has nothing to do with his original Generation X, but is rather inspired by a famous quote from Kurt Vonnegut at a college commencement speech in 1994, which at the time was actually his attempt at making fun of Coupland); but also like I said, the book certainly has its problems, and for sure takes a whole lot of liberties to get to the point at the end it eventually reaches, liberties that are harder and harder to swallow the less of an existing fan of his you are. It'll be interesting to see how history treats this particular title, whether it'll be chalked up in the future as a minor experiment or hailed as a brilliant early manifesto of this so-called "Age of Sincerity" we now find ourselves in post-9/11; I find it absolutely worth taking a chance on, but please don't come complaining to me if you end up detesting it, which you very well might.Out of 10: 7.9

[tombleweed · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm a fan of Coupland's work most of the time, but the problem is that he tends to get sloppy. It's the problem with a lot of his books, and Generation A has the same problem. He takes a well-thought of concept (the bees that become extinct, 5 people that get stung), but then turns into a smudged plot. It's not deep, it didn't make me think, it didn't make me laugh. Still, I finished the book, hoping Coupland would still tie it alltogether in the end. Sadly, he did not. I sometimes get the feeling with Coupland that he tries to hard to be original, funny or thought-provocative. People who try to hard, eventually end up writing books that aren't sincere enough. Still, J-Pod e.g. was amazing.

[ironicqueery · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Douglas Coupland's newest book, Generation A, tell the story of and through five individuals who are stung by bees, bees that have been thought to have died out. The book is a bit slow to start, as Coupland takes turn rotating through the five individuals, who each narrate their own scenario explaining how they got stung by a bee. The story picks up as we learn how they are isolated and kept apart from society as they are studied. Then they are rejoined and the mystery of why their were stung and the aftermath is slowly revealed. Part of this revelation comes through them each telling fictional stories to each other. While the stories are interesting, it does create a disjointed experience for the reader which is hard to follow. The conclusion then comes at warp speed, ending the book at a much faster pace than the buildup. What results is a book that is good, of course. It's Douglas Coupland and he doesn't really write a bad novel. It's a great story, but compared to his other books, there could have been improvements. It possesses a lot of philosophical ideas, but they aren't as fleshed out as they should be. The book clocks in at 320 pages, but I don't think Coupland should have done this story in less than 420. Of course, being such a Coupland fan, perhaps a bit of that is simply remorse that another book of his is done, and now the wait for the next commences.

[michaeldwebb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a difficult review. The things is, I just love Coupland's writing, and because of that I enjoyed this more than anything I've read since, well, Coupland's last novel. But this was actually a little odd. The first half was wonderful, classic Coupland, a great story about life after bees, great characters, his usual brilliant turn of phase. And then... well, it kind of fell apart. It moved into Gum Thief territory, with the characters telling a succession of deliberately oddly /badlywritten stories (similar to Glove Pond in Gum Thief). And then the ending was just a bit daft.But all the same, beautifully written, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I loved every sentence of it. But I'm a bit of a fanboy here, so what do I know?

[chrystal_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I LOVED this book. Unlike anything I have read before. I found it crass, hilarious, inspiring. A drug that makes you feel like you've read 1000 books? Fabulous. The gross jello-like reproduction of the characters cells- wow. Oral storytelling to bring people together! Both personally, and as a librarian, I thought this book was perfect.

[reluctantm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So Douglas Coupland is always about shtick and by the end of the book, the shtick was wearing thin on me. He's always interesting to read, but after I finished I wanted to say: Hey, if you want to write microfiction stories, just put out a book of microfiction stories, don't try to gussy it up by putting a narrative to weave them all together. Essentially, the entire last half of the book is just short (like 500 words) stories. I didn't need the characters to try and tell me how these stories all relate. I could figure it out on my own. That said, I did read the book and enjoy it for the most part. I just couldn't shake the feeling that Douglas Coupland felt we couldn't figure out some of the story on our own and so there were parts where I felt like I was being lectured rather than I was reading a story.

[shannonkearns · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

a fantastic read. set in the future when bees have become extinct, what happens when five seemingly random people from all over the world get stung within days of each other? a powerful narrative about connection, stories, and what it means to not be alone.

[gmendonca79 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a big fan of Douglas Coupland - he might be one of those authors future generations will refer to when describing our times, our anxieties and hopes. I expected "Generation A" to be connected to "Generation X", in the same way J-Pod" and "Microserfs" somehow dialogue between them. But the title is a mere disguise - "Generation A" is not a sequel to "Generation X", but an independent, touching novel that reflects upon the basis of our societies. It really poses the question: what ARE the basis of our society? What brought us together in this way and not any other? As is his other novels, the questionings may be hard to be faced with, but the directions Coupland points as possibles answers are always full of hope and a deep faith in Humanity. "Generation A" is fun to read - I really caught myself laughing out loud sometimes. It might be even taken as a light reading, but it makes one reflect on many aspects of our time and life.

[benedetto1fiorelli · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have read most of Coupland book and this was the most disorienting. In some of his books the characters are almost anonymous puppets whose mixed actions and stories will end up describing a realistic but very humorous picture of the 'human condition', a la Vonnegut. In others of his books the strategy is inverted and there are fragmented anonymous stories that will together give a vivid description of the characters and their most inner pains. But the A generation has its birth in a moment of history when human kind has lost the capability of living stories.So, Coupland has to adopt a stratagem in order to story-tell the generation of humans with non stories and the uncertainty in their future. The stratagem is an injection of fantasy / science fiction that goes a bit out of control and will leave the readers a bit confused at the end.

[cecilturtle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Apart from a few good quotes, this is an amalgam of crazy characters with unlikely traits living outlandish scenarios. And for what? Yet another diatribe against large pharmaceutical companies, human greed, ecological disasters? Themes du jour to be sure, but they've been treated by others and in a much more comprehensive and creative way. This book just bored me. Only Harj grabbed my attention, but he alone could not save the book.

[sofiaandersson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's in the future. Five smartasses from all around the world are stung by the (until then) extinct bees.

[gbsallery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not certain, but I think this book would have merited five stars if it had a slightly denser texture. That said, it is a tour de force of self-consciously modern literary form; a novel about stories and the collapse of society, lovingly kneaded to form rich satisfying self-referential loops. There are also bees, though their motives remain unclear.

[miranda_d_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As always, Douglas Coupland presents us with an interesting novel inhabited by unusual charactors and only semi-improbable plot lines. This futuristic tale about a societey plagued with problems stemming from the disappearance of bees is at times entertaining, engrossing, and laugh out loud funny, but there is a deja-vu-ness about this novel. As we're first introduced to the main charactors (the B5s) there was a vague sense of recognition from other Coupland novels ... almost as though we've seen them somewhere, but we never get a full enough picture of them to remember exactly where we know them from. Not that these slightly recycled charactors aren't charming and interesting in their own right, but you get the feeling that it has all kind of been done before. Nowhere in the story do you not think, 'oh this exactly what I would expect from a Coupland novel'. Which might be wonderful if you're a huge fan of Douglas Coupland, but it's slightly more disappointing if you're simply a fan of original writing.

[tomleesteenboek · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm a fan of Coupland's work most of the time, but the problem is that he tends to get sloppy. It's the problem with a lot of his books, and Generation A has the same problem. He takes a well-thought of concept (the bees that become extinct, 5 people that get stung), but then turns into a smudged plot. It's not deep, it didn't make me think, it didn't make me laugh. Still, I finished the book, hoping Coupland would still tie it alltogether in the end. Sadly, he did not. I sometimes get the feeling with Coupland that he tries to hard to be original, funny or thought-provocative. People who try to hard, eventually end up writing books that aren't sincere enough. Still, J-Pod e.g. was amazing.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

About as profound as a fortune cookie but immensely entertaining. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the format of characters telling stories. Reminds me of Chucks Palahniuk's haunted. Here the stories also tie into the bigger stories and are echoes of the main story showing how storytellers draw from their own life stories to create them.

[stephenbarkley · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Generation A is the story of how five young people’s lives become entangled after being stung by almost extinct bees. The plot’s little more than a vehicle to relate the meta-narrative of life in crumbling future. In the book, each of the five characters take time telling mini-stories which swirl thematically around this central thought: life is 95% suck and 5% hope.The title of the book is an obvious nod to his brilliant Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I was expecting the same piercing insight on the current generation that he offered to us Gen Xers a couple decades ago. Unfortunately, Coupland did little more than transplant the Generation X mindset into younger bodies.In the end, there was too much plot to consider this a mere social commentary, but not enough plot to make a 300 page book very interesting. I’ve read everything that Coupland’s published, and would have to encourage a Coupland-virgin to begin elsewhere.(If you are new to Coupland, start with Girlfriend in a Coma or Hey Nostradamus!.)

[suetu_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What’s the buzz?I can’t say that I’ve loved every word Douglas Coupland’s ever written, but by and large I enjoy his work quite a lot. His novels are observant, quirky, and very funny. So, I was looking forward to Generation A. And I enjoyed reading it, but I wanted to like it so much more than I did. I think my biggest problem is that I felt like I was reading two different books. The first half of this novel did not seem to match up with the second.The novel is primarily told from the points of view of five individuals from five different lifestyles and countries. What bonds them is that they all share an extraordinary experience. They are each stung by a bee—at a time (roughly the year 2024) when no one’s seen a bee for five or six years. They’ve long been assumed extinct, and the world suffers for it. Fruits and flowers are incredibly rare, and must be labor-intensively hand pollinated. Honey is like gold. The bees are essentially the canaries in our coal mine, and the future isn’t looking too bright.This is so much an issue, that there’s a new, hyper-addictive drug on the market called Solon. It keeps users in the present, instead of all that pesky worrying about the future. It also makes time pass quicker and helps alleviate loneliness, so that users can “live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.” So, it is in this near future that Zack from Iowa, Samantha from New Zealand, Julien from Paris, Harj from Sri Lanka, and Diana from Canada become instant worldwide celebrities—and subjects of scientific scrutiny.And I was really engaged in this somewhat bizarre story. I was totally digging it! But as things moved forward, the plot veered off into left field. For reasons I won’t get into, the B5 (as they are called) spend the second half of the novel telling each other quirky stories they’ve made up. Very little happens as a series of sometimes charming short stories are recited, and the ideas behind Coupland’s satire are driven home. Eventually there are revelations that somewhat tie the two halves of the novel together, but I found the ending to be weird and somewhat grotesque. There were definitely pleasures to be had in the reading of this novel. Coupland’s just too darn good for that not to be the case, but Generation A never quite came together as a cohesive work.