Book summary of the author Douglas Coupland - Generation A. The summary contains: a short summary, a long summary, character descriptions, notes and food for thought questions.
Book Details
Title: Generation A
Author: Douglas Coupland
Pages: 357
Publisher: Lijsters
Publication Date: 2010
Genre: Dystopian Fiction, Science Fiction, Novel
Original Language: English
Topics: Dystopian Future, Extinction of Bees, Escapism, End of the World as we know it.
Notes have been included: These are not part of the text in the book. They are extra insights
intended to help you understand the story. They will always appear in green font.
Short Summary of the Book:
The story is set against the background of a dystopian future, somewhere around 2020. In
this world, bees have gone extinct, leading to the scarcity of honey and the rise of its prices.
Fruit has become a luxury, and the disappearance of bees has had consequences, including
the extinction of heroin addicts, as poppies from the poppy flower require bees. Instead of
heroin, a new narcotic called Solon dominates, providing users with a sense of solitude akin
to reading a good book, enabling them to live in the present and not worry about the future.
The novel revolves around five seemingly unrelated individuals from different corners of the
world who, after being unexpectedly stung by a bee, gain celebrity status. These individuals
include Zack, a farmer from Iowa, United States; Samantha, a fitness enthusiast from New
Zealand; Julian, a computer geek and amateur philosopher from France; Diana, a dental
hygienist with Tourette's syndrome from Canada; and Harj, a call center worker from Sri
Lanka. Despite their different backgrounds, all five are stung by a bee and are swiftly taken
by government agents to observation laboratories, where they stay for about a month.
During this time of isolation, they have no contact with the outside world. Upon their release,
they seek each other out, hoping to find answers to their shared experience. However, their
freedom is short-lived as one of the scientists round them up again and transport them to a
remote Canadian archipelago. Here, they are instructed to share stories with each other as a
form of group therapy. As they participate in this peculiar therapy, peculiar answers to their
questions begin to surface. There is a twist at the ending!
Long Summary of the Book:
Important to know: The book is divided into chapters per character. That means that each
chapter is being told from their own perspective. There are five characters, Zack, Samantha,
Julien, Diana and Harj, and each get their turn to tell another piece of the story.
The Book is dedicated to: Anne Collins
Introduction 1:
‘Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. Suddenly you’ve become a
novel idea and you’ve got people wanting to join in. You’ve gained credibility from nothing.
You’re the talk of the town. Develop this as a story you can tell.’ – Malcolm McLaren.
Note: This statement seems to have been chosen to highlight the idea that to stand out from
the crowd or your generation, you need to rebel against it. Go against everything it stands for
and then you will become famous. Then you will have a story to tell.
1
, Introduction 2:
‘Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want
jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation
X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as
much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve
were so long ago.’ – Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, 1994.
Note: This statement seems to have been chosen to highlight that Generation X need not be
the end. Simply rename it to Generation A and start over, as if you were at the beginning of
time itself. The idea may be linked to the sense that each Generation thinks they are special
or the last of its kind, while it is more likely that each Generation stands on its own, doomed
to repeat triumphs and failures, like all generations before them.
Harj Vetharanayan
Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
Note: Although Harj is the last to be stung by a bee, the book begins with his perspective
and ends with him as well. Perhaps because out of the five, he is the one with more to tell.
Every character tells his/her part of the story in I-form!
Harj says: ‘How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together
this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and
lava and blackness. It’s a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what
existed before.’ He reflects on the day that the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2004. That day, he
was on the third floor. Safe from the disaster itself, yet powerless to do anything about it. He
heard a strange hiss outside. He went to the window to see what it was and saw the water
sweep everything. Imagine everything you have ever known, being carried away by mud
water. Buses, vans, laundry baskets, dead animals and dead people. It was a horrible sight.
Zack Lammle
Mashaka County, Iowa, United States
Zack starts out by telling us about his opinion on corn. His view on corn is that it is scary,
because it has been engineered by humans to produce fructose and it dominates every
aspect of consumers’ lives. High fructose corn syrup is one of the reasons Americans have
become morbidly obese over the years. And what was the response of the corn industry?
They said that we have been snacking more since the eighties. They took no responsibility.
To Zack, humans are a nightmare, and we deserve everything we do to ourselves. He goes
on to tell us a little more about himself. His father used to have a meth lab, which got busted
by the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). His father’s head was burned during the
raid, and he spent six weeks in the correctional facility’s hospital unit, where he recovered
slightly. Uncle Jay, a lawyer and Freon broker from Palo Alto, was able to post bail and get
him on a flight to California. However, Zack’s father contracted an infection on the flight, and
he died not long after. After Zack’s father had been buried, Uncle Jay sold half the farm and
bought Zack a corn harvesting machine, which Zack called Maizie. Since then, Uncle Jay
would send Zack a reasonable paycheck for staying away from meth and tending to his half
of the farm. Uncle Jay would often demand that Zack do a drug test to be sure he kept his
end of the deal. Zack had no problem doing this. He found it disgusting that the whole county
was baked on drugs all the time, clueless as dirt and morbidly obese.
So, on the day that Zack got stung by a bee, he was out in Maizie. This harvester was so
luxurious that it was air-conditioned and had no less than four plasma screens. On these,
Zack was watching 1) the NFL, 2) a Korean game show, 3) the DEA real-time satellite of his
farm, 4) a two-way satellite link to a man named Charles. Charles, an insomniac who works
in satellite TV media, pays Zack a hundred bucks an hour to watch him work nude in Maizie.
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