ghastly. If I had still been spiritual, I would have seen it as evidence that God is a malignant thug.
By the end of that last year, I felt so beaten up and so beaten down, so alone in the moment, so abandoned and confused about everything, that I felt I had lost purpose. I felt I had nothing left. I wasnât all that nice a person to be around. Ask those who were there.
What I did have was an empty little apartment, a desk, a typewriter, a ream of paper, and yes . . . finally, something to write about: the question that HARLIE had so casually asked before my life blew up in my face.
What does it mean to be human?
So I sat and I typed. I had long conversations myselfâwith HARLIE. We looked at the big question and all the little questions that attached to it like barnacles. We held all the questions up to the light and took them apart, piece by piece. I sat. I typed. I hammered away, one sentence at a time.
Every time I stopped to read what I wrote, I realized there was more to say. More sitting, more typing. Pages passed through the typewriter five times, ten times, sometimes more. All that editing, all that rewritingâit was like having multiple conversations with myself, a changing self, one that was being revised by the processes of time and story.
Sitting and chatting with HARLIE was my own personal turnaround. No, please donât call it therapy. It wasnât. Those chats were about creating a more informed conversation about life, thatâs all. They grew into four expository stories, enough to become a complete novel. In the process, I also learned to examine every sentence carefully to make sure it actually communicated a clear thought and didnât just use up words. I started learning to pay attention to what I was really saying.
Iâm not so arrogant as to assume that I answered any questions in the process, but Iâm pretty sure that I asked some very useful ones, and they were certainly questions that I needed to look at for myself. So the act of inquiry became a worthwhile journey regardless of the ultimate destination.
When I was done, I knew I had written something very unlike any other science fiction book Iâd ever read. I had either written a very good book or a very embarrassing book. 1 With a great deal of fear and trembling, I sent the manuscript off to Betty Ballantine. She decided it was a very good book and published When HARLIE Was One in 1972.
It was my first novel, even though it wasnât the first one published. It received some very nice reviews and went on to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awardsâthe first time a first novel was ever so honored. (Isaac Asimov eventually won both awards for The Gods Themselves.) But the best compliment was from Robert Silverberg, who had two excellent novels of his own on the ballot. He asked me to warn him the next time I was planning to write a book that good, so he wouldnât have to compete.
When HARLIE Was One is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry.
I first heard the idea of a computer program called a VIRUS (and the corresponding VACCINE software) in the late summer of 1968. A programmer shared it as a joke. I thought it was a funny and fascinating notion and incorporated it into the next HARLIE story, even postulating that it could be used as a means for extracting data illegally and moving it around to other machines. It made for an interesting plot device.
When I wrote that bit, I thought it was merely speculation about what computers might someday be able to do. I had no idea that all sorts of malware variants, worms and trojans and virii would someday become a global epidemic, let alone a whole industry of malicious criminal schemes. To this day, I still do not understand why anyone would write malicious software, especially when there are so many more interesting and exciting things to do with a
By the end of that last year, I felt so beaten up and so beaten down, so alone in the moment, so abandoned and confused about everything, that I felt I had lost purpose. I felt I had nothing left. I wasnât all that nice a person to be around. Ask those who were there.
What I did have was an empty little apartment, a desk, a typewriter, a ream of paper, and yes . . . finally, something to write about: the question that HARLIE had so casually asked before my life blew up in my face.
What does it mean to be human?
So I sat and I typed. I had long conversations myselfâwith HARLIE. We looked at the big question and all the little questions that attached to it like barnacles. We held all the questions up to the light and took them apart, piece by piece. I sat. I typed. I hammered away, one sentence at a time.
Every time I stopped to read what I wrote, I realized there was more to say. More sitting, more typing. Pages passed through the typewriter five times, ten times, sometimes more. All that editing, all that rewritingâit was like having multiple conversations with myself, a changing self, one that was being revised by the processes of time and story.
Sitting and chatting with HARLIE was my own personal turnaround. No, please donât call it therapy. It wasnât. Those chats were about creating a more informed conversation about life, thatâs all. They grew into four expository stories, enough to become a complete novel. In the process, I also learned to examine every sentence carefully to make sure it actually communicated a clear thought and didnât just use up words. I started learning to pay attention to what I was really saying.
Iâm not so arrogant as to assume that I answered any questions in the process, but Iâm pretty sure that I asked some very useful ones, and they were certainly questions that I needed to look at for myself. So the act of inquiry became a worthwhile journey regardless of the ultimate destination.
When I was done, I knew I had written something very unlike any other science fiction book Iâd ever read. I had either written a very good book or a very embarrassing book. 1 With a great deal of fear and trembling, I sent the manuscript off to Betty Ballantine. She decided it was a very good book and published When HARLIE Was One in 1972.
It was my first novel, even though it wasnât the first one published. It received some very nice reviews and went on to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awardsâthe first time a first novel was ever so honored. (Isaac Asimov eventually won both awards for The Gods Themselves.) But the best compliment was from Robert Silverberg, who had two excellent novels of his own on the ballot. He asked me to warn him the next time I was planning to write a book that good, so he wouldnât have to compete.
When HARLIE Was One is also the novel that introduced the concept of the computer virus to popular thought. For that I am profoundly sorry.
I first heard the idea of a computer program called a VIRUS (and the corresponding VACCINE software) in the late summer of 1968. A programmer shared it as a joke. I thought it was a funny and fascinating notion and incorporated it into the next HARLIE story, even postulating that it could be used as a means for extracting data illegally and moving it around to other machines. It made for an interesting plot device.
When I wrote that bit, I thought it was merely speculation about what computers might someday be able to do. I had no idea that all sorts of malware variants, worms and trojans and virii would someday become a global epidemic, let alone a whole industry of malicious criminal schemes. To this day, I still do not understand why anyone would write malicious software, especially when there are so many more interesting and exciting things to do with a
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