Player One
Author: Douglas Coupland
Release: October 7, 2010
Tagline: What Is to Become of Us
Publisher: Random House Hardbacks
Genre: Fiction
ISBN-10: 0434021040
ISBN-13: 978-0434021048
Main Character(s): Karen, Rick, Luke, Rachel, Player One
Synopsis: Five disparate people are trapped in an airport lounge during a global disaster: Karen, waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool blonde; and, finally, a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals their true selves as the world as they know it comes to an end.
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Reading Player One Post-Pandemic Challenges Its ‘New Normal’ Narrative
Quotes and Lines
Doug’s Law
“You can have information or you can have a life, but you can’t have both.”
Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events – a story – and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.
Goddam Internet. And his computer’s spell-check always forces him to capitalize the word “Internet.” Come on: World War Two earned its capitalization. The Internet just sucks human beings away from reality.
“The opposite of coincidence is entropy. Entropy is laziness. Entropy is energy being sucked away into nothingness. Entropy is the universe clocking fake hours on its time sheet. Entropy wants your car’s tires to go flat; it wants your cake to fall; it wants your software to crash. It wants bad things for you. So remember, stay halfway between coincidence and entropy and you’ll always be safe. Take my word for it, a day in which nothing bad happens is a miracle – it’s a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong failed to go wrong. A dull day is a triumph of the human spirit; boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.”
Work was never meant to be a person’s whole life, so why do so many of us believe it is?
Rick things, Nothing very, very good and nothing very, very bad ever lasts for very, very long.
Being different is hard, and being different in the New Normal is going to be harder still.
Individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation not evenly spread throughout the population, a mutation that poses a threat to those not possessing it, hence the ongoing war between religion and secularism.