Galatea 2.2

Name: Galatea 2.2
Brand: Recorded Books
Availability: InStock
Author: Richard Powers
ISBN: 9781980016694

Author: Richard Powers

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 14 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/29/2019

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction

Synopsis

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.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Manny

[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 t......more

Goodreads review by Joshua Nomen-Mutatio

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 matt......more

Goodreads review by Ian

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 so......more