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Nov 02, 2010

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it:

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 intellectual More...

40 comments like (47 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2011

oriana rated it:

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 develo More...

16 comments like (13 people liked it)

Nov 02, 2010

Jessica rated it:

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 b More...

24 comments like (25 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2008

Rob rated it:

SHORT VERSION: Galatea 2.2 is (in essence) Richard Powers' novelization of the ideas laid out in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. It's well-crafted (if a bit pretentious with the language at times) and (with no small irony) a bit recursive. It's also tragically humanist. I was half-blind with cross-eyed, hopeful denials of determinism toward the end there; or perhaps I'm thinking of naive humanitarianism? Helen's cynical abandonment (a cognitive suicide) was not anticipated but n More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 05, 2011

Hundeschlitten rated it:

Powers is a man of ideas, and he discusses several interesting ones here: the nature of love, of fiction, of consciousness. The plot is woven around the conceit that the narrator has been brought in to train a neural network to analyze literature like a living, breathing graduate student. So far, so good. I bought in to the electronic personality that the narrator trains, and I generally liked the author's miscellaneous diversions. But Powers portrays everything relevant in life as painful, or a More...

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Mar 11, 2011

Akiva rated it:

This book is good good good. It's about a lot of things from writing novels to neural networks. But probably the most important theme is an age old question: Why even bother?

The premise is that a novelist, sharing a name with the author and certain similarities in back story, is doing a year at a fictionalized research lab at what is apparently actually UIUC. He gets involved in a bet to construct a machine that can convincingly discuss literature.

But it's mainly about th More...

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Apr 07, 2010

Michael rated it:

Galatea starts from the idea that individual existence is of ultimate importance; this is a humanist book, except that one of the main characters, Helen, is a computer-powered individual. Richard Powers builds within this framework on many topics, including despair, love, loneliness, socio-technical relations, the world of academia, rare disease, and the Dutch. The book is brilliant in its depiction of despair--every page you wonder how much lower the whole situation can get, ending with the dev More...

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May 07, 2009

Goggly rated it:

While reading this book, I grew annoyed and disliked so much of it. The gimmicks frustrated, the narrator while intelligent was almost dislikeable in how much he overdescribed things, I never cared for C or even the Dutch really, and the neuroscience both seemed above my head and at times laughable (even their second iteration is miles ahead of AI theory now, and they were two men, one of which wasn't a scientist but a writer).

But then I put it down and did something I haven't done s More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 15, 2009

Chani rated it:

Richard Powers never ceases to amaze me. I love his musical style; the way he keeps digging up; the way he narrates through thinking while probing the thinking; how he thinks through telling while exploring the way language and communication work; how his novel proceeds spiralling through mazes, moving in a hall of mirrors.

Here he revisits and revives the myth of Pygmalion, telling a pseudo-autobiographical story that intertwines past and present human relationships the narrator –– More...

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Nov 18, 2011

Jessica rated it:

Reading this book was like eating a lobster; it's a lot of work, and sometimes you miss parts of it, but the parts of meat you do get to can be really delicious. This was one of the most complex and sometimes incomprehensible books I have read in a long time. I think I re-read almost every sentence at least twice, but it also had some really amazing lines in it. The kinds of lines that would make me read them out loud to my boyfriend, only to have him say "I have no idea what that means" More...

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Nov 16, 2010

Manny rated it:

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 learne More...

53 comments like (20 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2012

Lauri rated it:

Wow...
This was just the sort of sweet mixture of science, and literary excellence that I find utterly irresistible. (This is why I loved Ian McEwan's Solar, which many seem to hate vehemently) In Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers combined ideas from science, philosophy, poetry and literature into an intelligent and fascinating study about the nature of consciousness. It especially pleased me that Powers seemed to have done his homework on cognitive neuroscience, and I loved how he wove the sci More...

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Oct 22, 2010

jobiwan6 rated it:

"Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest."

http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/nec/ecks...

http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/nec/rosu...

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Dewey, Joseph. Understanding Richard Powers.
Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. [page 102]

Penc More...

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Dec 23, 2011

Frank rated it:

This is a fairly dense book, ambitiously covering a lot of ground: the writing and reading of literature, relationships of love, humanism, neural network sci-fi. It is a semi-autobiographical (semi-fictionalized? the cup is half-what?) narrative about an author named Richard Powers who is tasked by a (seemingly fictional alter-ego) scientist to teach a vast neural network to read. Not just read as in simply parse words into some syntactic hierarchy and extrapolate semantic facts, but to read in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 28, 2010

Cassiel rated it:

It's not that Powers is forgettable, no not at all, but his books fall into such different catagories....
When I read Gain, I was surprised to find I'd read another, The Echo Maker.
Finishing Galatea, I was again surprised that I had previously read two of RP's books.
Mr Power's reclusivity has been working, at least on me.
Gain
The Echo Maker: A Novel More...

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Dec 24, 2010

Ezra rated it:

i should have liked this. a carefully researched novel about artifical intelligence, cleverly blended with classical/victorian themes, a masterful use of sentence structure and vocabulary. i finished the book, and sort of enjoyed it, but it took me way too long. richard powers' self-conscious misanthropic act, his potshots at academia, and his idea of romance, are all rather exhausting, and i needed a lot of breaks. i also felt the need to administer actual science writing, as an antidote... it' More...

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Dec 01, 2010

Scott rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Sep 02, 2011

m.j. rated it:

This book was the biggest disappointment this year so far. About a year ago I found it mentioned in another book by Bruno Latour (Aramis, or the Love of Technology), a book I enjoyed very much. It opened my mind on how technology, management, politics and science are intertwined in our society and how success or failure of a new technology have little to do with the rational development process behind it but with how to communicate this process to people with a completely different interest. So More...

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Aug 30, 2008

Rob rated it:

well...i gave this book a good try but just never cared a bit for it, or any of the characters...or even the main plot-line, which was interesting enough but just never worked for me.

The main plot-line is that the main character gets involved with another character to build a machine that can parse language and respond to questions about literature - very interesting and brushes on some very interesting topics like the nature of intelligence, memory, language, etc. Problem is the st More...

1 comment like

Feb 16, 2008

Matt rated it:

While the book addresses a very technical subject matter--neurology and computers/technology growing role in cognitive development--it in the end simultaneously celebrates and critiques humananism (as best as postmodernism can address such an issue). A neuorlogist and the Richard Powers (the author writes himself into the novel) endeavors to train a computer network to read and critique works of literature to see if it can attain a similar response to that of a graduate student . The result: the More...

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Oct 02, 2007

Brooke rated it:

old book blog...

Pt 1.
I am currently about half way through Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. First sign that the author is a little pretentious is that the main character is an author named Richard Powers. This is not a biography. At least I"m pretty sure it's not, considering it's about an author in a giant scientific center trying to create a machine that will think and read. At least that's the gist of it. It's actually quite technical in it's content, sometimes hard More...

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Dec 03, 2007

Jason rated it:

This just wasn't what I expected. The weaving of the backstory with the present action was awkward and jumped back and forth too quickly with seemingly little thought as to when and why parts of the past were nested within parts of the present. I ended up not really caring about any character because of this. A machine that can read and write about literature was a neat premise, but it just turned into a clever way to recycle every bit of famous dead male writing for the past five hundred years. More...

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Nov 19, 2007

Jae rated it:

This is the first book I've read by Richard Powers. I had heard about The Echo Maker on NPR and started looking at review for his books. Galatea 2.2 is a modern retelling of the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who carved a statue (in some versions of the myth, the statue's name is Galatea) and fell in love with it. Aphrodite hears Pygmalion's prayers and brings the statue to life.

I thought Powers did a fine job of combining a (I'm guessing) fully fictional account of training a simu More...

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Jul 13, 2007

Chilly rated it:

A novelist doing a stint as ‘Humanist-in-Residence’ at the college from which he graduated in a midwestern town gets involved in a bet among several scientists in the Center where he works. Finding himself comited to the bet, and partnered with a bitter and sardonic scientist named Lentz, they set out to create an artificial intelligence which will be tested, in several months time, essentially as a graduating student of literature would be. Lentz creates a series of machines, or neural networks More...

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Jun 30, 2007

Natalie rated it:

This was the book that introduced me to Richard Powers, who is one of my most admired contemporary novelists. I picked it up because it's about artificial intelligence-- the challenge is whether or not a computer can be taught to understand and appreciate poetry (specifically Milton, if I remember correctly). In the larger sense, it's about the (sometimes fraught) intersections between scientific and humanist thinking. The main character, however, is a novelist named Richard Powers -- who has wr More...

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Oct 21, 2007

daniel rated it:

a beautiful book.

part pseudo-autobiography / part science fiction, powers tells the story of (an ambiguously fictional version of) himself teaching literature to a nascent neural-network (i.e., AI program). inevitably, this gives rise to countless questions that run from banal (how??) to complex and deep (what is fiction bereft of the context of its readers' lived histories?), and though powers thus takes on quite a bit, he doesn't disappoint. he brilliantly delimits the scope and d More...

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Feb 13, 2011

Aletta rated it:

Fantastic read. My boss recommended it to me and I didn't really know what to think. For the first 100 pages I was particularly lost with what the heck was happening in this unfamiliar world of neural science. However, by the end I became extremely attached to the characters, the science and the lessons of rebirth, struggle, comprehension and perception. Each character plays a fundamental role in displaying thoughts, from the autistic son of a colleague, to the protagonist's bull headed research More...

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Apr 29, 2011

Sarah rated it:

I found this book tedious and self-indulgent. It had some very good moments, but not enough to overcome my struggles with the meandering plot and two-dimensional characters. The protagonist and his ex, C., were the only characters given any real depth. While Powers is a skilled manipulator of the English language, some of his sentences were far too clever and ornate for their own good. Ex. "She was my midmorning's hypothetical. The givens of my day revealed their thinnest convention, so lon More...

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Jul 03, 2008

John rated it:

Richard Powers may well stand as the preeminent American novelist of this turn of the millennium, and for my money it's in this novel that his cerebral reach and emotional contortions prove the most fascinating. G 2:2 renders a computer-science course as a sketch of one lost soul staggering towards renewal; it reinvents love in binary code. A few of the touches of tragedy here -- from the pain of growing up with an alcoholic father to the quandaries of a man whose spouse has slipped into demen More...

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Oct 30, 2011

James rated it:

In this novel Richard Powers uses language and literary references with a sharp pen, deftly weaving them into a moving and beautiful narrative. The novel describes the building of a literary thinking machine. It is a machine that gradually matures over the course of several iterations, but in the end it is a life of reading that fueled all of his loves.
The novel is pseudo-autobiographical: the narrator is named Richard Powers and there is discussion of the four novels he wrote before Gal More...

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