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| SFReader Author Page: Pete Flies
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This is the author's first published novel. Find out more about it at http://www.peteflies.com. Paperback: 244 pages Publisher: Stonegarden.Net Publishing (December 30, 2005) Language: English ISBN: 0976542684 Buy it at Amazon or Barnes & Noble!  Book Description
A high-tech satire, Memoirs of a Virus Programmer is the Candide of this century. Johnny Pepper dedicates his memoirs to his former girlfriend, Katya, to explain what drove him to become a virus programmer. As a software engineer at the illustrious Beamer Corporation, he begins his career with a naive disposition, assuming life will be nearly perfect. Eager to escape childhood poverty and to experience comfort, he forges his way into the office world with a blind and maddening optimism. The real world singes him time and again as he finds his world view impossible.
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | In this book, we meet Johnny Pepper. He works at the Beamer Corporation when the Internet and Stock Market are booming. He's dedicated to Katya, a girlfriend he met at a Missionary party. This book is his memoir, written for her. I really liked the style in which Pete Flies wrote this. The overly detailed story really makes you feel like a fly on the wall. I loved the satire and caught myself laughing out loud a few times when I wasn't sure if I was supposed to. I loved how topics that "shouldn't" be discussed were plainly written about in an in-your-face-style that, though grotesque at times, made this book so real. You really experience what Johnny is going through. The layoffs in his field, September 11, obnoxious office mates and a blowout with Katya along with other events all lead him to program the virus. The ending was fitting and oddly appropriate. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. |
| Delightfully Wicked, Enormously Entertaining. |  |  |  |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | Memoirs of a Virus Programmer by the promising new author Pete Flies, is a delightfully wicked and enormously entertaining peek into the world of competitive software engineering and the frustrations that predictably arise when personalities clash and egos become tediously overblown. With hysterically funny observations on the daily pressures and attempts of the protagonist Johnny Pepper to save face and survive the various stresses, it offers a unique glimpse into a world rarely documented in this particular fashion. If you are looking for something that will make you laugh, while recognizing the darker realities beyond the humor, this is the book for you. For anyone with a history in the Computer world, or just a person who enjoys delightfully raunchy humor, disguised within the civility of tight language, get this book. It aims to please, and it does, very effectively. Review by Therresa K. |
| A Tragic Comedy or a Comic Tragedy? | | | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | A thought-provoking story that has a great deal to say about the modern state of affairs, and miraculously manages to say without the cliches we've all become used to. It's essentially the story of a young man from a poor background, Johnny Pepper, who enters the world of middle-class suburbia with the notion that it will offer him everything he's ever wanted but ultimately finds nothing in his new life can give him a lasting sense of purpose, least of all his tedious occupation as a software debugger. His only source of hope is a girl named Katya, to whom he's addressing his memoirs, and when he loses her, he loses any reason to live. He then decides to crash his software company's system with a virus basically just because he can, and has nothing else to do and has found no vet for his talents.
What really makes this story special to me is the protagonist's motivation and character. He enters the story like a clean sponge waiting to absorb the ideas of whoever is around him. At a Christian party, all it takes is a few Jesus songs to convert him, but he abruptly rejects his new-found religion the minute he meets a girl named Katya who gives him a brief explanation of why he should. Johnny Pepper is like a child who's open to everything and eager to explore his new world.
The tragedy is that his new world turns out to be very lackluster and limited, making him more and more desperate to find a sense of purpose.
He even tries dedicating himself to earning money for an eccentric drifter, but even he won't let him be his friend. It's a very powerful moment in the story because all Johnny really wants is to have an affect on the drifter's life, to mean something to someone, but it turns out the drifter is as trapped in his monotonous routines as Johnny's corporate colleagues.
There are many other powerful scenes. One example is when Johnny's company gives all their employees a message following September 11 saying the best thing they can do for their country is to continue working. It's rather disturbing that a company would expect its workers to look to them for moral guidance in the aftermath of such a tragedy. What's really ironic about this scene, though, is that this is exactly how we have reacted to September 11 as a country. Instead of stopping to ask whether such a tragedy could have been prevented had we done things differently, we've continued with our same old routines as if nothing happened.
I think Johnny Pepper's motive or lack thereof is what really makes the story unique. He doesn't program the virus specifically because of an anti-corporate ideology or out of spite for his superiors. He's basically rebelling for the sake of rebelling because he has nothing else to do with his life. Johnny Pepper's transition from upbeat, dedicated employee to subversive delinquent is brilliantly done through the course of the novel. Even though Johnny Pepper is narrating the story, he never describes the changes in his attitude in too much detail. He seems alienated from himself as well as others; even he doesn't know why he's programming the virus, and never stops to ask himself if he's doing the right thing or not. At this point, we understand why Johnny Pepper's lost his ability to ask such questions because the story has been so successful at conveying his sense of ineffectuality up until now.
To me, Memoirs of a Virus Programmer is more than just a criticism of capitalist society. It says a great deal about human nature in general. I can't help but draw a parallel between Johnny's virus and the attack of September 11. Though the two acts are so far apart in scale of sheer viciousness, both are irrational acts that serve no purpose other than to cause harm. Intriguing...
Overall, this is one of those books that really has something to say and says it all without actually saying it. It's both provocative and funny as hell. I'd recommend it to everyone in the world, especially terrorists. Maybe if they get hooked on programming viruses, they'll stop trying to kill us.
-Review by Patrick K. |
| | A Self-destructive "Office Space" | | | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | An excellent look at the life of a programmer during the boom, bust, & war time corporate sink hole.
I could not stop from laughing out loud as the wide-eyed college grad moves into his first job with the "Beamer" Corporation. He then rides the rollorcoaster of emotions as he realizes his dream of engineering great software cannot be fulfilled in a cube in the maze of corporate machine, but could be in a virus.
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| The underground programmer | | | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | While Symantec and Norton spend large sums of money every year defusing viruses written by young programmers, and while the media vilifies the criminals as dark anomalies emanating from the technoculture, a subset of fiction and cinema has continued to celebrate the underground and find new ways in expressing the motives of virus writing pariahs.
In 1984, William Gibson's "Neuromancer" began the Cyberpunk genre, a movement that culminated with the Matrix in 1999, and continues on with this hilarious book of a different flavor, Memoirs of a Virus Programmer, that puts satire and psychology in the pit together to examine the motives of a young disgruntled employee and his attempts to spear an elephant-sized company, as the main character, named Johnny Pepper, sets his virus execution to run "one week before the end of the third fiscal quarter, which happened to be the perfect time for a Dow stock to take a dive and rattle Wall Street."
The events leading up to his psychological illness is a walk through modern suburbia, with misfortune striking Johnny Pepper in almost every chapter.
Pepper feels that he has been driven or forced to write a virus to find a way to be creative, making his motive subtly different from the typical attraction to writing viruses. The company's lack of ethics, layoffs, the corporate attitude, and the overcharging of customers for billable hours, all niggle Pepper, along with the pontificating office-mate who continually reads the news out loud. However, it is his own isolation and emotional instability that ultimately allow him to write the virus.
If what you rage against is only an entity on paper, then what is physical violence? A virus is a type of intellectual violence.
It is primarily a book about an era and an archetype, both of which are to date unexplored in fiction and satire. The character begins with absurd optimism, hoping for creativity in his career, but while he runs the gauntlet of modern life - from the suburbs, to the slums, to Christian revivalism, to the desperate housewife next door - his mood degrades into Dostoyevsky's nameless narrator from Notes from the Underground.
He describes the technical pieces of the virus in detail, including the methods used to lift a password off of his office-mate in order to log in as another user. He defends his goal by saying, "for the first time...my inflated title of 'software engineer' was applicable."
The ending of the book does not glorify the criminal act, as Pepper finds himself facing an ethical dilemma beyond his control. He comes of age in a harrowing manner, too late for his own redemption. But, on the other hand, he shows no pity for Symantec or Norton either. |
| A Sci-Fi Comedy in the New Economy. Combines Office Space with Fight Club | | | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | What would drive someone to create a computer virus? In "Memoirs of a Virus Programmer," the answer is love and madness. A young programmer named Johnny Pepper begins his career with absurd optimism and gradually transforms into an isolated criminal.
The short chapters in "Memoirs of a Virus Programmer" are stuffed with humor. The pace quickens as Pepper struggles against a love-hate relationship with technology. The setting is Minneapolis in the year 2000. Fans of Office Space and Fight Club will be a target audience, and it has been described as "a science fiction comedy."
The naive Pepper is surrounded by modern character archetypes. From his faceless project manager, to his pontificating cube-mate, to the desperate housewife next door, he stumbles his way through a fictional memoir, making mud of his ideals, and capturing the apoplectic dot-com era and contemporary Christian revival. The tone and pace of the novel is upbeat: "My manager spoke in a genial manner, and as he spoke, his brushy moustache bounced over his upper lip like a little floor broom at work."
Pepper dates a woman named Katya, a former pharmaceutical saleswoman-cum-anarchist who despises corporations. When Katya ends the relationship, Pepper becomes consumed with his programming: "I looked for my viral insertion point. I opened and closed many files as I searched for something perfectly obtuse, a file that no one really understood or cared about any more."
Themes include connected isolation, culture loss, technophilia/phobia, information overload, and lack of community.
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| Office Pleasantries, Christian Zealotry - "this job fits like a bad hairpiece" | | | |
| Monday, 29 May 2006 | From daily life's minutiae, to the highly technical world of the computer programmer as the internet took off and the stock market boomed, Pete Flies' "Memoirs of a Virus Programmer" covers relationships and love, and good-natured though entirely nutty Christian revivalism, as main character Johnny Pepper's youthful ambition turns to depression, alienation, and worse.
Johnny and his manager (whose "brushy moustache bounced over his upper lip like a little floor broom" so that if Johnny "tipped the manager upside down and held is legs like wheelbarrow handles, his moustache might clean anything from linoleum to hardwood") bond over Midwest football rivalries and exchange office pleasantries. When the pleasantries run out, they listen to the overhead lights' whir, a sound like the one "that might be found at the end of the universe, after infinity, in the white space."
Having secured a job at which he gets paid a lot for initially doing nothing, Johnny moves with his roommate, Jamie, into an upscale neighborhood (Jamie wants to avoid "the slum," where the bars are, and tattoo parlors, and "`crime in general,' meaning black people"). Jamie tricks Johnny into going to a Christian missionary-like gathering where Johnny, soon drunk and uninterested in being preached to, hoots along with the Christian songs being sung, and then keeps to the kitchen, where the beer is. In the kitchen he meets Katya, and they spend the night laughing and drinking the good-natured-though-silly folks' alcohol. When their good nature runs out, Johnny and Katya are "banished" from the missionary house forever. They leave together, and Johnny falls in love.
It should, but it doesn't last, and Johnny faces an unenviable end.
Flies captures the ordinary concerns that everyone has but almost no one mentions, like the "bathroom culture" at the Beamer Corporation: "We all sat in silence, praying that somebody flushed, or turned on a faucet, or dried his hands - anything to make a noise so we could grab our next piece of toilet paper." When someone accidentally violated this norm, it "disgusted and at the same time elated us all, as if yelling, `At last!'"
Flies' "Memories of a Virus Programmer" is a great read. Review by K.A.
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