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

In 1984, Roberta Watson, a quality assurance tester with a computer start-up company, and Ethan Levin, a computer programmer, try to find the bug which is infecting their company's new software before it ruins the company and their lives.

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

Volume 4 (Essays on Writing and Editing Fiction)

Story Behind the Book

The award-winning writer returns with a major, absorbing, atmospheric novel that takes on the most dramatic and profoundly personal subject matter San Francisco in the 1970s. Free love has given way to radical feminism, psychedelic ecstasy to hard-edged gloom. The Zodiac Killer stalks the streets. A disgraced professor takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. But the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door—his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to hear about the patient's troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family, and her quest to track down her birth mother. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient's recounting of her dramas—and the most profound questions of her own identity—the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient's questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II. But confronted with this new self— "I have no idea what it means to say ‘I'm a Jew'"—the patient finds her search stalled. Armed with the few details he's gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient's mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can't let on that he's been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news, and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret, fraught, triangular relationship: himself, the patient, and her therapist, who is herself German. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program. With ferocious intelligence and an enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman weaves a dark and brilliant, intensely personal novel that feels as big and timeless as it is sharp and timely. It is an ambitious work that establishes her as a major writer.

Ellen Ullman

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