"A Kingdom of a Thousand Princes but No Kings": The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs

Abstract

This essay argues that Douglas Coupland's 1995 novel Microserfs is a fiction that represents the postsuburban spaces of the West, and Silicon Valley in particular, as a direct contrast to previous conceptions of suburban space as restrictive and conformist. Critics of Coupland's work have positioned him as a writer happy to champion the older suburban forms of subdivisions and tract homes, but this essay suggests that he is equally as interested in engaging with changing socio-spatial forms and that Silicon Valley, written about by historians as an environment predicated on innovation and prosperity, and as a typical example of an 'Edge City', is scripted by Coupland as a new and empowering phase in the capitalist spatial matrix. Drawing on theoretical work that sees space as being socially produced, Foster shows how Microserf sasserts that the postsuburban spatiality of Silicon Valley is created through an interaction between the characters and the places they live and work in. He argues that the novel deconstructs such pre-existing binaries as city/suburb and home/work and that the new phase of the postindustrial capitalist production of space being entered into in the mid-1990s is directly influenced by the social relations the characters enact. As such, he demonstrates how the novel's narrative dramatizes the maturation of the lead characters through the creation of a communal and mutually beneficial Internet start-up and therefore allows for a revised conception of both the social hierarchies traditionally associated with capitalism and the centrality of the idea of the frontier to the making of a Western imaginary.