BKHARLIE.RVW 931222 Ballantine Books 101 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 or Bantam Doubleday Dell 666 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10103 "When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One", Gerrold, 1972/1988 HARLIE is not a virus. He/it is an experiment in artificial intelligence. For the purposes of the book the experiment is a success and HARLIE is alive: is a person. The plot revolves (slowly) around the efforts of corporate management to kill the project (and HARLIE) and the efforts of the computer (program) and its creators to stave this off. As in most of Gerrold's books, the plot is primarily there to set up dialogues in which he can expound his philosophies. (The most blatant example of this is in "A Rage for Revenge" most of which takes place in a seminar, the largest chunk of which is devoted to an illustration of the standard five-stage model of grieving.) In both versions, the "virus" is a mere diversion. It has nothing to do with the story at all, and is a discussion point between two characters, never referred to again. Indeed, in the first version it is introduced as a science fiction story, "but the thing had been around a long time before that." Make of this latter statement what you will. My resident science fiction expert can't think of what the prior story might be and ventures that this might be Asimovian self-citation. Statements have been made that the virus aspect was downplayed in the second version. This is rather ironic. The virus story gets roughly the same amount of ink in both versions, but the early one is definitely superior. HARLIE72 gives a fairly simple and straightforward account of a self-propagating program. In fact, aside from the dependence upon dial-up links, the parallels between the HARLIE72 virus and the actual CHRISTMA infestation fifteen years later are uncanny. Specifics include the use of an information source for valid contacts, and a mutation which loses the self-deletion characteristic. The HARLIE88 discussion is much more convoluted, bringing in malaria, spores, phages and parasites. The are even two separate invocations of the worm, one lower case and one capitalized, both with different definitions. (One refers to a logic bomb, and the other to a virus directed at a specific target. Neither definition is so used by anyone else.) The end result is a completely iconoclastic set of terminology bearing almost no relation to anything seen in real life. To further the irony, HARLIE88 could have been viral. HARLIE72 could not: part of the system was advanced hardware which did not exist in other computers. Therefore, while HARLIE72 had the ability to program other computers, such programming could never have resulted in a reproduction without the additional hardware. HARLIE88, however, was software only. To be sure, the environment included "2k channel, multi-gated, soft-lased, hyper-state" processors, roughly a million times more powerful than the home user's "Mac- 9000", but still, as one character has it, just chips. HARLIE88 *could* survive, albeit running more slowly, on other computers. However, while one character realizes that HARLIE could be "infectious" the discussion dies out without realizing that the primary tension of the story has just been eliminated. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKHARLIE.RVW 931222 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag