For three semesters I did graduate work in computer science at the University of Maryland, so it was inevitable, perhaps unfortunately, that sooner or later I’d write a story with a computer as the main character. This is it.
In terms of action, this is probably the most complicated story I’ve ever written, even though most of the action is just electrons slipping to and fro. I was a little concerned that it might be too complicated, but it did sell, and to a good market.
I took the story to a writers’ conference in Baltimore—six or seven of us who met every few months to tear each other’s work apart—and didn’t expect any mercy, since we were fairly savage with one another (in a friendly way, oh yes), and it seemed to me that a story about a computer would be pretty vulnerable to sarcasm.
To my surprise, everyone liked it. I was so pleased that I got careless, and explained to them what the underlying structure of it was.
For the rest of the week, it was “Joe’s God-damned Boolean algebra story.”