Product Description

In 1984, at the dawn of the personal-computer era, novice software tester Roberta Walton stumbles across a bug. She brings it to its inadvertent creator, longtime programmer Ethan Levin, and the two embark on a hunt for the elusive bug, nicknamed “The Jester” for its tendency to appear randomly and only at the least opportune moments, jeopardizing the fate of the company. Ethan’s attempts to find a solution soon become a frightening obsession that threatens to destroy both his professional and personal life. Roberta, on the other hand, is drawn to the challenge. Forced to learn how to program, and seeking refuge from her own private troubles, she becomes enthralled with learning to speak the computer’s language. Expertly merging code with prose, big ideas with intensely personal stories, Ellen Ullman brilliantly illuminates the space between human beings and computers—a space we occupy every day as we peer into our monitors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386439 in Books
• Released on: 2004-07-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Essayist, memoirist (Close to the Machine) and computer industry pioneer Ullman has now produced an illuminating novel about the fate of a programmer, Ethan Levin, who wrestles with an ineradicable bug in the heroic era of computing. It is 1984, and Telligentsia is an information technology startup engaged in creating a database and an interface to access it. While such a project is ho-hum now, at the time screen graphics were a novelty and the mouse was a puzzling and esoteric artifact. The story is narrated by Roberta Walton from the perspective of 2000, remembering her first IT job as a quality-checker for Telligentsia, which she takes after a failed bid for an academic job in linguistics. Berta finds Ethan's bug, UI-1017, but there's a catch: it appears and disappears erratically, so she can't get a "core dump"-a picture of the part of the code where the bug resides. Ethan must do the debugging, but he's in no shape to face the problem. Insecure about his job because he doesn't have an advanced computer science degree, he codes far into the night, driving his neglected girlfriend, Joanna, into the arms of a weedy hippie. Everybody at Telligentsia secretly feels at sea, but for Ethan the uncertainty starts to have deep psychological effects. As Berta comes to realize, Ethan's ever more alarming quirks are correlatives of the deeper collective madness of Telligentsia's impossible schedules and uncertain innovations. As she proved she could in Close to the Machine, Ullman brings to the programmer mindset, in numerous finely wrought asides, a combination of poetic and philosophical sensibilities that plumb the abstruse depths of technological creation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ethan Levin, programmer at a database start-up in the mid 1980s, has a serious bug to find, one that freezes the whole program. However, the elusive bug cannot be reliably reproduced; it seems to rear its ugly head only during high-stakes demonstrations for venture capitalists and prospective clients. As the bug continues to elude Levin and Roberta, the software tester, the idea that it has a life of its own seems less and less a joke (even to fellow employees), and more believable. While this novel can be enjoyed for its humor (albeit in a wry and dark sort of way), there is undoubtedly deeper meaning behind the individual trials of Levin and Roberta. Ullman's poetic and philosophical inclination shine through a story that is, on the surface, about technology. However, readers may gain a closer understanding of the way people interact with technology, the way small things can have huge ripple effects that profoundly affect people's lives, the way life itself reveals its meaning. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Thrilling and intellectually fierce. . . . The novel of ideas is alive and well.”—The New York Times Review of Books

“Takes the techno-novel to a new level of literary excellence. . . . Ullman resembles Kafka in the way she writes so vividly and clearly about states of paranoid anxiety. . . . This is magnetic fiction.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Ardent, brilliantly tactile. . . . Offers endless systems twists and turns. Technophiles can revel in its UNIX complexities while the rest of us delight in its user-friendly explanations, but the moral conundra The Bug poses are far more rewarding, and discomfiting.”—Newsday

“Extraordinary. . . . This fascinating tale leaves the reader wondering about the line between science and art, analysis and feeling. . . . Perfect for our time.”—USA Today

“No one writes more eloquently than Ullman about the peculiar mind-set of the people who create the digital tools we use every day. . . A thriller-like tale of hubris and self-destruction that never stoops to cheap tricks. . . . At stake is not just the program, but the fragile belief that we can master ourselves and our fates.” –Laura Miller, Salon

“Suspenseful. . . Think Mary Shelley in the Silicon Valley.” –Elle

“A fascinating literary study of an often-misunderstood culture.” –Chicago Tribune

“A blistering novel about love, hate, and psychopathy. . . At its best, [it] finds in computers the same eerie allure that DeLillo’s White Noise found in televisions.”–Kirkus Reviews

“Illuminating. . . . a combination of poetic and philosophical sensibilities that plumb the abstruse depths of technological creation.” –Publishers Weekly

“Ullman is a rarity, a software engineer who is also a wonderful writer.” –New Scientist

“The Bug should be read by every software developer–and every end user who has ever experienced a software crash–if only to know that they're not alone in their endless fight against the almost-alive malignancies hiding in code.” –IEEE Spectrum

“Ullman is dead-on in her depiction[s]. . . . A deeply humanistic and surprisingly old-fashioned work.” –Library Journal

“Ullman writes unsparingly of the vivid, compelling, emotionally driven souls who gave us our new machines. By turns love story, tense psychological drama, and comedy of (very bad) manners, The Bug is an edgy and irresistible journey into lives all too rarely visited by literary types.”–Geraldine Brooks, author of A Year of Wonders

Customer Reviews

boring book.
The basic storyline of The Bug has potential, but Ullman does not do a good job making the storyline interesting. Many connections are never quite made, and her character's connection to the story is kind of lame. From a litereary viewpoint the book just isnt very good.

If you are interested in programming, all of the programming talk will probably be interesting, but the basic storyline is very lacking. the ending is also pretty lame. all in all, i wouldn't recommend this book unless you're interested in programmning, and even then its a little bit of a snore. sorry ms. ullman.

This Bug is Good
The Bug. Kind of an odd title for a novel--what is novelist Ellen Ullman referring to? Is it the bug that has invaded a computer program designed by protagonist Ethan Levin in the mid-1980s, or is it also something less obvious, a deeper bug in Ethan's life. Ethan is pretty much all work, no play, and he has the disintegrating life--love life, friendships--to prove it. The program he has designed has a bug in it, a bug discovered by software tester Roberta Walton. Ethan spends much of the novel tracking the bug down, and helped, at times, by Roberta. The narrative moves forward on two paths--Roberta tells her side of the story from her 2000 vantage point, while an omniscient narrator fills us in on Ethan's disintegrating life. This is a well written story--the plot isn't all that clever or unique, but neither is it predictable. There is much in here of computer codes--but that shouldn't turn the computer neophyte off. I am sure much of that went over my head, but don't think that affected my enjoyment of the novel. The Bug is an entertaining, quick read.

The Human Side of the Technology Equation
Ellen Ullman has once again written a book intertwining the technical, emotional, personal and professional sides of computer programmers' lives. In this book, which is her first novel, a programmer at a startup in the 1980's chases a flakey bug. That bug ultimately proves to be a maddening obsession for him, taking a toll on his professional and personal life.

On the plus side, this book was an easy read; Ullman is a fluid, entertaining writer, and can explain the technical details with a poet's perspective. She realistically describes the typical life of a programmer -- the meetings, swarms of elusive bugs, demanding schedules, the thrills of working on cutting-edge projects, the quirky humor of programmers, and so on. Interspersed with the action are philosophical musings about computer technology, "real" life, and the parallels between the two. Furthermore, as she did so well in "Close to the Machine," Ullman is able to describe the supremely logical world of software development and draw us into it to make us sense and understand the source of programmer's excitement and frustration. Like Ullman herself, the novel's narrator was not a computer programmer at first, but drifted into it. The result is a fresh, lively, fluid description of computer technology that a pure, "hard-core" techie probably couldn't capture.

On the minus side, the novel had just a few drawbacks. First, the ultimate outcome for the main character was slightly disappointing for me (I won't reveal the conclusion here, though I will say I could think of a slightly better ending). Second, others have complained that the bug turned out to be too simple once it was found; however, I think that the complexity (or lack thereof) of the bug is besides the point of the novel, since its elusive nature is what drives the novel and characters forward. Third, Ullman tries to make the novel have two main characters -- Roberta, a software tester whose narration dominates the beginning and end of the novel, and Ethan, the programmer whose actions dominate the middle of the novel. The shifts between these two voices are mildly disorienting, and having a single character narrating the entire story would have been slightly better.

Overall, though, I believe the plusses outweigh the minuses, and I'd recommend this novel to any budding computer programmer, or anyone interested in software or technology. If you enjoyed other books in this vein -- "The Soul of a New Machine" or "Microserfs" or Ullman's previous book, "Close to the Machine" -- then you'll enjoy this one. Despite the technical subject matter, this novel is ultimately more about the characters than it is about the technology, so I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in the human side of the technology equation.