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About The Bug
Product Description The Bug is a mesmerizing first novel about a demonic, elusive computer bug and the havoc it wreaks on the lives of the people around it. This rare combination–a novel of ideas and a suspense–is a story about obsession and love that takes readers deep into both the personal and virtual life.In 1984, at the dawn of the personal-computer era, Roberta Walton, a novice software tester at a SiliconValley start-up, stumbles across a bug. She brings it to its inadvertent creator, Ethan Levin, a longtime programmer who is working at the limits of his knowledge and abilities. Both believe this is a bug like any other to be found and fixed and crossed off the list. But no matter how obsessively Ethan combs through the depths of the code, he can't find its cause. Roberta runs test after test but can't make the bug appear at will. Meanwhile, the bug, living up to its name, "The Jester," shows itself only at the least opportune times and jeopardizes the fate of the company. Under the pressures of his obsession with the bug and his rapidly deteriorating personal life, Ethan begins to unravel. Roberta, on the other hand, is drawn to the challenge. Forced to learn how to program, she comes to appreciate the intense intimacy of speaking the computer's language. As she did in Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman brilliantly limns the space between human beings and computers–a space we all occupy every day as we peer into our monitors. Ullman has been a computer programmer for more than twenty years, and having switched from code to prose, she has shown herself to be a unique, revelatory writer. She is the insider who can articulate the realities of the technical world, taking readers to emotional and intellectual places fiction has never brought them before. With The Bug, Ullman proves she is not only a remarkable essayist but also a master storyteller. 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
