Douglas Coupland models his life & books on net-rumors about him

By at 5:45 am Saturday, May 13

Douglas Coupland makes a habit of following the Internet gossip about his proclivities and habits -- when he finds a juicy rumor about his hobbies (such as the idea that he's an avid meteor collector), he tries out whatever the rumor has him doing.

He's written a new novel, JPod, in which "Douglas Coupland" appears as a character, based on the nasty things that people write about him on the net.

There's a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the '90s. Every effort he's made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens...

...[F]or JPod, he created a character called Douglas Coupland, based on his online doppelgänger: a one-dimensional egotist with cold eyes resembling "wells filled with drowned toddlers." This Coupland first intrudes on the action when the narrator - Ethan Jarlewski, a game designer working for a lightly fictionalized Electronic Arts - meets him on a plane to China. Coupland is ostensibly writing an article for Wired on "designer prisoner-of-conscience labor," but he's secretly developing a gadget and, not incidentally, looking to poach programmers from Electronic Arts.

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Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

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