Details
Synopsis
Leaving behind the ruins of a love affair, the protagonist of Richard Powers's fifth novel--a novelist named Richard Powers--returns to the United States and takes a position as a Humanist-in-Residence at the Center of Advanced Sciences. While there, Powers meets the brilliant cognitive neurologist Philip Lentz, who challenges Powers to teach a neural network to appreciate art and literature. This brilliantly conceived novel, infused with shades of FRANKENSTEIN and PYGMALION, challenges our notions of identity, communication, art, and meaning, and proves that Powers is one of the most intellectually and artistically ambitious living writers.
| Size | | Length: | 336 pages | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 10.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "It was like so, but wasn't."
Industry Reviews
"Richard Powers' people are ideas and his ideas are people; and so, right away, he sets himself apart from writers who sketch an engaging intellectual path but don't find characters to tread it. 'Galatea 2.2' is about a man who programs an artificial intelligence system only to find it is more human than he is. Powers' characters and ideas are all over the place. Their engagement is wholehearted, the results are uncertain. Frequently a glittering insight will be thrown up from the dust and the skirmishing, or a shard of human sadness or wicked enjoyment. Other times the ideas submerge just as they are about to crystallize, or characters tire and blur. At the end the reader may well be unsatisfied, but that is not the same as dissatisfied. It is closer to art to be left unfilled and wanting more than to be sated and wanting less, as tends to happen in out pile-on culture. I finished 'Galatea' not totally sure of the destination but with a vivid memory of points along the way."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (06/18/1995)
"Powers is as gifted and important a novelist as we have....He has already proven himself a master of incorporating science into fiction, a poet of chaos and fuzzy logic. Here, he shows himself to be a poet of love, For 'Galatea 2.2' is a once dazzling novel of sustained thinking and a piercing cri-de-couer."
Boston Book Review - Paul Gediman
"'Galatea 2.2' is not quite in the same class as Powers last two novels--the underrated 'Operation Wandering Soul' was his last--but it is a splendid intellectual adventure, a heartbreaking love story, a brief tutorial on cognitive science, and the autobiograghy of one of the most gifted writers of the younger generation. Play Pygmalion and bring this lovely Galatea to life with your appreciation."
Washington Post Book World - Steven Moore (07/09/1995)
"...It takes a pedantic flair to particularize the ins and outs of artificial intelligence, and Powers' exposition of the linguistic and perceptual intricacies underlying consciousness is nothing less than brilliant."
New Yorker - John Updike (08/21/1995)
"Sneaky is the word for Richard Powers' 'Galatea 2.2'. A book that at first seems coy, trite and annoyingly self-referential, insidiously turns the reader's expectations around before finally revealing itself as the kind of delicious novel of ideas that a computer-literate Vladimirv Nabokov might have written."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Michael Berry (08/13/1995)
"GALATEA 2.2 is an ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work....[Richard Powers] has stitched together out of disparate materials a heady and provocative experiment and brought it to life."
(07/23/1995)
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