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If Douglas Coupland’s hilarious new novel, JPod (Bloomsbury, $24.95), reminds you of his 1996 Microserfs, don’t worry—that’s exactly what he had in mind. But while that earlier novel explored techie geeks finding themselves at the beginning of what turned into the dot-com bubble of the late 20th century, JPod is set firmly in the age of Google.

JPod is an island of cubicles at a big computer company where the novel’s main characters are toiling away at a skateboard video game that their bosses seem intent on ruining—first the hapless geeks are forced to add a “hip and edgy” turtle character, and then a new regime of management wants to turn the whole thing into a fantasy adventure involving flying carpets and magical sprites. As revenge the coders create a hidden parallel game that involves a homicidal Ronald McDonald on a terrifying killing spree. All of this goes on in the background of the novel’s much more complicated story line, which includes a pot-farming mom, a Chinese smuggler of refugees who sidelines as a professional ballroom dancer, lesbian separatist survivalists, and an obnoxious writer named Douglas Coupland. And if all that isn’t enough, Coupland interweaves pages of numbers and letters disguised as quizzes. (Can you find the rogue digit in the first 100,000 places of pi?)

Coupland spoke from his home in Vancouver, Canada, and—typically for the author of Generation X—the conversation veered off into fascinating tangents covering everything from Mary Tyler Moore to Nigerian spam e-mails.

The last time we spoke, you talked about how you hate traveling and how you are, technologically speaking, a semi-Luddite. And yet in this book you’re traipsing around China and talking the geek talk of the tech world. You do a very convincing job of not being the voice that’s presented in your work.
Oh, thank you. Uh, that is a “thank you” situation, right?

Of course. It’s baffling to me that in talking to you, I get a different picture of you than someone reading the book would get of you and the life you lead.
I do go to China, and I know people who have, so I kept on grilling them, “What’s it like?” I thought the funniest comments were about how bad the air was. Which of course becomes a running joke.

Microserfsand JPod run on parallel tracks. Does it worry you at all that people will accuse you of rehashing a previous book?
I don’t think so. The tone of the two is so different, probably because things have changed so much in the last 10 years. I think with Microserfs there was really the sense of something new and “1.0” being created in the culture. It wasn’t just the bubble and all the money, although that was certainly part of it. There was a “Wow,” especially with Apple, like this is something fundamental and amazing that’s going to transform society. And nowadays the money is gone, and it’s not transforming society; it’s just finding out what’s the capital of Michigan. Everything’s different, but nothing’s different.

I think the characters in JPod are much more amoral, and they certainly inhabit a much more amoral universe. Certainly Vancouver, where the book takes place—we don’t make anything in Vancouver, we just push electrons around with a stick, and we flip real estate. We’re kind of like a bedroom community to global piracy. We’re living in a concentrated version of the present here. And in a way, the city itself is part of the book.

I have to share this with you in light of the book—I got a press release this morning about a series of new DVDs starring Ronald McDonald, and they’re designed to encourage kids to exercise.
Oh, boy. I saw this commercial about two weeks ago where Ronald’s become a “real person.” It’s kind of disturbing. If I remember it correctly, people are sitting talking about something, and Ronald is walking by and saying, “Oh, but did you know blah blah blah?” I guess it brings up the whole question of, “Well, do you ever take your makeup off? Or were you born that way, like Krusty the Klown?” If you think about spokesmascots too deeply, it gets very dark very soon. Do you think the Lucky Charms leprechaun has a drinking problem? [Alonso laughs] He lives alone; all he does is terrorize kids, and he has no other known job activity.