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: #731781 in Books
• Published on: 2004
• Released on: 2004-07-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .74" w x 5.19" l, .59 pounds
• 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