Part of the Twenty Books in Twenty Days series.
I have previously joked that if you could somehow combine Neal Stephenson and Douglas Coupland, you’d end up with a dense, well-researched, character driven story.
Over the years, Stephenson has got better at writing people and Coupland has added more plot. Just as I argue that Snow Crash was the sweet spot for Stephenson, I think that Microserfs is for Coupland. (Don’t @ me. That’s an opinion, not an objective truth.)
Microserfs [affiliate link] tells the story of some friends working for Microsoft, trying to figure out the corporate culture and life in general. It’s set in the nineties, when Microsoft was ascendent, but it still seems pretty relevant.
As hinted at in the first paragraph, it’s very much character driven, with the technology just the background. But the characters are so well written, rounded and believable that it’s no bad thing.