Search this: Douglas Coupland returns with a hilarious new novel that explores tech culture, Ronald McDonald, lesbian separatists, and the nightmare of being Googled.

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 fined 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. Visit www.advocate.com for outtakes.

You're an admitted technophobe who writes out his novels in longhand. What's your process for getting so deeply into the minds of people who work in technology and information systems?

The reason I did this book is because I reread Microserfs about 2 1/2 years ago. It was really funny, and I wanted to do a really funny book again. The way I did Microserfs was the way I did this one, which was to do Gorillas in the Mist anthropology. I got some companies to give me names of employees. And God knows, I have enough friends who work in the business. And then, two things: I come to your house and look around, and then I ask you to play the best game you can play and have you play it while giving running commentary while you're playing it. I don't play games; I'm just not very good at them, and I don't have a lot of them. A lot of it is like country-and-western music to me: It just goes over my head. It's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 when you get these people talking while they play--it's so entertaining. And that was my entry point, this running dialogue that people gave when they played.

You came out in The Advocate last year. Did it make the slightest bit of difference in your life?

I don't think so. The whole point of doing that was to show that I wasn't trying to hide anything. I've got people in my life who have asked me not to talk about them, so I don't because I want to keep them in my life. So that's pretty much why I am the way I am. But I don't want people thinking, Oh, he's concealing something.

So let's talk about you being in this book. What made you decide to go there?

I think it's a response to this new thing out there called your Google persona. There's the real me--I'm here, touching myself--and then there's this other me out there, which is me, but it isn't me. It's like truth and lies and half-truths and wishful thinking and nonsense and genuine facts and genuine facts out of context and real stuff. And it's going to last longer than I am; it's going to last forever. I don't think there's anyone in the culture who has figured out what the long-term ramifications are. So I think this is a creative way of handling it. I think it's just going to get freakier and weirder.