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Player One: What Is to Become of Us: a Novel in Five Hours Free FREE PLAYER ONE: WHAT IS TO BECOME OF US: A NOVEL IN FIVE HOURS PDF Douglas Coupland | 246 pages | 01 Oct 2010 | House of Anansi Press | 9780887849688 | English | United Kingdom Player One: What Is to Become of Us by Douglas Coupland Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Player One by Douglas Coupland. 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 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 voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours an end. In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers, and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. More Details Original Title. Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Player Oneplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jul 16, Mon rated it it was amazing Shelves: po-mo. 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 Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours, possibly the clearest manifestation of Couplandism: where do we go after Postmodernism. When was Generation X published? Let's Google that. 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 It's hard to write about any of Coupland's novel because they are much more than mere plots and characters smudged together. So it has been two decades since his first book, and the transition is striking. The premise is purer and more minimal, the characters well defined as he finally ditched using first person narratives no offense Doug, but you really aren't a good enough writer for that yet. More importantly, this is a synthesis of all his previous attempts at clarifying his philosophy - it's a combination of Life After God 's postmodern religion, Hey Nostradamus 's terrorism, Shampoo Planet 's denial of the past and Girlfriend in a Coma 's So-now-let's-pretend-it's-the-future- what-the-hell-do-we-do. Intentional or not, a lot of material in this book, including character profiles and dialogues are recycled straight from his earlier works. But it's all very art school isn't it? Appropriation as part of postmodernism. It works much better when Coupland cleans up his half-finished rants and integrates them into a stew of social criticism. One thing, or perhaps the best thing of all, is that Coupland offers hope in his work. Not the obvious Bald-fontHelvetica in-your-face Obama sort of hope, but a subtle 'hey I know it's shitty now, and probably will be shitty because we're surrounded by shitty people, and you will most definitely fail, and be broken in the process. But that's ok. Because you're here asking that question'. This really shouldn't be called a novel, it's a bunch of quotes and thoughts put together loosely bound by a post-apocalypse theme. Maybe Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours should just stop pretending and have a list of Tumblr-ish ideas and illustrations. What was I saying before that? I don't remember. Oh well. This is what the 'save' button is for isn't it. I love Coupland. Probably because he's such a product of art school yet he went on to satirise its exact nature. Now, you don't see Damien Hirst or Vito Acconci doing that do you? View all 3 comments. Dec 11, Daniel rated it it was ok. If this book had decided to just go ahead and be a novel, it would've been great. If it had decided to just go ahead and be a series of essays on existentialism and the transformations and implications of humanity and society, it probably would've been great, too. Instead, it tries to be both, and only gets halfway with either. The book is -- at first -- about five people who meet in a hotel bar during a major, global crisis. They each get a chance to tell their tales -- including a mysterious If this book had decided to just go ahead and be a novel, it would've been great. They each get a chance to tell their tales -- including a mysterious narrator named "Player One. The characters are all at thresholds of differing types -- Luke is a pastor who's lost his faith, Karen is there to meet an internet hook-up, Rick is about to hand thousands of dollars over to a celebrity savior, and Rachel has finally decided to get pregnant to prove that she's human -- and it's fun to see the "flawed narrator" tool used in four different ways, their flaws all multiply colored through everyone else's eyes. Unfortunately, the global crisis traps them in the hotel bar, and they spend the rest of the book all ruminating on life, existence, the soul, and purpose. Even this wouldn't be so bad except every - single - character has the same poetic, insightful, intricate thought processes when they start analyzing what it means to be alive. By the end of the story, it is painfully obvious that every character is nothing more than a mouthpiece for our author, who -- at that point -- has said "to heck with it" with character development and story and has gone full bore with his philosophizing much of it coming across as little more than erudite thumb-twiddling, although Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours may just be because there's so darn much of it that it becomes mind-numbing after time. The story, almost unforgivably, is tied up with a hasty narrative ribbon, with one character quite literally explaining everything to the reader, as if Coupland was bored with the book and just didn't want to bother with actual writing. The last fifth of the novel is a glossary of terms that, while interesting, don't really add to either the book or the philosophies it analyzes. I'm not sure what the purpose of this section was -- some of it is definitely meant to be funny -- but it didn't do much for me. It's fantastic when a book gets you to think about life more deeply and in challenging ways, but the best books do this through interesting stories, complicated characters and character development, and in intricate plotting and planning. This book sets up an intriguing premise and then tosses it all aside to give each character a chance to preach the same basic message of modern disaffection and doubt. That's not good writing or Player One: What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours philosophizing. It's a lazy example of both trying to wear the other's hat. Just another terrific read. This is ultimately an exploration on some of the bigger, philosophical questions on life: what is this concept of time? What happens before we're born and after we die? And so on. And Coupland does this with his innate lyrical language, and his trademark wit. The premise of the story is: Five people, all of whom end up in a Toronto Pearson airport lounge, find themselves locked inside the lounge while the world around them implodes. Oil prices instantly skyrocket, and Just another terrific read. Oil prices instantly skyrocket, and what follows is a sort of nuclear-esque fallout as people lose their goddamn minds over the shortage of oil. It's extremely prophetic, in my mind. I think Coupland brilliantly satirises the extremes to which humans will go when the world oil supply suddenly dries up and the prices sky rocket. Perhaps he exaggerates the outcome, but perhaps not I think he accurately assumes that the dominant religion on the planet are not the religions we commonly think of - the dominant religion is the Almighty Dollar.
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