Ellen Ullman

The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution. Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology’s loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn’t. Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years—and the next twenty.

A Personal History of Technology

Life in Code

Ullman tries to balance her life, "close to the machine" as a computer programmer with the social and philosophical repercussions of her work.

Technophilia and Its Discontents

Close to the Machine

Taking a downtown office to plot his comeback in tumultuous 1970s San Francisco, a disgraced professor eavesdrops on a woman's therapy sessions and becomes enraptured by her struggles with identity and ongoing search for her war-torn Jewish-German birth family. By the award-winning author of The Bug. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel

By Blood

In 1984, at a start-up company in Silicon Valley, Roberta Walton, a novice software tester, discovers a bug that she brings to the attention of programmer Ethan Levin, who, obsessed with eliminating the bug, begins to unravel, while Roberta is drawn to the challenge of working with the computer, in a novel about the sometimes uneasy relationship between humans and computers. A first novel. Reprint.

The Bug

Helene Wecker

James Robertson

Lynn Shepherd

Andrew Taylor

Pietro Grossi

Alex Bledsoe

Felix Palma

"Story Behind the Book: Volume 4" collects nearly 40 essays about writing and editing fiction from some of the most talented authors working today. These essays reveal intricacies and secrets behind the craft and offer a unique and unprecedented insight into the creative process. Includes following "Story Behind the Book" essays: "The Professor of Truth" by James Robertson "The Bug" by Ellen Ullman "The Golem and the Jinni" by Helene Wecker "The Center of the World" by Thomas Van Essen "Enchantment" by Pietro Grossi "The Delphi Room" by Melia McClure "A Fatal Likeness" by Lynn Shepherd "The Scent of Death" by Andrew Taylor "The Map of the Sky" by Felix J. Palma "Murder by the Book" by Eric Brown "This Strange Way of Dying" by Silvia Moreno Garcia "The Broken Ones" by Stephen M. Irwin "The 'Geisters" by David Nickle "Blackwater Lights" by Michael Hughes "Cain's Blood" by Geoffrey Girard "Rivers" by Michael Farris Smith "Your Brother's Blood" by David Towsey "Strange Mammals" by Jason Erik Lundberg "The Carpet Makers" by Andreas Eschbach "The Ravenglass Eye" by Tom Fletcher "The One-Eyed Man" by L. E. Modesitt Jr. "Copperhead" by Tina Connolly "The Tide King" by Jen Michalski "Gallow" by Nathan Hawke "Elysian Fields" by Suzanne Johnson "Theirs Not to Reason Why" by Jean Johnson "Aliens: Recent Encounters" by Alex Dally MacFarlane "Clockwork Fairy Tales" by Stephen L. Antczak "23 Years on Fire" by Joel Shepherd "The Shifted World" by Philippa Ballantine "Bang Bang" by Patrick Malloy "Gods of Earth" by Craig DeLancey "Wisp of a Thing" by Alex Bledsoe "Dream London" by Tony Ballantyne "Persistence of Memory" by Winona Kent "Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure" by Kathryn Allan "King Breaker" by Rowena Cory Daniells "Gideon Smith & the Mechanical Girl" by David Barnett

Ellen Ullman

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