There’s a sense in which it is pointless to review a Douglas Coupland novel. When casting about for some non-SF to read recently, I realised that I (a) couldn’t remember which Coupland novels I owned and (b) couldn’t remember which ones I’d read, because (c), they all blur into one.

Which is not to say that there is no pleasure in reading his books, just that he’s so zeitgeisty that every single iteration of his works bears the same relation to our contemporary culture. He’s always just ahead of the leading edge, surfing the wave of our so-called progress, reflecting it back at us with a parabolic mirror in a tight laser-like beam.

Read Microserfs and then read JPod. It almost seems like the same book, with the same set of characters, except somehow things have taken a much darker turn, like life. Coupland seems to like his characters to come in fives: each a collective hive mind which merges into one – like his books.

Clearly, Generation A is meant to make us think about Generation X. The annoying thing about Generation X was the way in which Coupland’s invisible post-boomer generation was overlooked (again) by the media in favour of a younger, more attractive demographic. In the media, “Generation X” came to stand for Bright Young Hipster Twentysomethings. Advertisers are interested in the under-25s, so that’s what the media went for. Generation X was about the neither-fish-nor-foul people whose cultural identity has been subsumed by the overwhelming numbers of the baby boom and by the inherent sexiness of those born more recently.

Coupland clearly wants to start again, beginning Generation A with an epigraph from Vonnegut, in which the X-stands-for-invisible is misinterpreted as X-stands-for-penultimate, implying that the Generations Y and Z that followed would be the last. In this construction, Generation X is an apocalyptic novel about the approaching end times. Generation A, taking its lead from Vonnegut, offers to wipe the slate clean, implying that endings can also be beginnings.

Generation A begins with this premise: all the bees are gone. The bee apocalypse is probably harder for people to get their heads round than the climate apocalypse. The idea that food crops won’t be pollenated is too scary to even contemplate. In a world without bees, apples become a mind-boggling luxury. It’s not just that we’d have to go without things, but that we’d have to live with the knowledge that it would be our fault: we killed the bees. That’s like waking up in the morning and realising you’re Hitler. I have trouble convincing students that the reason why so much of the world hates and resents the British is that for a couple of hundred years of colonial expansion, invasion, and imperialism, we were the bad guys. Our former colonies have a few hundred years to go before their future Monty Python equivalents can make jokes about “What the British did for us” without wanting to blow something up.

Generation A is narrated by five individuals from different parts of the globe, each of whom is stung by a (supposedly extinct) bee. The puzzle is to work out what happened and why. Why these people? In seeking the answer, we encounter a version of our society, the one we live in, with its instantaneous global village communications and Asian call centres and its tendency to want to solve problems with drugs.

One drug in particular, Solus, acts on the brain’s chemistry in ways which make its users feel okay about being alone. It creates a sense of pleasure in solitude, the kind you get when you’re all “peopled out” from all the clamour and noise, and want to spend some time on your own. With solus, you feel that way all the time. Happy to live a separate life, not hankering for human contact or love, not worrying about your children or parents. Solus creates the same sense of contentment in solitude that avid readers get when consuming a novel.

The point that Coupland makes is that we keep volunteering for this stuff. We voluntarily consume the products of intensive industrial agriculture – even if it means the bees are dying. Some of us volunteer to drive over-sized cars even though the oil is running out. A small percentage of us volunteer to do most of the air travel, which is supposed to be Bad For The Planet. But instead of stopping it, somehow, we defend its right to continue.

More disturbingly, we’re being socially engineered by our gadgets. Who hasn’t checked a text or taken a phone call from a distant person whilst in the presence of someone else? We value the distractions our gadgets bring us, interacting with our friends via electronic means. We stick earbuds in our ears and hope nobody sits next to us on the train. We drive our children to school instead of letting them walk or take the bus. We’re all becoming more and more addicted to Solus, and we can’t turn it off.

Generation A, like all Coupland books, is at times very funny, but it’s reflected beam of light-from-the-future is piercingly accurate. Recommended.