Galatea 2.2: A Novel

Front Cover
Picador, Jan 1, 2004 - Fiction - 352 pages

"Dazzling...a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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 existing.

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
10
Section 2
11
Section 3
14
Section 4
16
Section 5
23
Section 6
26
Section 7
27
Section 8
35
Section 25
195
Section 26
205
Section 27
206
Section 28
217
Section 29
225
Section 30
242
Section 31
250
Section 32
258

Section 9
66
Section 10
71
Section 11
75
Section 12
79
Section 13
81
Section 14
84
Section 15
95
Section 16
103
Section 17
107
Section 18
110
Section 19
128
Section 20
153
Section 21
157
Section 22
175
Section 23
181
Section 24
189
Section 33
266
Section 34
290
Section 35
292
Section 36
297
Section 37
300
Section 38
303
Section 39
308
Section 40
310
Section 41
311
Section 42
313
Section 43
316
Section 44
325
Section 45
326
Section 46
327
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Galatea 2.2: A Novel
Richard Powers
Limited preview - 2004
Galatea 2. 2
Richard Powers
No preview available - 2019
Galatea 2.2
Richard Powers
No preview available - 2019

Common terms and phrases

Aerograms already answer asked Audrey Beau brain called Center child connectionism Diana Dutch Ethan Frome everything eyes face felt forever front GALATEA 2.2 girl give going grew hand Harold Hartrick head heard Helen hippocampus hope human hurt idea input Italian beef joke knew laughed layers learned Lentz Limburg listened lived longer looked lost machine Marcel mean meant memory mother needed neural neural net neurodes never night Okay once Philip Plover posthumanists PRISONER'S DILEMMA remember Richard Powers seemed sentence simulation singing smiled someone sorry sound stood stopped story Symbolic grounding synapses talking Taylor tell thing thought told took tried Trish trying Turing Test turned Violent Femmes waited walked watched week What's woman words write wrote

About the author (2004)

RICHARD POWERS is the author of a dozen novels, including The Overstory, which won the 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.

Bibliographic information

TitleGalatea 2.2: A Novel
AuthorRichard Powers
Edition2
PublisherPicador, 2004
ISBN1466803681, 9781466803688
Length352 pages
Subjects ›  ›  › 

Fiction / Literary
Fiction / World Literature / American / 21st Century
  
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