The Bug
by Ellen Ullman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ellen UllmanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-07-13
ISBN: 1400032350
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The Bug
Book Review: Debugging Life
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the most impressive novels I've read in the last few years. It takes on issues of love, hate, ego and the much written about "human condition" and views them through what to most outsiders seems the most inhuman world of computer technology and software engineering. It takes the reader into the soul of the machine as only a few non-fiction works have previously done - "The Soul Of The New Machine" and Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" spring to mind - and weaves a very human story of love, betrayal and madness around and within it.
Ullman's writing is clean, precise and emotionally spot-on, her characters are all too real to anyone who has worked in the software industry. Ethan Levin, software engineer lost between the world of dbx, cc and his broken relationships with human beings, is finely drawn and involving. A flawed tragic character descending into a madness Shakespeare would have recognised instantly. Roberta the software tester and former linguist who becomes a programmer as Ethan decays in front of her is also tragic, lost and very human, if more capable than Ethan of introspection and thus survival.
The wisdom with popular science books is that for every equation they contain the readership is cut in half. I would have thought things would be at least as bad for a novel that contains C code... but not in this case. Ullman fits the technical explanations and some code into the text with admirable dexterity and clarity that anyone should be able to follow. It was a very brave course to take, it could easily have ended up as an indigestible geeky info dump, but she pulls it off extremley well.
Her ability to see the world and relationships through the eyes of men is quite spooky at times, particularly men caught up in the challenges, excitement and self-absorbtion that can be found in the world of code and debugging. She ties it all back to our essential humanity and analog vs digtal world views in a satisfying conclusion.
This is one hell of a book.
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