2010 CBC Massey Lectures: Player One: What is to Become of Us. by Douglas Coupland

Presented by CBC Radio in partnership with the Chan Centre

CBC is proud to present the 2010 Massey Lectures, by celebrated Canadian author and artist, Douglas Coupland. A cultural commentator with international impact, Coupland presents this year’s lectures in the form of a novel, Player One. What is to Become of Us.

Coupland’s lecture explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, macroeconomics and the afterlife.

The novel and lecture together present a story set over five hours in an airport lounge which asks; at what point do humans stop being humans and become something else? Where, if anywhere, do modernity and classical theology overlap? What is time? What is the human essence? And how does storytelling fit into all of this?

Karen, Rick, Luke and Rachel are four people marooned in an airport lounge sometime in the very near future. The price of oil goes through the roof, and a kind of apocalypse takes over the world- or at least the world that they can see through the windows of the bar and on the crackling, intermittent news reports. Thick ash falls from the sky. The taps are dry. Cellphones don’t work. Sealed in, the four can only talk to each other, examine their lives and the meaning of love, and try to confront their own demons. There is no turning back, they realize.