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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Metafiction or Autobiography?, July 18, 2002
This review is from: Galatea 2.2: A Novel (Paperback)
Last year I added Powers' The Gold Bug Variations to my favorites list (a set of roughly 100 novels and stories that I consider the best things to have passed my way) and stated then that I would have to find out if his other novels had the same appeal for me. When scouring the used bookstore shelves, his name is often the one I start with, hoping to find a copy of his rare first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. Instead, I often saw copies of his fourth--Operation Wandering Soul--which I have decided to pass for the moment. Then I discovered this one. Powers again on science, this time artificial consciousness. Sounded like a winner to me. I knew it wouldn't be the same as The Gold Bug Variations. That novel had a *sine qua none* aspect of perfection that I doubted could be matched even by its author. What I had not expected was a meditation on that book--a reflection or introspection of his career as a novelist to date. The main character in Galatea 2.2 is a man named Richard Powers, a man who has written three novels and is just finishing his fourth as the book opens. The novels have the same titles and subjects as those of the author of this book, but can we assume that the protagonist and the author are the same? (One branch of literary theory says that no author is the same between books. That as soon as any single work is finished, that author is unattainable--dead, so to speak, to the world. I was surreptitiously referring to this above.) Why is it an issue? Because the Powers displayed herein is so flawed that you don't want to believe it is the same person. Yes, I still have that silly illusion that authors can somehow be better than the rest of us, to be above spite and greed and depression. But one has only to look at oneself to see the problem with that belief. How Powers comes across in his novels (the implied narrator) is different than how he is in "real life." I also suspect that it is different than how he sees himself as well. The self-examination is only half of this book (an extremely interesting half, to be sure, as we come to learn the "reality" behind his "meteoric" publishing career). Interspersed with that story is a year that the protagonist spends as Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. He first finds himself at odds, spending his days as a hermit before this new thing called the Internet that allows him to travel the world from his desktop. One night, while in his armchair travels, he hears a repeated strain of music from down the hall. Investigating, he meets Lentz, an acerbic researcher into neural nets. A chance encounter between the two at an university bar the next week, and Powers is drawn into a wager in which he must learn the limits of machine intelligence and reveal his soul to Lentz, who strangely has become his friend and antagonist. I can't tell you if the science is any good--it is way beyond my Liberal Arts comprehension--but the characters are great, even if some of them aren't the kind of people you would want to share research with. Powers captures the pure upmanship of science perfectly; the arrogance, the exaggeration, the doubt, the disinclination. When he says that he was a failed physics student, we can take him at his word, but, contrary to his stated belief here, he is not a failed observer of the human condition. This may have been a therapeutic exercise for the author. It is if we believe the character of Richard Powers shares some of the same emotions with the author. For the rest of us, it has some benefit as well, a view of success that questions itself and a glimpse into one of the most important things in life: balance.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Moving and compelling, but in the end, hollow, May 10, 2002
This review is from: Galatea 2.2: A Novel (Paperback)
While I was reading Galatea, I was entranced. The book tells two stories side by side. In one, the protagonist (not coincidentally also named Richard Powers) is a washed-up author enlisted by a computational neuroscientist to train a artifical neural net to parse, understand, and comment on English literature. The others is Powers' fictionalized autobiography, describing his ultimately failed 10-year relationship with the unnamed woman C. Both stories are beautiful. They warn you in advance they are going to break your heart, but they proceed to do so with such an honest approach to human inadequacy and regret that although the end is filled with sentiment, it has earned the right to that sentiment. There was not a character in the book I did not love. In the science fiction storyline, Powers uses a highly novel approach to the genre: actually writing about science and scientists. The story of discovery proceeds incrementally through several tweaks and re-implementations of the developing artificial intelligence. It is one of the few novels I have read that adequately captures the feeling of doing research in a highly speculative field, but does so without becoming tedious. Similarly, the scientists Powers works with have fully developed lives outside their research. One gets the feeling that these are real people that you would like to know yourself, people with lives that the book only scratches the surface of. The autobiography is also well-conducted, being about himself without being self-indulgent. From the beginning of his relationship with C., Powers simply expresses regret over his inability to be the person C. needed him to be at any given time until the assymetry of their relationship hollows it out and kills it. He often dwells on what he would have liked to have done at each step in its decay, and how far short his actual actions fell of those unvoiced desires. This part of the story is simply an honest look at the fear of living up to one's intentions and regret for having not done so. After I finished, though, I was unsatisfied. Each part of the book raises difficult, important issues: What does it mean to have consciousness? What is meaning, anyway? What role does literature have in the modern world? How can people let the ones they love know that? To what extent can we really know another human being? Is there hope for human civilization? Yet in each instance, Powers not only shies away from trying to answer, but refrains from even giving hope that an answer might exist. All he can say is that he would like to make some moving, profound statement, but is either powerless to act or inhibited from doing so. Though a pleasure to read, both for its wit and its heartbreaking honesty, in my final analysis, Galatea disappoints. This book is like a nervous suitor who stands on the doorstep of profundity, poises his knuckles to rap on the door, and then, after several long seconds of silence, walks away without having knocked.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Carbon or Silicon based?, August 30, 2000
This review is from: Galatea 2.2: A Novel (Paperback)
Richard Powers is a gifted writer, a rather unusual measure of that are the reviews that people write about his work. With the usual exception, those that read his work take what he has written, and integrate it in to their own ideas. His books are not just entertainment. Another reviewer suggested the Author allows for this ambiguity in his writing, he allows the reader the freedom of opinion on outcome, the ability to make a choice. The primary subject he presents in this work is one that will continue to grow from theory, until it forces fundamental beliefs to be questioned, and bring out the most Fundamentalist of Luddites, and with them debate that will carry the potential for disruption, or worse, violence. Mr. Powers has a talent for writing about arcana and making the subjects accessible. Unlike many reviewers, my knowledge of the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence is strictly that of an amateur. I found that Mr. Powers brought credibility to a theme that has been little more than bad Science Fiction in the hands of other Authors. He included all the tech-talk, but he used language in its most basic forms to first make the project appear possible, to bringing the true enormity of what will be required before anything akin to sentience can be achieved/created. The written words, when he collected them into novel form, also became the deciding factor in his initial carbon-based personal relationship. When silicon took the place of carbon the importance of language was increased exponentially. Neither relationship was fruitful. One reviewer queried that when we finished the book did the experience stop or is it continuing even now. If you have never read this Author, what I write might suggest I have a form of dementia. I admit that before I read "Plowing The Dark" I thought other reviewers were there, way, way, out there. Mr. Powers is the perfect novelist, for when you are immersed in his work he suspends disbelief faultlessly. He does not intrude, and he does not preach. Making the decision to read his work is a bit like what Neo faced, the red pill, or the blue? Once you start with the first book, you cannot stop reading until he stops writing.
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