Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lecture)

Player One: What Is to Become of Us (CBC Massey Lecture)

3.51 of 5 stars 3.51  ·  rating details  ·  2,316 ratings  ·  319 reviews
International bestselling author Douglas Coupland delivers a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true hum...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published October 1st 2010 by House of Anansi Press (first published 2010)
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Tfitoby

What Is To Become Of Us?



Player One by Douglas Coupland

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Blurb: International bestselling author Douglas Coupland delivers a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious...more
Mon
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 bee...more
Sam Quixote
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 strand...more
Patrick
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 machi...more
Silletta
Il pensiero predominante del libro è stato: ma come diavolo siamo arrivati a questo punto? Da un inizio almeno all'apparenza promettente, ci si ritrova poi ad affrontare un tono pretenzioso e vagamente moraleggiante, camuffato dai discorsi dei personaggi sulle questioni ontologico-esistenziali. E avrei volentieri evitato di leggerli, visto anche che non pensavo proprio di trovarne, se non fosse che tolti quelli, da un certo momento in poi, non rimane altro.
Ma tant'è, il libro in sé si merita un...more
Xox
The book is almost finished. So I better write this before I forgot how I feel about it.

First, the characters building.

He is a master of this. No pages of pages of description, just name and some background so that the reader could have enough input to formulate an image of a person.

It covers some pop culture, the self-help guru. The give me your money and go through the training to feel better. With only a few pages of appearance, it already established how a person could buy into this kind o...more
Stephanie verzelen
This is when half-star ratings would come in handy - three feels too average, four feels like a bridge too far. All in all a fun, swift, semi-apocalyptic story about some people trapped in an airport bar together while the world outside is going crazy over an oil-crisis and chemical explosions and what have you. An incredibly quick read due to a limited but interesting mix of - well-developed - characters, a set setting and few crazy plot-developments but at the same time quite an interesting re...more
Kent Winward
This novel is actually five lectures down for the Canadian Massey Lectures. It was originally broadcast as a five hour radio show with a separate hour each week. Coupland is at his finest when satirically critiquing culture.

Like Coupland, I'm a tail-end Baby Boomer or a seminal Gen X-er, so maybe it is an age thing that he resonates so well with me. The novel explores ideas that I think about on a quite constant basis -- sin, religion, economics, technology, neurology and the human condition in...more
David S.
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 i...more
Edmole
Douglas Coupland is one of those artists, like Woody Allen or Kevin Smith, whose characters all speak in his voice. Now whether this technique/failing works for you very much depends on the voice. I love me some Woody Allen. Boy howdy, do I hate me some Kevin Smith.

Luckily, Coupland's dense, florid, fact-packed inner and outer dialogue does it for me big time. From page one where a MILF on a plane ruminates on whether the teenager taking sneaky snaps of her will be sharing them online as soon as...more
Anita
Player one – what is to become of us? Is a novel in five hours by Douglas Coupland. It centres around four main characters who meet in an airport lounge bar and become trapped there when a oil crises erupts and the world descends into apocalyptical chaos.
Karen – a single mother who met a man online and has chosen the Toronto airport lounge bar to meet and vet her future mate. Rick – a down on his luck one time drunk is now the bar tender and spends his days sizing up his ever fleeting clients a...more
Melissa
After reading only 8 pages of this book it began to become very obvious to me (as I assume it will to any Coupland fan) that there is a lot of content in this book which has been recycled from his previous novels.
For example: The 'rapture on a plane' section is paraphrased from The Gum Thief, and the yawning bird point is mentioned in that book too; Many, many ideas which were already used (more skilfully) in Eleanor Rigby (eg, Black stars during daylight, reaction to shopping for books about lo...more
Alex
I've unintentionally gone on "author binges" this year, and the last week and a half has definitely been a Coupland binge. For whatever reason, "Generation A" caught my eye at the bookstore recently, and I was immediately consumed (if occasionally unable to suspend my disbelief :-p). I then had to go back and reread "Generation X," and I subsequently landed on "Player One."

The best part of an author binge is that you get to see the way an author grapples with the major themes of his or her life...more
Tim Gingrich
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,...more
Darrell Reimer
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 s...more
Cori
Where were you the day oil hit $250 a barrel? Oh wait - it hasn't happened yet. Just in the mind of Douglas Coupland and shared in his latest book "Player One". In this book, the story centres around the unique experience of 4 people, each at an airport bar for a different reason and how they came together when facing what might have seemed like the end of the world the day the price of oil skyrocketed and things began to go terribly wrong.

Rick is the bartender in the lounge. A recovering alcoho...more
Michele
As part of the Massey Lecture series, this novel is already an unusual kind of creature. But. In addition to being a lecture and a novel, there's also a trailer for the book! A TRAILER for a BOOK. I've never heard of that before. You can check it out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4fAmO...

Of course because it's a lecture it's also a 'big ideas' kind of novel, but don't let that fool you. The ideas are presented in a fascinating way without being didactic. I read a lot of 'big idea'...more
Ryan I
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Jean
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 a...more
Sharon
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...more
Mike
This was a good one. I listened to the podcast of the live CBC Massey lectures, which was slightly abridged, and perhaps not for the better -- it sometimes felt like relevant materials was left out.

Anyway: The novel uses a seemingly apocalyptic scenario to address the question "What is it that makes us human?" I've kind of got a boner for that question, because I think it's important to our getting along peaceably on planet Earth, so my reaction to the novel was probably skewed in a positive dir...more
Chad Post
Although for years I've avoided Douglas Coupland (though I'll admit to loving GENERATION X when it first came out, and finding LIFE AFTER GOD *profound* when I was in college--which is most likely an untrustworthy endorsement), I decided to pick this up because of this (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/opi...) interesting "Dictionary of the Near Future," and this (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/n...) "Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next Ten Years." Not to mention, I've been quasi-obsesse...more
Ben
My first time reviewing a book online and here it goes: what a wonderful book filled with thought-provoking one liners and concepts. As other reviews have pointed out, this book isn't as concerned with plot as it is with introducing to readers Douglas Coupland's philosophy on the human condition.

I finished this novel in exactly one day and I had an absolute blast. The first half was amazing, filled with great monologues and perspectives on the human condition. The last 1/3 of the book (excludin...more
C. D.
Douglas Coupland's impeccable style and understanding of the properties of human existence shine in his 2010 novel, Player One: What Is to Become of Us. Beginning rather cheerfully and humorously, things take a turn for the worse when unexpectedly, and unexplained, the price of crude oil sails to a bewildering price of $300+ per barrel. The tragedies begin to pile upon one another as people fight, loot, riot, and rebel in order to find not only gasoline, but general resources. Taking place almos...more
Beverley
Player One was originally written as a series of week long one hour lectures, hence the novel is split up into five "hours" and is written in real time.

This is the first Coupland book I've read in years, I have a vague recollection of skimming through Generation X in my teens and dismissing it as pretentious intellectualism. It would be interesting to re-read it now and see what I think as I really enjoyed Player One and Coupland's unique style of writing.

When Coupland describes a character he g...more
Eric
Douglas Coupland has this way of using his fiction to advance sociological and existential concepts in this utterly facile and casual way that always makes me wonder: is it that he's really, really smart and he's trying to dumb it down to make it accessible to me, the common reader, or is it that he really isn't all that bright? (I have the same question about the Matrix movies, if that helps you to understand - brilliant idea, dumbed down for the masses, or just really banal, obvious idea?) He'...more
Sylvied
I enjoyed it. The characters were engaging and the lifestyles and interactions portrayed were insightful and gave an intersting picture of what life really is like in the early 21st century in the industrialized world. Lots of varying perspectives, geekiness, fanaticism, isolation and detachment and a healthy dose of paranoia. Early on one character reflects that they think the witness protection program is a massive cover-up, people are just killed by the government. It's a clever cover up thou...more
Matthew Pennell
There’s nothing quite like a Douglas Coupland book. From the relentless pop-culture references to the hyper-communicative characters — even the dialogue-heavy prose possesses a distinctly Couplandesque rhythm.

Player One, the novelisation of his 2010 Massey Lectures, touches on many of the themes of his previous works; we have a global catastrophe and semi-end-of-the-world hysteria (Girlfriend in a Coma, Generation A); random shootings (Hey Nostradamus!); musings on identity and ‘starting over’ (...more
Steev Hise
This book reminds me of Generation X, Coupland's first novel, which I read when i came out just about exactly 20 years ago. Like Generation X, it's full of characters who most of the time don't do much but are full of profound thoughts. All the characters are similarly smart and introspective and philosophical, and their thoughts are super super interesting. In this, Coupland's writing is pretty unrealistic, as I don't believe very many people really are this way. But I think much of his fiction...more
Nicole (imluvinit)
This book would make a horrible movie. Mainly because of how fantastic the writing is! The character development, the expression on life...ah, it's fantastic. I would say this is a thinking book. If you need an escape---and I can understand that feeling --- this book wouldn't be for you at that moment. But if you want a book that will make you think about life, the after-life and the "fallen angel" in all of us. To summarize it's plot: it's a post-apocalyptic type theme with humor twisted in the...more
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Player One (Paperback)
Player One (Hardcover)
Player One: What is to Become of Us (Massey Lectures Series)
Player One: What Is to Become of Us (Paperback)
Player One (Paperback)

1886
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 sever...more
More about Douglas Coupland...
Microserfs Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture Girlfriend in a Coma JPod Hey Nostradamus!

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“You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.” 60 people liked it
“By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate...

...I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over.”
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