Galatea 2.2 - Softcover

Richard Powers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312423136 ISBN 13: 9780312423131

Publisher: Picador, 2004

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 this title

Review:

Cognitive neurologist and well-known writer team up to produce a machine that can pass a comprehensive exam in English literature, with predictably unpredictable results. Like The Gold Bug Variations, this is another of Powers' wild, unforgettable novels encompassing science, philosophy, and the frailty of mankind.

About the Author:

RICHARD POWERS is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0312423136
• ISBN 13: 9780312423131
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 336