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Home > Fiction and Literature Books > Fiction: general and literary > MODERN & contemporary fiction > The Bug
The Bug

The Bug


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About the Book

"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 toemotional 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 the Hardcover edition."



Review :
"Ellen Ullman, English major turned computer programmer, writes with humor and aplomb...Ullman takes her liberal arts sensibility and opens a fascinating window onto the culture of people obsessed with Activex controls, device drivers, and C++."
--"Newsweek
""For someone sitting so close to the machine, Ellen Ullman possesses a remarkably wide-angle perspective on the technology culture she inhabits.... It's a ride we're all on, though most of us sit passively at the wheel; Ullman brings into sharp focus the blurry landscape whizzing by."
"--Village Voice
""Ellen Ullman gives her extraordinarily realistic insider's perspective missing from the pundits who write about it secondhand. And male coders writing about their culture might not remember to include the life part."
--Stewart Brand
"Hundreds of books purport to tell us what the computer revolution really means, but none hold a candle to Ellen Ullman's astonishing novelistic memoir, "Close to the Machine.""
--Patricia Holt, "San Francisco Chronicle
""Ellen Ullman writes unsparingly of the vivid, compelling, emotionally riven 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"
"
"

"From the Hardcover edition."


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9780385510905
  • Publisher: Nan A. Talese
  • Publisher Imprint: Nan A. Talese
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 038551090X
  • Publisher Date: 06 May 2003
  • Binding: Digital (delivered electronically)


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