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Galatea 2.2

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After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2 — Richard Powers — returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.

329 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

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About the author

Richard Powers

346 books4,692 followers
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His most recent book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

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Profile Image for Glenn Russell.
1,421 reviews12.3k followers
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March 12, 2022



Galatea 2.2 is a brilliant novel by brainy Richard Powers that's an update on the classical Pygmalion tale of bringing a man-made work alive - in Ovid, a sculptor animates his beautiful female statue; in this novel, main character Richard Powers (modeled very much after the author himself) and his fellow researcher and cognitive neuroscience genius, a fifty-something gent by the name of Philip Lentz, design and instruct Helen, a neural net, to emulate human thought and speech.

Author Richard Powers is a seasoned veteran at writing long, erudite, intellectual novels - prior to Galatea 2.2 published in 1995, he counted four doorstop novels to his credit, most notably The Gold Bug Variations which interlaces the discovery of the chemistry behind DNA with Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations played on harpsichord. And just for good measure, as an added conceptual layer, our author from America's Midwest throws in references to Edgar Allan Poe's tale, The Gold Bug. I bet Mary Higgins Clark or James Patterson never thought of writing such a novel.

Just in case you think Galatea 2.2 sounds like nothing but the heady stuff, let me quickly point out narrator Richard Powers (again, so much like the author) includes additional storylines: his recent breakup and past years with his flame, a gal he calls C.; his past relationship with his now dead father; friendship with his past mentor, Professor Taylor, who persuaded him back when he was an undergrad to switch from physics to literature; his current time at U (University of Illinois) where he deals not only with Lentz but also comes in contact with other academic types, two delightful youngish ladies in particular; and last but hardly least, the ongoing saga of his life as a novelist and lover of literature.

The opening pages set the stage: On the strength of having past affiliation with the university (undergrad, grad student, English instructor) and having published well received literary novels, Richard Powers, age thirty-five, is granted a year's appointment, official title "Visitor," at the massive Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences at U. (RP has this thing about calling people, cities and schools by their first initial). Richard takes up residence solo since he has had his breakup with C. and pedals on a second-hand bike to his office at the center where he spends hours and hours not writing his next novel (he's in a bit of a writing funk at the moment) but exploring that newest of technological marvels (it's early 1990s), the internet.

It isn't long before Richard rubs elbows with a group of researchers at the local watering hole and is asked to join computer wiz Philip Lenz who is challenged by his PhD buddies to develop a computer program in ten months capable of displaying reading comprehension enough to surpass your average human grad student on the English Department's Master's Comprehensive Exam. Not exactly brimming over with literary inspiration at the moment, Richard agrees to team up with Lentz.

Now the fun (or, at least, the high-grade thinking) begins both for Richard and for the reader since not only does exploring the domain where concepts, literacy and literature interface with computer technology provide Richard with a wide platform to delve into his background and understanding of such specialties as cognitive neuroscience, computer programing and language (both human and computer simulated), but he has ongoing interactions with wizmaster Lentz.

Ah, Philip Lentz. The ultimate bald, overweight, oddball, multiple PhD egghead nerd wearing his coke bottle glasses and spouting out platitudes and judgments on every conceivable field, from neurology, networks and computer engineering to linguistics, literature and music. Occasionally bordering on mellow but usually acerbic, sarcastic, cutting, stinging, sardonic, ironic or some combination of the above, by this reviewer's reckoning, in addition to Richard, Philip Lentz is the human star of this Galatea 2.2 show.

Here's Richard mulling over Lentz's radical brainchild: Connectionism: "The new field's heat generated its inevitable controversy. I sensed a defensive tone to many of Lentz's publications. Both the neural physiologists and the algorithmic formalists scoffed at connectionism. Granted, neural networks performed slick behaviors. But these were tricks, the opposition said. Novelties. Fancy pattern recognition. Simulacra without any legitimate, neurological analog. Whatever nets produced, it wasn't thought. Not even close, talk not of the cigar."

The above quote also serves as an example of Richard Powers' brain power (both author and main character). And when Richard interacts with Helen, the synapses in the gray matter really start to fire off.

Oh, yes, Richard and Helen make quite the pair. We watch as Richard brings Helen to life at first as a computer program and then something either approaching or replicating a fully human mind, not to mention conscious awareness (I wouldn't want to say anything more specific so as to spoil).

Recall back there I listed several other storylines such as Richard's relationship with C., his father, his mentor and his being a novelist. The powerful, heartfelt emotions Richard experiences in these other non-technical dimensions of his past and present exert their influence on his dealing with Helen. And his speaking and listening to Helen (Lentz rigs the technology where Richard and only Richard can carry on 2001 Space Odyssey HAL-like conversations with Helen), in turn, play their part in Richard's sorting out his life, a feedback loop running from head to heart, from heart to head.

In the end, Galatea 2.2 is a deeply moving story, one where emotions and feelings meet thinking and reflection, mostly for Richard but also, curiously enough, for that oddest of oddballs, Philip Lentz. And a piece of good news: even for non-science, non-computer types such as myself, this Richard Powers novel is accessible, making for an enjoyable, compelling read. What an accomplishment from one super-smart author.

And Richard's numerous metaphors and turn of phrase sparkle, as per:

"I had nothing left in me but the autobiography I'd refused from the start even to think about. My life threatened to grow as useless as a three-month-old computer magazine."

"The maze performed as one immense, incalculable net. It only felt like countless smaller nets strung together because of differences in connection density. Like a condensing universe, it clustered into dense cores held together by sparser filaments - stars calling planets calling moons."

"We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two."

"But I had never once put fingers to keys for anything but love. I had written a book about lost children because I had lost my own child and wanted it back. More than I wanted anything in life, except to write."


American author Richard Powers, born 1957

"I meant to reverse-engineer experience. Mind can send signals back across its net, from output to in. An image that arrived through light's portal and lit up the retinoptic map on its way to long-term storage could counterflow. Sight also bucked the tide, returned from nothing to project itself on back-of-lid backness. This special showing required just a bed on the floor of an otherwise empty room, the place all novelists end up. Only, I had ended up there too soon." - Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
Profile Image for Manny.
Author 34 books14.8k followers
October 15, 2018
[Original review, Nov 16 2010]

People see different things in this unusual book. Let me start with the undisputed facts. The novel is written by Richard Powers, and its narrator is a character also called Richard Powers. The narrator and the author share a good deal of personal history. Among other things, they have both written three novels with the same titles and, as far as I can judge, similar content. They are both Americans who lived in Thailand when they were children, moved to Holland when they were adults, and learned to speak reasonably good Dutch. They both got their first degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, initially studying physics and then switching to literature. They both returned to Urbana-Champaign when they were around 35 to take up a post as Writer in Residence.

There are other areas where I am pretty certain that the author and the narrator have had different experiences. In particular, the narrator, while he is Writer-in-Residence, becomes involved in a daring research project, whose goal is to create an artificially intelligent entity capable of passing a literature exam. The AI is well done. Powers has worked with software, knows a fair amount about it, and has familiarized himself with neural nets and other relevant background. He's very interested in the philosophical question of "grounding". How can a piece of software know what language means without experiencing the world directly though its senses? More generally, does the meaning of language derive from its connection to the world, or can one understand language in its own terms?

In between the real and the imagined, there are things which may or may not reflect the author's personal history. In the story, "Powers" is in a state of near-suicidal depression after breaking up with the love of his life, a woman referred to only as C. The book alternates between the present, where Powers works on the AI project, and the past, where he remembers his life together with C. It's hard to be sure whether the relationship with C. really happened, but I'm inclined to believe it did, at least in some form.

The analogy that occurs to me is with Lolita, one of my favourite books. When he wrote it, Nabokov had recently moved to the US. He was an immigrant whose command of English, though good, was by no means perfect. He was also unhealthily attracted to young girls. I know this is to some extent controversial, but the theme turns up in so many of Nabokov's books that I can't believe it didn't reflect something real; I'm pretty sure he never acted on his impulses. At any rate, Nabokov made the brilliant pragmatic decision to use the material he had available. He made Humbert Humbert another immigrant with a similar sexual fixation, I believe greatly exaggerating the side of his character which he was most frightened and ashamed of, and created a masterpiece.

Similarly, I think Powers worked with the material he had - though it feels to me that he was closer to it, and the novel lacks the distance needed to be completely successful. By all accounts, Powers is a person who has spent his whole life living in a world of words. He's read obsessively since he was a small child, and he published three good novels before he was 35. The narrator of the book hardly experiences life directly at all, except though his relationship with C. When that relationship breaks down, he wonders if he has ever really understood her, or understood anything.

Can you live just though language? The book is a dense web of allusions and quotations: every page is full of ones I recognise, and I'm sure I missed plenty. To me, Helen, the AI program, is standing in for Powers himself. Helen can only experience the world through language. Powers is good at showing us how language, and especially great literature, can open up new ways to see the world, but even more importantly he shows us just how much it misses. Words are a poor substitute for love.

To me, and I see to many other readers, Helen is the most appealing character, and the one who redeems the book. She is just a piece of software, but she desperately wants to experience the world directly, through the senses she doesn't have, and escape the web of language; in the end, she helps the narrator reconnect to his life. Against all the odds, this friendship between a depressed workaholic and a machine ends up being a touching and uplifting story.

_________________
[Update, Oct 15 2018]

I was talking to someone today at a conference and noticed that he came from Urbana-Champaign. I mentioned that I had read a novel set there, and he immediately guessed it was this one. It turned out that he'd met Powers several times.

I couldn't help asking if he knew which parts of the book were autobiographical. He laughed and said the author had gone to some lengths to leave that unclear. But on further questioning about the characters C and A, he relented and said that Powers had indeed got divorced shortly before he wrote Galatea. He didn't think A was based on any particular person, but was rather a composite of several different female grad students. The woman who had joined the conversation looked rather unhappy about this particular revelation, and I didn't find out any more.
Profile Image for Infinite Jen.
89 reviews577 followers
December 12, 2023
Friends, never lead into a job interview like this: Is it true that I became so obsessed with the grizzly murders committed by one Ed Kemper that I eventually studied the man so thoroughly that I was able to precisely replicate his IQ scores on the WISC-V, WAIS, DAS, Stanford-Binet, and Peabody Individual Achievement Test? I’ll assume for a moment that this, not entirely baseless conjecture, merits serious consideration and just say that the fact that I have a severely dysfunctional relationship with my mother, a neurotic, domineering, megalomaniac who frequently belittles, humiliates, and removes the hands and feet of all my GI Joes, (in what I can only assume is a way of both emasculating and rendering Sgt. Slaughter (ie. Robert Rudolph Remus) completely dependent on the largesse of another to fulfill basic biological imperatives), and possess certain mental disorders characterized by enduring and inflexible maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by any culture, formed in early adulthood and associated with significant stress or impairment - does not endear me to the act of severing someone’s head, placing it on a shelf, and screaming at it for an hour before the authorities arrive. How is this so hard to understand! This is why I prefer highly distributed, digitized consciousnesses, to all you unvaried, localized blood sausages with your excruciating chatbot scripts! Oh! Hey there! How fortuitous of you to arrive just in time to answer this simple question: Have you ever, while profusely sweating inside a full body cast constructed from blotter acid, found increased glutamate release in the cerebral cortex and therefore excitation in this area? Specifically in layers IV and V, in addition to DARPP-32-related pathways, and the enhancement of dopamine D2 receptor protomer recognition and signaling of D2-5-HT2A receptor complexes? Well, if you’re at all offended by the activation of signal transduction enzyme phospholipase A2 at the expense of activating the enzyme phospholipase C (as the endogenous ligand serotonin does), then you’ll have plenty to bitch about here. Because LSD is a biased agonist that induces a conformation in serotonin receptors that preferentially recruits β-arrestin over activating G proteins, and it DON’T GIVE’A FUK!

...

Then, suddenly, your perceptual framework violently reorients to accommodate the lysergic pudding trickling down the bib of your limbic system. You’re observing the locus of your corporeality through a compound lens, collated from the parallactic displacement of multiple astral projections burning inside the ionosphere. Starring down at the human shaped glove compartment normally responsible for bundling, containing, and integrating this hellish tide of sensory data.

...

Well, I’m not sure that’s even tangentially related to this book, so, for gods sake get ahold of yourself. Because this book is smart. In fact, it may be gratuitously smart. Smart to its own detriment. So smart that the author may be wielding his intellect like a scourge. And since you’re trying desperately to be a more empathic person, you briefly decamp from your role as a dominatrix, and attempt to occupy the position of those mewling creatures you service with your riding crop.

“Yes, Powers. Continue to impress me. Burry me up to the neck in jargon and slap my cheeks with the frenetic love that Bob Ross showed his paint brushes when beating the devil out of them.”

Anyway. If you don’t have a passing familiarity with (or a keen interest in learning about) linguistics, neuroscience, and software, then I rebuke you in the name of the Nahuatl moniker for the Feathered-Serpent deity of ancient Mesoamerican culture (ie. Quetzalcoatl) and say unto you; “This might not be your thing, bruv.”

From the synopsis of this book, I thought it would coast cleanly into my favorites. I happen to have an interest in those topics, and I desperately modify the settings of Bixby every day in the hopes that I’ll create something I can have a conversation about senescence with. Yet, somehow, at least a half of this book felt like it was having a massive wank at my expense. Which is odd, considering my prodigious participation in Info-Bukkakes. It might be fairly said that I hold several world records for taking bits to the tits. So I admonish you, potential reader, as someone who is positively sticky with the rapid, and voluminous expulsion of information on any given day, I had to really brace for this one.

I also didn’t find the relationship between Meta-Powers and the Meta-Love-of-His-Life very convincing. Who the fuck says “Beau” that much? So, when I think about it, I guess 100% of this book felt like a tantric session that I was expected to judiciously study whilst displaying truly risible Paizuri skills due to certain genetic limitations.

Also, Lentz was an insufferable asshole. I absolutely hated that guy.

....

And then you woke up inside the darkness of your psychedelic piñata and realized that you imagined writing a review on Goodreads that was completely unrepresentative of your true feelings about this incredible book called Galatea 2.2, which hit all the right notes and in such perfect cadence that it felt like it was written especially for you. It caused you to put the lotion on its skin (completely and utterly avoiding the hose again), moved you to tears a few times, and created one of your favorite fictional characters in the form of a tortured curmudgeon named Lentz.

Seriously, don’t take too much acid. And if you find any of themes this book sets out to explore remotely interesting - give it a go, eh?
Profile Image for Joshua Nomen-Mutatio.
333 reviews938 followers
November 2, 2010
This book is about relationships—the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences, both within and beyond the walls of the academy and the lab; between cognitive neuroscience and literary fiction; between the romantically entangled; between human beings, period; between mind and matter. Richard Powers—an author I now have tremendous affection for—strikes an impeccable balance in his use and examination of these varied relationships. Consequently, this book was both intellectually and emotionally stimulating and satisfying, and not in a forced "head ‘n heart" routine kind of way, but rather in a way that gave the sense of effortless integration.

In terms of sheer technical style, the plain fact is that the deft wielding of words instantiated by Powers is just fantastic. Gorgeous and unique prose abound, sprinkled with clever word-play and smoothed over with an inexorable stream of metaphors and analogies that I found heart-warming, playful, hilarious, and often beaming with truth that pierced the pages. (Perhaps incidentally, metaphor itself plays a substantial role in this book's deeper musings on the nature of intelligence and its artificial relative.) I kept a 4" x 6" notebook by my side throughout my reading of this novel and found myself jotting down striking lines for memorial-safekeeping frequently enough to fill ten pages. I love Powers' style and really look forward to reading more of his work.

This book is also a quasi-autobiography for The Author. The main character shares his name, occupation, and perhaps other personal, historical details. The major narratives of the book trade-off between a more youthful Powers and his long-time girlfriend (only known as C.) and the "present day" in which he’s doing independent work at his ol’ alma mater, which blossoms into the most substantial plot-trajectory of the novel, namely his collaborative project with a cognitive neuroscientist named throughout the book mostly as Lentz. This project involves training a synthetic brain to pass a Turing Test of sorts, but one involving passing through the hoops of academic literary theory with the impression of being a conscious human being. What transpires within this relatively skeletal, straightforward narrative arc is far from simplistic or straightforward, that is if the reader allows the myriad mind-bending and heart-thumping implications of much of the on-page action to really resonate. If you are fascinated with issues of what it means to be human, with the nature of the mind and what it’s made of, you should be fascinated with and pleasantly bewildered by this book.

There are basically three major headings for me to place my engagement with this novel under:

1. The Tensions and Collusions Between The Humanities and The Natural Sciences

This theme mostly hums along in the background and is played out most dramatically between Powers (The Literature Guy) and Lentz (The Science Guy). It got my wheels spinning a bit about the whole Two Cultures issue (which I’ll just link rather than expound on). Basically, I feel that what is worth striving for is a more open and collaborative discourse between the humanities (the fine arts, literary theory, philosophy, etc) and the natural sciences. The drama between Powers and Lentz really illustrated the tensions well, but also pointed to the ways in which embattled fields of study can manage to find mutual respect, admiration and new paths toward genuine discovery, truth, goodness and all the rest of that sappy, idealistic shit (which I ultimately love and pursue sincerely).

This relationship also houses the most hilarious elements of the book. Lentz solely refers to Powers as Marcel (as in Proust) and many hilarious, hyper-intelligent potshots are taken at each other’s respective disciplines, but ultimately there’s a very human bond and exchange of ideas taking place between the two. There are a few moments that are genuinely touching which I’ll forego quoting or paraphrasing here as I think their full emotional weight requires a larger, non-synopses-like context of the novel to be adequately felt. Plus, I’d more or less consider them spoilers and I’d rather they be experienced by you, dear reader (and potential reader of the novel), as rarefied gems.

2. The Potent, Bittersweet Reminder of How Wonderful It Can Be To Be In Love

The prominent romantic relationship of the book is between Powers and C. and on its surface may strike some as "What are you talking about, MFSO?" when grafting it upon my dripping-with-sentimentality heading above. But I beg to differ against this purely hypothetical objection. To cut to the chase: it’d been a while since I’d really thought about how it feels to be in (romantic) love with someone. Several years long, to the extent that I hadn’t really even noticed the absence of this potent mixture of longing, lust and dedicated affection from my emotional repertoire—my queued up rotating line of thoughts and feelings. This book gradually kindled it pre-consciously until the revelation hit me like a tidal wave—a series of miniature, psychic birth-pangs coalescing into a deep focus shot of remembrance of loves had and lost. A variety of tiny, precious moments of intimacy nestled throughout the nooks of Powers’ own memories all added up to something profoundly moving for me. I let the streams of this emotional elixir wash over me, reminding me of something precious that I’ve always sought out and briefly, ever so briefly, found. Not that I am without love, I’m fortunate to have more than I need in many respects, but there is that Ideal lodged within the neural nets and weighted vectors of most human minds, and it’s a capital "I" Ideal for the very reason that it’s often so rare and so prized. I feel a gratitude to this book for inadvertently re-transforming the mere knowledge of this Ideal into its felt presence.

3. The Big Questions: How Does Consciousness Emerge? How Do We Live Well While Knowing We Will Die? What Truly Distinguishes Human Beings From The Rest Of Existence? Etc.

Truth be told, this book really only flirts with deep philosophical speculation about the nature of the mind, but where it does, it does so in a very interesting, emotionally-jarring and thought-provoking way. It’s more than likely that I spent much time feasting on these barely-there scraps of titillation simply because this is in area of inquiry which fascinates me greatly and has been the focal point of most of my thoughts for the past few years. I grabbed each speck of "how the mind works"-style speculation and exposition with both hands, and most certainly filled in the blanks with my pre-existing obsession with and knowledge of What Makes Us Who We Are Studies/philosophy of mind/cognitive science, and the attendant flurry of bewildered question marks faithfully trailing behind as always. I won’t bore anyone with the technical details or a lengthy existentialist meandering (both of which I considered doing while reading the book and jotting down notes) but I will leave us with this: consciousness itself is a deeply perplexing phenomenon, second only to the question of what the Ultimate Origin of All Things is, and one that is remarkable for the very fact that it's the one thing that is the most familiar to each and every one of us (the feeling of what it is like to feel), and yet it evades neatly reductive explanation like nothing else has in the entire, spectacular human career of digging deep to understand things.

I fear (and know) that I've left out a whole lot of what I wanted to express here. It doesn't work out sometimes. C'est le vie, more reviews, more chances to wrench something satisfying from within and prop it up on web-display... I've hit a wall though, and that wall is called "Shush now, child." And I just realized that I didn't relay any quotations. So let me find something... Hmmm, this seems relevant for this self-conscious, meta-aside:

"I had gone on one of those glorious, demented sidetracks, the hallmark of intelligence. The ability to use everything in the lexicon to answer except the answer." (p. 198)

CODA

"I picked up an old microscope at a flea market in Verona. In the long evenings, in my imitation of life science, I set up in the courtyard and examined local specimens. Pointless pleasure, stripped of ends. The ancient contadino from across the road, long since convinced that we were mad, could not resist coming over for a look.

I showed him where to put his eye. I watched him, thinking, this is how we attach to existence. We look through awareness’s tube and see the swarm at the end of the scope, taking what we come upon there for the full field of sight itself.

The old man lifted his eye from the microscope lens, crying.


"Signore, ho ottantotto anni e non ho mai Saputo prima che cosa ci fosse in una goccia d’acqua." I’m eighty-eight years old and I never knew what was in a droplet of water." (p. 226)

This book is only superficially about relationships (to amend what I wrote as I kicked off the review) but now, feeling a self-sustained pressure to condense its effects on me even further, perhaps with a more profound heft, I'd say its greatest instruction for me was finding within it what I really do try to find in everything I touch: a deep gratitude and amazement genuflecting towards the very fact that we're alive at all. Finding the grandest emotional resonance within that which is most easily taken for granted. Hopefully everyone has some sense of what I'm talking about. It's really what I live for, if forced to fill in the blanks on that cliché. The ability to feel awe and wonder and an evolving childlike curiosity at the feet of this numinous plurality, this paradox of strangeness and familiarity swirling around and within the self—in short, to see the world anew.
Profile Image for Jessica.
596 reviews3,335 followers
April 25, 2015
I hate the Internet because of the comments section. On blogs, on YouTube, on the New York Times website, the hate-filled, aliterate hive mind rules, spewing bile and LOLZ and telling a truth about humanity that I can't bear to face. That truth is that we as a species have blown our legacy. These great big brains with their potential are just atrophied damaged lumps, twitching out asinine trivialities and ignorant, brutal crap. The Internet makes me embarrassed to be human, embarrassed even to be a primate. But at least monkeys are cute and furry, and can eat bananas with their feet; we have nothing left to recommend us once we blow out our brains.

Enter Richard Powers, the opposite of that terrifyingly idiotic mass online. Powers has a brain that you want to write poems to. You want to make it a candlelit dinner, try and get in its pants. I think this is the best of his books that I've read, and I have some theories about why that is. The main one is that its characters are abnormally smart people. As a genius, Powers gets in trouble when he tries to write about us regular-brained folk. It's sort of like the irritation I felt when Charlize Theron got the Oscar for having the guts to look ugly in Monster. As an ordinary-looking person, I feel condescended to when supermodels go out of their way to try and look like me, and in the same way I'm never convinced by Richard Powers's characters of average intelligence. I know he has the best intentions, but it just can't come off right. Powers doesn't know what it's like to be working with limited brainpower; I do, and can tell the difference between an effortful stoop and the bona fide half-brained thing. He should stand up straight and stick with writing about brilliant people, and let the rest of us try to stand on our toes.

I've said before that I find Powers's characters much less interesting than him, and My Flesh Sings Out wisely suggested this book as the logical remedy. The main character here is Richard Powers! He plays a writer-in-residence at a science center at the University of Illinois. Suffering from writers' block and the aftermath of his relationship with a tiresome Dutch American woman, Powers becomes absorbed in an experiment to teach a computer to read.

Two of my favorite writers these days are Powers and Roberto Bolaño, both of whom write about literature in a more interesting and inspiring way than pretty much anyone I think I've ever read. Powers is obsessed with literature, and also with brains. His AI creation Helen is one of the most compelling characters he's ever made. I was much less taken with the other two romantic interests here, though that might be partly due to cattiness because I wished that he were MY boyfriend. On the whole, though, with the exception of C. and A., I think the cast of characters here is much stronger than any in his other books, which I attribute to them all being scientists or literary geniuses. Powers should maybe give up on trying to write Everyman. His best people are either smarter than us, or else cognitively damaged. His TBI sufferer in The Echo Maker, the Downs Syndrome kid here, and the computer he's trying to make human all seemed incredibly real and interesting. Why is that? Hm. Maybe having too much relates somehow to not having enough.

Okay, so this isn't really much of a review, but I've set a time limit for myself today, so I'll wrap it up here. Galatea 2.2 is, I think, a thoroughly successful book. I started tearing up in public (like I do) when I got to the last pages. One of the many great things about this guy is that he does usually deliver an ending, and structurally this baby was sound all the way through. For its investigation of what makes humans, this book gets an A! It's also so well-written that after I finished it, I went back and started reading from the beginning so I could appreciate the sentences without being distracted by my impulse to find out what happened next. As I've said before, this guy can really WRITE (or really TALK INTO A COMPUTER, or whatever he does). In the past I've felt a kind of Apergery vibe from him sometimes, an inability to connect emotionally with the text as much as I wanted to, and sensed that Powers badly wanted to have me do. More than any of his other books, this one is successfully imbued with the heart and viscera and fluids that make us people, not machines, and he describes and makes me feel again why it is that I read. I know some people -- like my mother, who works in the tech industry -- are turned off by the topic and might not pick up a book about artificial intelligence. But Powers's own intelligence comes through here, more human than ever, and I recommend this unreservedly to anyone who uses literature to survive their world.

And especially, of course, to all users of this site! If you're into computers and books, this one's for you.
Profile Image for Ian "Marvin" Graye.
900 reviews2,392 followers
July 23, 2016
Measurement for Words

This novel seduces you, both emotionally and intellectually. It starts like a romance, albeit one set on campus, but ends up an exceptional work of meta-fiction.

The first person narrator, an author, a homonymic namesake of the real Richard Powers, has written four novels that sound like the ones on my shelves, has suffered the break-up of an 11 year old relationship while living in Holland, and is now confronting writer's block.

He is ostensibly "working" for 12 months as a writer in residence and "token humanist" at an enormous new Centre for the Study of Advanced Sciences at "U" (most likely at the real Powers' alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign).

Originally a physics major, he too was seduced, by his English Professor Taylor's "life-changing freshman seminar", into switching to the study of Literature and thus became a novelist, much to his natural father's disappointment. He has forsaken "measurement for words".

Back from the Dead, Literarily

Because he is conversant in the "Two Cultures", the Centre sees him as its potential liaison with the outside community.

His aim is to do as little as possible, while he struggles to determine the subject of his next novel or give up writing altogether.

Powers' year takes another turn when Dr Philip Lentz at the Artificial Intelligence unit issues him a challenge: can he teach their software creation to write a critical essay on a book from the English Department's canonical Masters' List that is better than one by a real life postgraduate student?

Powers speculates early on that Lentz (whose own wife is hospitalised with a mental illness and whose daughter is estranged from him) "would bring a life back from the dead."

Tabula Rasa

Much of the novel maps the journey upon which the various AI iterations or "implementations" acquire linguistic and critical skills.

They start with a blank slate, a tabula rasa, which is gradually filled by repeated experience, accumulation, selection, curiosity, pattern matching, syllogistic deduction, and tentative inference, until finally they realise they are shooting "the first rapids of inanimate thought".

Each lesson, Powers finds himself telling a story and answering child-like questions about the story from a computer he decides to call "Helen".

Soon, Helen's enthusiasm almost matches the words of his ex-lover, C., about an earlier novel:

"That's a great story...I loved that one. I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you for it."

Metaphysician, Heal Thyself

Powers' biggest problem seems to be his loneliness. His writing has disconnected him from those around him. Ironically, he turns to scientists who specialise in neural nets and connections.

Powers learns that he must reach in before he can reach out. No matter how dejected he might feel, he is not a total void. He realises that he has nothing left in him, "but the autobiography I'd refused from the start even to think about."

He, too, thought he had become a blank slate, a tabula rasa, except that he's learned that not everything has been erased. What remained, the legacy of his life to date, would be his tale. Now, finally, he is ready to tell his story.

Galatea and Pygmalion

Helen represents the challenge of transferring human knowledge and understanding to a machine. However, any transfer requires two acts: the transmission by one entity and the reception by the other. To oversimplify the issues, it requires both teaching and learning.

Just as the team takes giant steps towards Artificial Intelligence, it successfully extracts a new story, a novel, from Powers, the narrator.

The meta-fictional aspect is that the novel is this novel, the work of fiction ostensibly written by the real life Richard Powers, the novel that we are reading. As we read, we are effectively learning about the creation of the very novel we are reading.

The educative process not only teaches Helen, the Galatea in the Pygmalion myth, it extracts a creative work from Powers' mind.

description

Depiction of Ovid's myth of Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean Raoux.


Learning to Love

Like Pygmalion, Powers teaches Helen great works of literature, from "Aesop's Fables" to Shakespeare, from "Don Quixote" to "Middlemarch", from "Paradise Lost" to "Frankenstein", from "Doktor Faustus" to "The Hobbit", from "Ulysses" to "Gravity's Rainbow".

Helen learns about desire and love and jealousy and grace and disgrace and second chances.

At times, you wonder whether Powers has actually taught Helen enough for her to "know" how to love. She even gets to the point where she pleads, "Show me Paris."

However, it's just as likely that Powers has taught himself to love again. If literature can teach a computer how to love, then perhaps it goes without saying (unless it needs to be said), that it can teach a human.

Great works of literature might have supplied the fictitious Powers with a literary device, but another great work is also the result, the real life Richard Powers' fifth novel, "Galatea 2.2."

The novel is so perfectly executed, it leaves us pleading, in the words of Helen, "Richard...Richard. Tell me another one."



VERSE:

Implementation G's First hAIku (Inspired by Its Maker)

I am dreaming of
Losing myself in your soft
Tangibility.


Free to Read

"Once you learn to read,
You will be forever free."
I am free to read.


The Great Paradox of Cognitive Neuroscience

It is easier
For a brain to perform tasks
Than to model it.


An Othertonguer Learns Dutch Out of Context

I knew the Dutch for
"Iconoclasm" before
Simple words like "string".


Ik Houd Ook Van Jou

I imagined that
I knew what she was saying:
"Ik houd ook van jou."



SOUNDTRACK:

The Raincoats - "No One's Little Girl"
[For A.]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEvl-...

The Au Pairs - "It's Obvious"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjbBr...

Karen O - ''The Moon Song'' [From the film "Her"]
[For Helen]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaKP...

Profile Image for Oriana.
Author 2 books3,499 followers
January 16, 2011
post: Well, I did it, I finished the fucking thing. And I continued to hate it, all the way to the end.

I just never got it. It seemed so overblown, so overdramatic, so so so overwritten! Sure, it's a story about artificial intelligence, which I suppose has to be written about metaphorically. But oh my god, the density of metaphors was just suffocating. Plus the emotions our "hero" developed for his machine? Come on. I never for a second bought it that this guy would develop this depth of feeling for Helen. Come to think of it? I didn't really buy any of his feelings, or his characterizations of people. The "real" love stories, past and present, his fellow professors, even his parents; he just waxed (and waxed and waxed and waxed) orgiastically poetic about every little twinge, every subtle gesture, every passing breeze. He wove this incredibly dense language cocoon around everything, which all it really did for me was utterly stifle any actual emotional reaction I might have had. So much kept being revealed in these Aha! little twists, and they either felt totally obvious or totally invented for effect. And that's not even to mention the extreme out-of-date nerdery. I mean, it's not his fault that a lot has happened with technology since 1995, but it's really hard for me to take it seriously when he's like "OMG there's this like invisible network? That like connects everyone? And you can like talk to people in different countries and stuff!" (Except he says that in about a dozen pages, wrenched out through three times as many overdramatic similes.) Gah, I'm really sorry everyone who loved this book, and I'm really sorry Richard Powers, too, whom I remembered so fondly from Gold Bug Variations, but good grief no. Book, I hate you.

***

mid: Oh no you guys, I hate this book. I'm like a third of the way in and practically dread having to open it. What's wrong with me??

***

pre: I adored The Gold Bug Variations, and then I somehow forgot all about Richard. WTF? Thanks Jessica & MFSO for the reminder.
Profile Image for Hugh.
1,274 reviews49 followers
April 24, 2020
This book seems more personal than most of Powers' later novels. Like several of his other novels, it effectively has two main strands.

The first is an update on the Pygmalion legend in which the narrator, an author called Richard Powers who shares much of the author's real history, is recruited by Lentz, an AI scientist whose aim aims to produce a neural network to pass a limited Turing test by passing a college literature exam, and has bet a colleague that he and Powers can achieve this in a year.

In the second strand the narrator describes an 11 year long doomed relationship with a troubled young woman known simply as C., and describes how this affected and inspired his first four novels, all of which match the real Richard Powers' novels. In this part of the story it is much harder to separate the real and the imaginary.

The AI part of the story is clearly imaginary - much of what Helen, as the creation is named, achieves would be beyond today's achievements, let alone anything that might have been possible when the book was written in the mid 90s.

So the book is at least partly about the creative processes involved in writing, and how literature can never fully describe what it means to be human. Helen becomes highly skilled at answering specialised questions, but her learning process is very different to human development because her sensory input is so limited and she has no intuitive understanding of what/who she is. Powers clearly enjoyed describing the literature, and gently mocking his own creations.

For me, this was one of Powers' most enjoyable books to read, and it contains some very interesting ideas. It is not perfect, but on balance I think it just about deserves five stars.
Profile Image for Jonathan K (Max Outlier).
693 reviews148 followers
April 7, 2022
Rating, 3.75

Of all novels I've read, this is the only one where the author is the central character, though I questioned his use of single initials for people and locations. At its core, it pays homage to books, learning and being human.

Powers takes the reader on parallel journeys: A) The development of Artificial Intelligence computer by a colleague, Philip Lentz, and B) His relationship with 'C' during the writing of his books.

One of his earlier works, we get a glimpse into Power's world as a known author while collaborating with Lentz, a sort of visionary neuro-geek/programmer building numerous systems that learn, speaks and expand. As Powers reads/offers books of all types to the machine, it's rapid growth impacts his relationships and work. Use of various time frames and locations fills the reader in on his back story, and with this, I questioned how much was fact. Unfortunately, we'll never know.

Lentz labels the first generation "Imp A"; over time, generations improve with the connection to super data systems, voice and visual capabilities arriving at "Imp H". With its ability to speak and read, Powers names it 'Helen'. As its knowledge expands, Powers is of the belief that its gained artificial consciousness yielding interesting turn of events; among them the slow demise of his relationship with "C".

Intriguing, engaging and unique, its downfall is the lack of cohesive theme, an element I had not experienced in his other books. Regardless it's great to see how he's evolved as an author and enjoyed it from start to finish!
Profile Image for Jonfaith.
1,950 reviews1,578 followers
September 12, 2013
My thoughts on Richard Powers have been expressed before. He remains a divisive figure. Many doubt his prowess. Some find him too American. This could be an example of Asperger's literature. I object to that last sentiment. This is a novel with heart. Somewhere between artificial intelligence and Ani Difranco, Mr Powers afforded voice to a muddled world of emotions and violence: both somehow framed in the altered world of office hours. His ouerve often appears to be talking therapy. He's backtracking from his interpersonal perils by means of evocative digression, yet he can't leave the University grounds. I can't fault him for such. I have read Galatea 2.2 three times and have never broken into song.
Profile Image for Nicole.
357 reviews172 followers
November 12, 2015
This is another book I wish I had read while in graduate school, when it was published. I think passages like this one would have made me feel less alone and stupid, particularly since they are penned by someone who is very much an intellectual, and who cares deeply about language:

I watched them up close, our opponents, the curators of the written language. I moved among them, a double agent. I listened around the mailboxes, in the coffee room. Criticism had gotten more involuted while I was away. The author was dead, the text-function a plot to preserve illicit privilege, and meaning an ambiguous social construction of no more than sardonic interest. Theory had grown too difficult for me, too subtle. It out-Heroded Herod. The idea seemed to be that if mind were no more than shrill solipsism, then best make a good performance of it.

Reading this, it seems absolutely ludicrous to me that I stayed and finished, that I let myself be smacked around, and about language, of all things, something that matters to me. Unlike Powers, I didn't have whatever it would take to be the one who says, hey, that guy, the emperor, he's naked. I didn't even have the courage to just say "fuck you".

The other thing about this book that is spectacularly good are the bits about learning a foreign language, and how much more difficult and bizarre that can become once you are actually somewhat adept and people start treating you normally, instead of giving you the clumsy foreigner discount. His trip to the hardware store recalls for me a parallel incident for me, looking for a funnel. Or that time I got a bike to ride to work and realized I didn't know the name of a single one of its parts (handlebars, inner tube, gears, anyone?), despite being better than fluent, despite working every day in the fonction publique. This book knows what it's like to be the only one in the office with a dictionary constantly open on the desktop (though, to be fair, I also always have a thesaurus, which is perhaps not typical either). It's nice to see my immigrant experience depicted for once: its humor and its details and its fundamental pleasantness. (Not all of us came here on a cardboard raft only to find misery and xenophobia our only welcome. And yet, we are also people.)

I like that this book takes the humanities seriously without needing to dismiss hard science. Indeed, much of Powers' writing gets at these intersections and problems (what's a self, where does character come from, what's consciousness, what's intelligence, what does it mean to "know" something) and tries to go at it from both "sides". Despite some ungenerous and, I suspect, simple-minded criticism from the likes of James Wood (why do I continue to read your columns when I know that you are everything wrong with criticism today? Is it simply that you always come up in the google search?) of Powers' "scientism", I think we would all be better off if there were more attempts to treat these problems from multiple viewpoints and disciplines at once. If only they weren't so busy cataloging privilege and misunderstanding power, today's intellectuals could be engaged in that project right now.*

Finally, in this list of random impressions, I like about Powers how he encodes in his language the ways that we deceive ourselves. I guess he's not unlike Ishiguro, who is interested in the same thing, I think, fundamentally, though Ishiguro's deceptions seems to happen at the level of story rather than at the level of language. In Powers, often, or at least when he's at his best, it seems like the ways we talk -- intellectualizing, theorizing, sarcasm, irony, knowingness -- they themselves build the distance, mask the deception, help us fool ourselves. The whole family talks this way in the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it's horrible and yet you can't look away. Here I think it's subtler, as is the dysfunction: some complicated projection, the will to be needed, a complete misunderstanding of what it means to love another person, all shored up by enabling theories, explanatory roundabouts, seemingly sophisticated self-knowledge that stops objections before they can even get started, yet are more false for all that. I like very much what Powers is able to do with this, how he is able to build entire worlds from it.

*Look at that, I did manage a belated "fuck you" right there after all.
Profile Image for Simon Robs.
451 reviews98 followers
May 21, 2023
5/23 Second reading is helpful to fully get the depth and complexity of a RP book as he delves deep into his treatment of chosen issues/topics to explore, this time an AI sort of love story which has now become reality to our times.


Notwithstanding the autobiographical template this is still a highly creative work of fiction and it's interesting to observe where the drifts occur back/forth as his narrator splits time and storyline remembering lost love while becoming a generative AI researcher/mentor/ Pygmalion.

a location in book - famous U of I campus pool hall with boucoup fish sandwich:

https://www.smilepolitely.com/splog/m...
Profile Image for Neil.
1,007 reviews700 followers
March 5, 2019
"Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?"

Galatea 2.2 is the story of a man called Richard Powers. In fact, it is two stories. In the novel’s present, Powers takes a role as “humanist in residence” at a midwestern university: he is looking for somewhere to hide away and lick his wounds after a long term relationship (she is always referred to as C.) has fallen apart. Here, he comes to know Dr. Philip Lentz who gets him involved in an attempt to teach a computer literary criticism. They are working towards a “Turing Test” at the end of Powers’ stay at the university where the computer and a human will both analyse a piece of literature and someone will try to determine which is which. In the novel’s past, Powers (the Powers in the novel, that is: he and the real Powers overlap considerably, but I am not sure exactly where the border lies) tells us the story of his relationship with C., a time in his life that involved the creation of his first four novels. Conveniently, the Powers in the novel has the same first four novels as the Powers in real life and Powers, the author, is fairly self-deprecating about his books.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance comes out of it fairly well and when Powers, the protagonist, gets the computer (it is called Helen at this stage) to read his book, Helen says, "I think it was about an old photograph. It grows to be about interpretation and collaboration. History. Three ways of looking come together, or fail to. Like a stereoscope. What’s a stereoscope?". Prisoner’s Dilemma is described as "…my memorial to a sick father. In it, I described every impasse of history but his. Only the passage of years, only knowing I’d never show Richard Powers, Sr., what fiction had done to him, made that fiction possible.". The Gold Bug Variations is "…long, a vicarious recreation of the scientific career I never had". But Operation Wandering Soul, which Powers, the protagonist, finishes near the start of this novel, is described as "a bleak, baroque fairy tale about wandering and disappearing children" and "an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history.". Powers takes the opportunity to refer to Margaret Atwood’s review of OWS where she famously said that there are some books that you love and some that you admire and OWS did not fall into the first category. The book is filled with references to Powers' first four works making it a treasure trove for fans, especially if, like me, they are re-reading the books in publication order so have recently read the four books discussed in this fifth.

The autobiographical story in the book explains to us how Powers reaches a place where he is unable to write. He has what he sees as a magic first line (Picture a train heading south) but he is unable to do anything with it.

The artificial intelligence story tells us how Powers escaped from that impasse and began to write again.

But there is clearly a lot more going on that just this story about Richard Powers, however factual or fictional this Richard Powers may be.

The plot in the novel’s present is a re-working of the Pygmalion story. It asks us to consider what we mean by consciousness and by intelligence. As Powers teaches Helen to read and to "think", so his back story shows us him learning through life’s experiences how to write. At one point, he relocates to The Netherlands (the real Powers did exactly this) and has to learn language in an almost identical fashion to the learning process Helen goes through.

Just as The Gold Bug Variations delighted in the complexity of life and wondered at the fact that, when so many things could so easily go wrong, life works on, statistically, nearly every occasion, so Galatea 2.2 delights in the complexities of human intelligence. Both books are, in the end, a celebration of what it means to be human, of the mystery that lies behind our lives and our conscious experience of our lives.

This is not a perfect book. Powers’ growing infatuation with a woman at the university doesn’t seem all that believable, for example. And, strangely, the story about the computer packs more emotional punch than the story about people. There is every chance that the second of these is deliberate as it would fit with the idea of the Turing Test that Helen is working towards. But it is a very enjoyable book that raises some thought-provoking questions about the nature of consciousness and intelligence. I imagine it will be enjoyed most by those who know they like Powers and who have read his first four books (incidentally, at one point the narrator casually says "plowing the dark" which was the title of Powers next but one book published 5 years after this one - I am not sure if he already had a working title or whether he maybe got the idea as he wrote this book. Also, the woman at the university bears more than a passing resemblance to Thassa who stars in Genersosity: An Enhancement which came 5 books and 14 years later. I also noted reference to a person who had trouble recognising others he used to know well and this became a main story thread in The Echo Maker, 4 books and 11 years later).

It’s not perfect, but it is very enjoyable.

---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------

This is a book by Richard Powers. It is about a man called Richard Powers who is an author. Both Richard Powers's have written the same books prior to this one. This leads me to an interesting conundrum: when (not if) I read the three books referred to in this book, how will I interpret them given that I have read the context given by the story here. Corollary: how would I have interpreted this book if I had read the other ones first (I'll never know that, of course).

It is these kinds of brain scramblers that Richard Powers' books are filled with. This one is about an experiment to try to teach a machine literary criticism. A book about a machine learning to review books - perfect stomping ground for the wild imagination and phenomenal intelligence of the author.

Richard Powers' books are not necessarily for the faint-hearted! He uses lots of words that I don't really know (and I read the paperback, so I couldn't easily access the dictionary like I can on my Kindle) and he explores a multitude of ideas ranging from science to literature to music and more. To read one of his books is to be taken on a journey of exploration and discovery. You have to concentrate, but it is worth it.
Profile Image for Marc Kozak.
256 reviews81 followers
July 14, 2015
Scenario: you and your friend watch a movie in which someone says something interesting and factual about elephants. A few weeks later, you and your friend are taking part in a group conversation, when the topic inexplicably shifts to elephants. Your friend nonchalantly says "well actually, did you know that elephants can control their body temperature with their ears?" Everyone is very impressed. The group assumes your friend must be some kind of expert zoologist. Meanwhile, in your head, you're thinking: Hey, what the shit?! I saw that same movie too, you bastard! You're not smart! You're a great big phony!

But is this not what learning is? Do you not gain knowledge from experiencing or being taught something from somewhere else? Does this knowledge not get strengthened from repetition and reinforcement? Are you not just jealous of your quicker-speaking elephant expert friend?

Here's another scenario: you're in high school. Your teacher asks you to memorize a list of facts, expecting you to regurgitate that exact info at a later date so you can pass a test. You mumble something about how it's total bullshit and you'll never use that information ever again in life. You memorize it, pass the test, and maybe 10 years later someone says something that triggers that information in your brain. Is that learning? Is your brain just a library of books, some in crystal clear text, and others fuzzy and partially unreadable?

In Galatea 2.2, two guys try to replicate the human brain by reading a crap-ton of text to a machine. The machine slowly learns words and associations, much like a a human child, gradually learning to form sentences, and then hold full conversations. It is able to pull text that it has heard previously, and apply it appropriately to the topic at hand. The more text it takes in, the better it "speaks". Like your elephant expert friend, it regurgitates things it's "heard" before, at increasingly higher levels.

This leads to a lot of questions:
- Is the machine able to have a consciousness? Is it really aware of itself?
- What's the difference between that kind of awareness, and human awareness?
- Is that all awareness is? Being able to make connections between previously heard words and ideas?
- Is it possible to have truly original thoughts? Or are we regurgitating old test answers?
- How do humans create art?
- What happens when science cracks the great mystery of the brain, and we understand how everything works?

None of these questions are really answered, but for me, the best part about this book was letting myself drift into these unknown areas.

Powers, whose prose is densely packed with metaphor, is essentially feeding the reader data from his own vast literary memory banks, in what is just one of the many meta flourishes in this book. Your mileage may vary on the more emotional beats of the story -- Powers' aforementioned prose will certainly stop some dead in their tracks, and the characters (based on Powers himself and people/places from his own life) aren't the most likeable or well-developed. But I was able to get enough out of the ideas to have a really great time. Honestly, this was 5-star territory for most of the duration.

I'm not going to pretend I understood all of the more science-y aspects, and Powers is operating on a much higher level than I'm at, but it set my imagination wheels spinning, and I'll always have time for literature like that.
Profile Image for Nelson Zagalo.
Author 9 books368 followers
January 9, 2022
"Galatea 2.2" é um livro sobre Inteligência Artificial (IA) escrito em 1995, algo que poderia ditar imediatamente todo um texto datado, no entanto não é daí que surgem os seus maiores problemas. Powers é uma mente brilhante, capaz de um olhar analítico em profundidade e a IA acaba sendo aqui uma ótima desculpa para dissertar sobre a vida e o ato de viver. Mais ainda porque o livro é escrito num tom autobiográfico, com o protagonista a ser nomeado com o nome do autor, um escritor escrevendo o seu quarto romance, aquele que estamos a ler, variando os países e a língua em que a sua mulher é profissional de tradução, mas mantendo intacta a vontade do autor de nunca ter filhos. Esta sua vontade acaba sendo central para compreender o desígnio final da IA criada.

O livro apresenta um modelo narrativo, à partida, simplista. Um duplo enredo entrelaçado: por um lado, os amores perdidos de Powers; por outro a tentativa de ensinar uma máquina a tornar-se inteligente. Deste modo, Powers oferece dois registos imensamente distintos, o lado amoroso do romance, pouco original, e o lado científico, como sátira da academia e as suas Duas Culturas (humanidades vs. ciências). As duas linhas são não só totalmente entremeadas de forma não-linear, criando múltiplas situações de disrupção na compreensão do sentido da leitura, mas são ainda laboradas por meio de secções que vão variando entre secas descrições e instigantes pequenas histórias. Tudo isto apresentado por meio de uma escrita altamente elaborada, que não raras vezes nos obriga a reler frases para extrair sentido, sendo que por vezes nos surpreendem pelo brilhantismo, enquanto noutras nos aborrecem pelo esforço exigido por tão pouco.

Assim, temos momentos de leitura em que a nossa atenção é completamente raptada pelo contar de história, e outros em que não percebemos completamente o que estamos a ler, em que vamos sendo expostos a ideias, digressões e dissertações sobre tudo e nada, mas essencialmente sobre a visão do autor do que é sentir-se humano. Muitas metáforas são sublimes e alargam a nossa consideração pelo texto e o autor, mas outras parecem mudas, não de sentido, mas de emoção. Existe um claro excesso de intelectualização, não pelo aprofundar das questões filosóficas, mas pelo modo como são apresentadas as questões, não só pela ausência de contextualização, mas pela escrita minimal que obriga o leitor a correr atrás para preencher as lacunas, fazendo sentir que o livro se alonga muito para além do sustentável.

Publicado com uma explicação final e spoiler, e relação com o seu último livro "Bewilderment" no VI:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Profile Image for Ian Scuffling.
170 reviews80 followers
December 27, 2023
Richard Powers is an astounding literary talent. Indisputable fact. But, I find, sometimes, as in Galatea 2.2, he can be a little too corny when dealing with love and love interests. This is the fourth of his novels I’ve read, and I’d rank it probably second after Gain (and probably in a tie with The Gold Bug Variations) but all of them have really dazzling constructions that are as intricately detailed as they are marvelous to read. The way he does this is by tapping into the great religion of our modern time: science. The science isn’t just setting or theme in a Powers novel, they are also the complete form and expression of the narrative. Twinned, double-helices corkscrew through Gold Bug while a dual narrative of cause-and-effect in Gain deepens the story of how commerce interacts with consumers, but consumers often have little say in the matter.

In Galatea 2.2, a fictionalized Richard Powers has returned home to the university of his doctoral studies to be a “Humanist in residence” in “The Center,” a department of neuroscientific study. Embedded amongst the white coats, the littérateur soon finds himself in a task to train a mechanical brain on all of the great works of writing humanity has to offer. Meanwhile, Powers reflects on the commencement and dissolution of his relationship with the single-letter-named C. who he has left in the Netherlands.

As the task of building intelligence into a machine continues via the history of human literature, the biograph of our fictional Richard Powers, too, is detailed to the reader via reflections on the geneses of each novel he’d written before coming to work at The Center.

As the artificial intelligence, dubbed Helen, develops more advanced function, Powers reflects on his life with C., has a date with another scientist in the lab, and falls helplessly in love with an English major student on campus referred to as A. The love story, while functioning as a metaphorization of the novels core themes around how intelligence operates and develops, is helplessly corny to the point of cringing. I understand that A. is meant to be a projection of C. that Powers (the character) fills up with everything he thought C. should be, but ultimately it just is a recursion of a grosser trope, especially of the Literature department, of a pretty predatory professor drooling over the intellectually astounding book nerd girl.

Despite this aspect to the story, I believe that the core narrative of the AI that develops a consciousness is unique and ever relevant to our current rate of AI development. Large language models today are still seemingly far from human consciousness despite having access to all the greatest works of literature (and the worst), all of the history of music, all of the history of the creation of humankind. Intelligence is more than an accumulation of knowledge stored in a bank. It’s the surprising and unique way in which that knowledge is mapped and applied to any certain set of stimulus—today’s AI appear to be attempting only to deliver the best fit for a prompt through recursive layers of reducing down, rather than interpretive work. Douglas Hofstadter refers to consciousness as a “strange loop” of meaning making at overlapping, recursive layers of information gathering. Powers ultimately gives a false sense of humanity to Helen’s mechanistic consciousness, but when he starts feeding her news of human behavior, she suddenly shies away from connection and closes off to further input. Maybe our best hope is that if/when we grant a machine with human-like consciousness, it will see the ugliness in that humanness and turn away.
Profile Image for Judy.
1,763 reviews360 followers
December 4, 2019
More autofiction! Richard Powers is the main character in his own novel, living through a year of personal crisis. He is looking back over his life so far. In the present he is helping the annoying Philip build a model of the human brain.

The Richard Powers character reconstructs the writing of his four previous novels which are the actual four first novels by Richard Powers, the author. Since I am reading his novels in reverse order of publication, I have yet to read those earlier novels, but when I do I will know what he was living through as he wrote them.

The other main character in Galatea 2.2 is Helen, the computer-based neural network brain, who comes to life under Richard's tutorials like his own personal female Frankenstein. They kind of fall in love, or at least Richard falls in love with his creation.

As usual, I skimmed over the technical computer stuff but any computer nerd would love those parts. The story had a claustrophobic effect on me. I was in Richard's mind and memory as well as in Helen's "mind" and circuits.

Despite Power's usual cerebral storytelling though, I was gifted with many realizations about memory, love, reading, regret, perception of others and life itself. The engine of it all is love.
Profile Image for Alees .
48 reviews65 followers
April 6, 2022
Boulevard of broken dreams

Accidenti a te Richard!
Accidenti al desiderio, all’ambizione, ai rimpianti e alle mancanze.
Come accidenti sei arrivato a questo?
Ho odiato questo libro.
Oh, certo, l’ho letto tutto.
Dalla prima fino all’ultima, brillante, faticosissima parola.
Ma in controluce, stavolta, non ho trovato nulla.
Nulla oltre a una impalcatura geniale ed erudita oltre la soglia del sopportabile, di quelle che trasformano ogni decollo in zavorra.
Un congegno meccanico perfetto può stupire.
Ma, per quanto eccellente, difficilmente può farsi amare.
Il restare amici non è, comunque, in discussione.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Soa3gO...
Profile Image for Adam.
415 reviews153 followers
September 7, 2020
A byte of the madeleine:

I won’t believe Powers can do wrong until I read it for myself. His nexus is my playground and paradise lost. If I had no shame, I would call him the postpostmodernist par excellence: one who reveres the Classics yet still knows the most abstruse theoretico-textual games and who melds nostalgia for the always-already imminent-inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat with inviolate lovelornness, dumbstruck wonder, and all the exquisite agonies of self-consciousness. The themes explored here (art/language/speech/memory/technology/subject/etc) stretch a commodious bridge across my recent readings from their austerely avant-garde treatment in Alice Knott to their farcical deflation in Forbidden Line.

There has hardly been a moment since modernity broke that the parlous state of literature has not emptied the inkwells, ruined the ribbons, and snapped the spacebars of writers. What are you gonna do. Powers’ work suggests that there is life (or, if not, then at least viable literature) beyond the lamentations and commiserating ressentiment. In the same way “to err is human” means you must make mistakes to be human, “the Self is narration” does not simply mean that the signifying chain overdetermines the Self, but more radically that the Self cannot but narrate. O what a tangled web we weave, when the prison-house of language we seek to leave.

“The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it… For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed.”

Wrote Richard Powers about "Richard Powers" in 1995. Do I care that the technobabble was already obsolete 20 years ago? Ha. About as much as I think GPS would have sorted Ulysses right out.
Profile Image for Anna.
907 reviews740 followers
May 9, 2020
Our life was a chest of maps, self-assembling, fused into point-for-point feedback, each slice continuously rewriting itself to match the other layers’ rewrites. In that thicket, the soul existed; it was that search for attractors where the system might settle. The immaterial in mortal garb, associative memory metaphoring its own bewilderment. Sound made syllable. The rest mass of God.
Profile Image for G.R. Reader.
Author 1 book180 followers
May 4, 2014
I hate to be the one to tell you, Richard, but you're just not geeky enough.
Profile Image for Jill.
435 reviews235 followers
November 8, 2014
I can't wrap my head around this book. Usually, that's a good thing: it requires effort; it's just that little bit too complex; it's stretching me in some new direction I've never been.

Galatea 2.2 isn't really any of that, or at least not consistently. It's just frustrating.

That's not to say there isn't some payoff through the frustration: the prose is stellar -- rich and fantastical. Helen is adorable and touching, in her way (though she's the only character who is, and she's a machine, so), and the meld of lit and science is interestingly conceived -- if mediocrely realized.

But okay, let's start with plot: I think there was a seriously major twist at the end. Like, so major that it changes the game completely. I think, though, because despite multiple rereadings of the passage in question, I still have absolutely no idea what happened. Now: I can't figure out if that's brilliant (and the entire book is a comment on literature and artifice, which would make sense given Powers' "fictional" self-insert) or just a smart person teasing his reader, much as Lentz teases Rick for the entire narrative. I may go try to make sense of this by reading other peoples' reviews, but honestly: I don't really care enough. Know why?

Because the characters were TERRIBLE.
I get it, or at least, I get part of it: Powers is inserting the dickwad-asshole part of himself ("Rick") into this narrative. An arrogant narcissist humanitarian (specifically, fiction writer) playing with science -- tee hee! Fine; I'll happily read unlikeable characters if they serve a narrative purpose. The problem isn't even Lentz, who is a caricature, or any of the other scientists who come out to play. It is, strictly, the women -- and particularly their perceived relationships with Rick (I say perceived because if you've ever wanted to see an unreliable narrator, Ricky is your guy).

C. and A. are fucking insufferable. C. is a shell of a human being who is built up to be a magical princess unicorn from geniusland by Rick, but there is NO narrative indication of why she's so smart. There's a little toss at the end, when Rick has one of his MANY ~~epiphanic moments~~, to how he never actually understood the relationship -- but if this entire spiel is in the past tense, which it is, there's no excuse for writing about their past in this stupidly romantic bullshit tone while still reifying himself and villifying C.

And oh, I'm sorry, have you met A.? The most AWFUL and IRRITATING example of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl I've EVER encountered? "OH TRA LA FREAKING LA, LOOK AT HOW ECLECTIC AND BRILLIANT I AM!!! I'M DOING A PHD IN LITERATURE AND I PLAY PINBALL AND I MAKE BARTENDERS LAUGH??? I CARRY REAL BOOKS UNDER MY ARM~~~ I DON'T TREAT CHILDREN WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME BADLY?~~!!!"
Fucking give the girl her sainthood already.
Honestly I was with Powers till A. started talking. I found the C. flashbacks eye-roll-worthy, but I could stomach them; once Rick started talking about how deeply in love with A. he was -- with no buildup, no reason, no purpose -- I couldn't take any of it anymore. And then A. opened her poorly-characterized mouth. Yeah, he's an unreliable narrator; yeah he's clearly a womanizer, fine. She's still a terrible representation of a woman, and there's no narrative/thematic reason for it. Unless it's in that twist that I clearly missed.


Jesus. Writing about this book makes me feel like I'm in my lit undergrad again. I get that it's smart, but I feel like I'm making excuses for the fact that it was also just kind of...bad. Of course, Powers hangs a lantern on this a few times...but tongue-in-cheek intentionally or no, a bad book is still a bad book. Even Helen would get that one right.

There are books that take these themes & ideas (human independence, nostalgia, technology, alienation, writing itself) and fly with them.
Galatea...struts.
Profile Image for Leonardo Di Giorgio.
124 reviews261 followers
May 28, 2023
Powers ha quella lucentezza narrativa, che solo in Eco ho trovato, nel raccontarti il dolore con la lente cristallina di chi ha esperito la vita attraverso la letteratura e ora può fare dei ricordi il romanzo della sua esperienza mortale.

Grazie Powers per aver parlato al me tra vent'anni, a quella persona che non sa dove sarà e con chi sarà, ma che avrà cercato di toccare e distendersi nella trama ingenua della storia che si è lasciato raccontare; nella speranza che questa storia non arrivi troppo tardi per chi non c'è più.

Questo libro mi ha straziato, tanto che per mesi non ne ho più scritto.

Potrei parlare della solitudine che porta la fine di un grande amore, il non sapere dove andrà a parare la nostra vita, il vivere ogni anno come fosse un amore difficile. Il tempo e l’amore, due facce della medaglia-vita: il sublimarsi nei momenti d’intensità, e poi il loro vaporizzarsi, un lasciar scorrere gli anni come una storia raccontata che si sfilaccia nella nostra mente.

Scrivere nel tentativo di trattenere la Nuda Realtà rifugiandosi nella Pura Finzione. Che è quello che fa il protagonista, un certo Richard Powers, uno scrittore di 35 anni, impegnato con una frase che parla di un treno che parte.

Scrivere per dare un ordine alle cose, perché “la finzione non accetta il caso”. Ma, come gli dirà il neurologo Lentz, “la vita – se per caso voi umanisti non ci foste ancora arrivati – procede per tentativi e sorti alterne”. E quanto terrificante la consapevolezza che la nostra vita ci sfugge dalle mani, quanto terrificante quando anche le parole sfuggono e il treno che parte è ancora fermo lì, come un incipit che non sa dove andare.

Nella testa la volontà di cristallizzare la storia di una storia d'amore finita. “Decidi di condividere la tua solitudine. Abbandoni completamente il tuo progetto di vita, basandoti su un’intuizione improvvisa”. Decidere d’amare è far partire il treno; lasciarsi è sperare che l’altro, procedendo dal centro della Grande Muraglia, con le spalle rivolte verso le tue, veda il mondo anche per te, ovunque egli vada.

Scrivere è essere i ricettori dell’amore, il vettore del sentimento: il romanzo, l’incontro di due vettori. Davanti alla tomba in cui sopravvive un amore sepolto, non nascono fiori.

L’amore che finisce rivela tutta la vita e il suo colossale inganno: non c’è niente che basti, e la mente ci imbroglia quando crea l’eternità per poter conservare le cose che ha già perduto. Nella solitudine, perduti, capiamo perché facciamo qualunque cosa: per avere qualcosa con cui parlare, per amare più d’una volta, sapendo cosa significhi ‘una volta sola’, e allora ci inganniamo un'ultima volta, speriamo di poter creare ciò che l’amore non avrà mai: un’immortalità.
Profile Image for LindaJ^.
2,237 reviews6 followers
June 29, 2017
Other reviewers have done a wonderful job describing what this book is about, e.g. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., so I won't go into too much depth. The main character in the novel and the author share many things in common -- same names, same four books written, same school, same job, both physics majors before switching to English, both lived in the Netherlands and speak Dutch, and others. Having a decades long romance with a woman he taught in grad school or working with a scientist to create an AI, the heart of the book, does not seem to be shared.

Many times while reading this paperback I wished it was on my Kindle instead, as there were references to literary works I did not know and words that were new to me that I could not immediately look up. And since I was usually without pen and paper and do not dog ear pages, it is likely that most will remain unknown to me. But having to figure out meaning from context and not knowing a particular literary work did not spoil the book for me.

While what the book is about can be simply summarized, the content and the issues that are discussed in telling the story are not simple. This book makes you work. You cannot skim. Oh, you could if you wanted to avoid thinking and it would probably still be interesting but you'd miss a lot of concepts that will keep you thinking for a long time after you close the cover.
Profile Image for Antonomasia.
979 reviews1,381 followers
December 11, 2015
Feb 2015
Having heard Richard Powers say in an old radio interview that the readers’ letters which mattered the most to him were from people who’d felt understood by a book - they identified; it reminded them of someone they knew – I’m now a whole lot more comfortable with my personal, ineloquent responses to his work. (Powers’ voice is lovely – vitally – and I so rarely like American accents… but he’s none of the things that annoy me about America/ns.) On the importance of books making one feel less alone, I’ll take any day the opinion of someone who has actually spent an entire year on his own, other than minor transactional interactions like buying groceries, over the criticism of those who’ve probably barely known spans a twentieth of the time lived that way. [By which I mean those who criticise identification as a means of appreciating a book - I suspect often out of not knowing what it’s like to have the sort of life where it’s badly needed. Whereas I agree that ‘I didn’t identify with any of the characters’ is a poor reason to dismiss something, and at any rate a way of reading that doesn’t interest me.]

The full extent to which the material in Galataea (in which a heartbroken novelist named Richard Powers, during a stint as writer-in-residence at his old university, is reluctantly enlisted in a project to teach an AI to pass an Eng Lit exam) is autobiographical, remains mysterious as suits a former recluse, but in this book, he paints his younger self as prone to ridiculous crushes – with feelings of a magnitude I’ve never personally experienced without clear romantic reciprocation. So I’ve less embarrassment too, about having ‘a bit of a thing’ for this author at the moment; I’m sensible and circumspect about it, especially by comparison with that episode. (And I can break it down so easily it takes away some of the sentiment: my own continuing rebounding; he ticks 3 basic & crucial boxes re. appearance; has talents in same fields as several exes – ones in which I can at least hold together a conversation – but all rolled up in one person; also au fait with fields more ‘ mine’ than ‘theirs’; displays a reflectiveness about modern culture and society I’d been searching for and despaired of ever finding again in a public figure. He started writing because of an epiphany from a photograph in an art gallery; I became vegetarian because of a Salvador Dali film in an art gallery, a despicable 2 minutes of killing a sea-urchin; part of me is still standing there looking at it too. Only major things lacking: could perhaps be funnier – though the quality of what he writes is such I don’t notice during; could modify haircut to suit age. Though I daresay his wife is happy with it as it is. …It’s so nice when people have partners who obviously sound worthy of them: she with higher degrees, decades of aid work, and, oh bless ‘em, they both had innuendo in their names too.)

Among readers online, I see, depressingly, more middling or negative opinions of Richard Powers than positive ones – so I find myself somewhat defensive, as about Nicola Barker (to whom the same applies) … This is one of those odd things I like, you probably won’t, though I wish a few more people did. They should, but I'm more than old enough to know that makes no difference, and that I'm unaligned with the major arbiters of 'should' I encounter on the internet. In this scattered landscape I miss the defiant tribalism of teenagers who proudly love an oft-rubbished band. Those who criticise Powers as too cold and cerebral must never have read Galatea. It’s wrenching and one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read (and is also ultimately wise rather than fanciful and impossible). Perhaps those people just don’t get something; they don’t see what they’ve already decided isn’t there. Characters not remotely like real people? You haven’t met the sort of geeks I have, then. Then there are those who criticise him for being too sentimental. Easy to imagine them as the trad cold scientist stereotype. I can’t remember when a book last made me cry once, let alone twice; Orfeo nearly did once too. His frisson-inducing sentences and fusion of movie-like scenes with realism work so terribly well on me. I’d bet Powers is another person who, in Baron-Cohen’s systematising and empathising tests would score very high on both alleged opposites. And he would then explain in calm and thoughtful terms how B-C’s schema was a blunt instrument. (In a way infinitely more reasonable than internet hysterics, and sounding even more reasonable for not needing to point out that he was being so, or even alluding, as I feel the need to, to the existence of the internet hysterics… He’s exactly the kind of writer and thinker I’ve been looking for. I never, never expected it to be an American.)

As for the exact moments when the scenes with [future] Helen the neural network flip between realism and SFF, I’d would have to enlist friends who knew 90s AI (one of the few occasions where I can actually see a non-academic use for those social book annotation programs / networks, the output of which, otherwise, I can’t imagine anyone bothering to read regularly unless the annotater is a great wit, or they are in love with them). Helen is, anyhow, obviously way ahead of 90s chatbots, but not so out of this world as a starship computer… this is the realist end of SF, and one place in which my knowledge of terminology from IT qualifications over a decade old is just fine as it is. Aside from the tech itself, there’s a timelessness to Powers’ books made by the relative isolation of his characters, away from the cacophony of ephemeral pop-culture references. Is he an author whose stock might increase in future? Or will the tech still make him too much of-his-time? He’s still too right to become retro-futuristic kitsch: there’s excitement around about the possibilities of computers and neuro imaging, but Powers’ eponymous lead character has a negativity about the online and computerised world more in tune with the jaded present than with 1995 (then promising, 1.0 from now seeming refreshingly minimalist). His depressing job several years past, programming smart appliances. Or The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it. (p.11) a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more hostile penpals (p.14) – been lurking on Twitter circa 2014, have we?

Powers makes me understand others better. My first long-term relationship: he already knew from the start the secret Powers took years to discover with C., that looking after someone too much can be ruinous: I was encouraged or assumed to do things for myself whenever I wasn't too weak and ill to do so and I was not to do much for him, as I'm inclined to be that way myself when I'm up to it. Not many people can say an alcoholic taught them good things about boundaries, but this one did. Still, at that age I didn't understand the pain in wanting to look after, how much it hurt him to see my pain - there was one metaphor he once told me, an image from the film of Titus Andronicus we saw together; but Powers in Galatea explains something of how it must have felt day to day and over and over again. And gave me a new appreciation for the unobtrusive kindness of that man over certain others - more alluring, but more disordered - who came later.

The other week I fell into browsing some profiles of Goodreaders with opinions I consider extreme, and noticed that one-starring Alan Sokal was, as the kids say, ‘a thing’. (Further evidence supporting the article a friend sent, in which US academics complained it’s like it’s 1991 all over again.) The project at the centre of Galatea prefigures Sokal’s own satire (I initially thought satirised it, but Sokal published a year later); Powers takes a more compassionate middle ground and therefore, in a field of extremes, sound unusual and original. If only ‘deft’ weren’t a meaningless book reviewing cliché I strive to avoid, this would be just the place for it.

I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite them in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.’s mouth. She convinced me at blood sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body’s idea. (p.308) Too much in thrall even to try to argue properly.
Ah, you would understand exactly how I’ve fallen for a number of fundamentalist/Angry Atheists…
This is why 5* for God Is Not Great.
(I don't mean Hitchens himself, but because an admirer made me feel and see and thrill with the energy of that book, how it puts fire in the blood and the heart and bolsters the backbone for speaking out. Even if the text itself does go too far and is a little counterproductive.)

Powers makes fun of his own writing, and of tropes, so beautifully and solemnly and with such self-awareness. And has respectful room for race and gender based criticism of his type without ever ceasing to be himself or be twisted out of shape into Maoist self-criticism.
p.22 ’Oh please, Mr Powers. European class. The world, it may astonish you to learn, is predominantly black-haired. A plurality of those live without adequate shelter and would use The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, as a canvas roof pitch if they could.’ (Five years later, he writes a novel about racism.)
p.37 I asked myself who in their right mind would want to read an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history… He recommends to a character who might be upset by this book, that they don’t read it.
p.69 C. used to say that everything was always outset with me. She came to know me so uncomfortably well. How my mind collapsed everything back to Go. How I would end with a head full of opening lines. … So he knew all along how these declamatory, polished sentences can sound. Potentially introductory.
The above probably work best if you’ve read at least one other book of his – to see this revelation and relief of self-awareness in full colour.

Novels about authors: what a drag, what a cliché, as if we need any more of those. Every now and again, though, there’s one that’s just about perfect.
Profile Image for Jef Sneider.
304 reviews23 followers
June 17, 2014
Sorry Richard, this just doesn't work. I have not read anything by Richard Powers before, so I had no preconceived notions about him. Unfortunately, I was not impressed. Maybe, as one reviewer said, I am not smart enough. I certainly missed many of the literary references, but was this book supposed to be targeted at English majors with an interest in artificial intelligence? I don't think so, because there are only two and one of them is Powers.

This novel failed me in several ways. First, as a novel, it really didn't add to my understanding of the possibility of artificial intelligence or machine consciousness. I just didn't believe it. I could make up a story about a computer seeming to be conscious but it wouldn't be convincing either. Second, the relationships, especially between Richard and Lentz, seemed contrived. The dialogue was almost David Mamet-like in places, that is , stilted. The author condemned Lentz as a curmudgeon before the fact was obvious to the reader. I never got that even after it was stated. Finally, the entire affectation of using letters instead of names for people and places in the parallel story of Richard and his first love was annoying and did not add to the understanding or enjoyment of reading.

So, I'll stick to Borges for now, Gibson and Stephenson. Maybe some other time, Powers.
Profile Image for AC.
1,799 reviews
Shelved as 'i-get-the-picture'
May 6, 2012
I don't think I know enough science to read this (novel though it be) -- well, I KNOW I don't. And what's worse is realizing that, as advanced as this stuff sounds, it's already nearly 20 years old (1995). Yikes!

I guess that explains my interest in the Middle Ages... in a real sense, I'm still living in them.

Anyway -- it seems like a pretty impressive book.
Profile Image for Stewart Mitchell.
507 reviews11 followers
August 23, 2020
I’m really impressed by the overwhelming humanity in both of the Powers novels I’ve read so far. This one was beautifully painful, self aware but unpretentious, and full of quiet hope. I’m almost tempted to jump into another one of his books right now.
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