Douglas Coupland, one of the world's biggest cultural brains, takes an inside look at the global company that keeps us connected, and wonders what all that connectivity is doing to our brains and our sense of ourselves as humans.

The incomparable Douglas Coupland reports from inside the corporate offices and science labs of Alcatel-Lucent, a globally influential business whose work is largely unknown to consumers. "Were it to vanish tomorrow," he writes, "our modern world would grind to a halt. The Internet would implode—your Internet would implode." Although his examination of the company is playful and fascinating in its own right, Coupland's account is driven by his thoughtful reflections on the larger cultural and sociological significance of the transformative information technology Alcatel works on: fiber wire, microprocessors, the Internet and mobile technologies. And by a larger meditation about what the Internet is doing to us as it relentlessly colonizes the planet—and our brains.

Like Coupland's best work, Kitten Clone is a wildly entertaining yet penetrating encounter with the technological and cultural forces that surround us. And also a surprising and unique exploration of a possible future.

"

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Germany and raised in Vancouver, where he still resides. Among his best-selling novels are Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Polaroids From The Dead, Microserfs, Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus! and Eleanor Rigby, altogether in print in some 40 countries. Coupland also exhibits his sculpture in galleries around the world, indulging in design experiments that include everything from launching collections of furniture to futurological consulting for Stephen Spielberg.

"

Douglas Coupland's profile page

• Short-listed, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize

"Douglas Coupland is a clever and resourceful writer. . . . He makes a persuasive case that technological advancement has had profound and transformative effects on human biology and neurochemistry. Part travelogue . . . [and] part stand-up comedy routine, Kitten Clone is ultimately about our insatiable need for information and the elaborate systems we've designed to feed it—and whether, in a Kubrickian twist, we've served ourselves up on a platter to our own creations." —Quill & Quire

"Coupland's tangents flow with the ease of a mindless mouse click, only to be slapped central with the author's yearning for focus. It's a calculated cry for clarity, and all very much intended: Couplamd at once investigates the state of our internet-addicted collective conscious and that digital undertow that could slowly consume its users." —New Orleans Review