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    Galatea 2.2
    Galatea 2.2
    Galatea 2.2
    Audiobook14 hours

    Galatea 2.2

    Written by Richard Powers

    Narrated by David Aaron Baker

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 29, 2019
    ISBN9781980016694

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    Reviews for Galatea 2.2

    4/5

    294 ratings15 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The only book I’ve read through and immediately “re-read” the audiobook version because I didn’t want it to end. This book would make a fabulous movie!
    • 3/5
      Even for the lazy (I know , but cannot remember it...now) eruditists,this book offers an overload of verbal challenges: Turing machine, The First Sully (Sullenberger?), Vaucanson's Duck...etcetera.After the author accepts the odd literary AI offer, why doesn't he take typing lessons?And why would even an emotionally very insecure man recovering from a breakdownfrom a jerk-off partner choose to allow himself to be repeatedly verbally berated by his new "boss?"So many other choices at a university, non? Unless one enjoyed being obsessed and rejected...No wonder he gravitates to Helen whom (!) he does not at all prepare for writing the final essay un which she and Powers were supposed to be judged...?Both the cover and the ending are unappealing.
    • 5/5
      Hated, dated, hard work (slog), so implausible, grew very impressed and pulled in eventually. Three, four, five love stories.
    • 5/5
      My thoughts on Richard Powers have been expressed before. He remains a divisive figure. Many doubt his prowess. Some find him too American. This could be an example of Asperger's literature. I object to that last sentiment. This is a novel with heart. Somewhere between artificial intelligence and Ani Difranco, Mr Powers afforded voice to a muddled world of emotions and violence: both somehow framed in the altered world of office hours. His ouerve often appears to be talking therapy. He's backtracking from his interpersonal perils by means of evocative digression, yet he can't leave the University grounds. I can't fault him for such. I have read Galatea 2.2 three times and have never broken into song.
    • 3/5
      Disappointing. It's on the list of 100 Best SF Novels (Broderick & DiFilippo), and it's certainly no potboiler, but it's a bit of a snooze (or perhaps I just didn't "get it.") The author identified several characters (and places) by first initial only, but others he named outright--it's offputting and I couldn't see the value of that particular choice.

      At least half the novel detailed the breakdown of a relationship the protagonist had with a Manic-Depressive Pixie Dream Girl who seemed extremely difficult and he was well rid of her. I don't think the character (or perhaps author) realised that.

      I think there are more fun, more gripping, more tautly-constructed works out there. Decent, but missable.
    • 2/5
      I was extremely intrigued by the idea of this novel, but I felt completely cheated by the banal misanthropic ending. This is one of those novels that make me wish I could sue the author to get back the time I wasted reading it. After wading through almost 400 pages of somewhat flabby writing this was all Powers came up with?The story of trying to create an artificial intelligence that can write an English paper better than a human is interlarded with the story of the main character's trite failed love affair with C. Presumably this is to reflect somehow on his relation with Helen, the artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the result isn't nearly as clever as the Raphael-based cover.My lack of sympathy at his love affair is partly because I remember the heady days of the sexual revolution when there would be no commitments, relationships would endure as long as the lovers chose one another every day. When the relationship broke down, it would be mutual and they would part without rancor or broken hearts and go on to their new loves. I knew that was never going to work reliably. Cervantes had this pegged in the 16th century. The book made me think of B.R. Myers' "A Readers Manifesto" that appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic (it can be googled online.) Myers condemns affected prose and poor story-telling: "Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction"—at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L." True, but what this book particularly reminded me of is Myers' dislike of long lists and babble. I thought this book had an interesting premise, but once we were past the setup, we just bobbed in a slow river of lists of what the narrator, cleverly named Powers, taught Helen the computer, plus his brooding over his failed love affair. There story began to pick up a little as Powers, having given Helen a fairly sunny view of humanity, suddenly burdens her with all of its failings. Reminded me of a technique they used in school when I was young -- no wonder the baby-boomers revolted in the sixties and seventies. Finally, we get to the climax where Helen is to compete with a human student in writing an essay about literature. It struck me that while they had taught Helen more than I know about poker and pool, I didn't remember them actually teaching her the conventions of writing such an essay, unless I nodded off during the middle of the book. (Entirely possible.)And after all this, all that Powers has to offer is this trite ending? I remember a reviewer talking about another author's book, earnestly saying that the author makes an important point that we all need to read. Oh yeah, there are only hundreds of books making the exact same point. Reading older novels helps one realize that there are intellectual fads, and every generation thinks that it has finally come upon The Truth, and this is so important that the reader is being picky if they have any demands about the quality of the reading experience when the author is expressing himself/herself and explaining the meaning of the universe to them.
    • 2/5
      Galatea 2.2 is book that feels very 90s. Its prose is littered with postmodernist buzzwords and now obsolescent technical jargon, its parallel plots of the construction of Helen and the failed relationship with C both feel unsatisfactorily contrived and its motifs of globalization and the fear of creeping computerization are both now hopelessly dated.
      But even if Galatea 2.2 didn't suffer from these faults, it would also have to contend with the author's unartful "Pynchonian" use of technical metaphors, scads of minor characters who should have contributed much more, and the stalking obsession he has with a graduate student near the end of the book.
      I feel that the author is capable of much better and was probably emotionally distressed when he wrote this and I'm honestly hoping that it was only written to fulfill a contract, because a book this sloppy cannot possibly be a work of passion for a MacArthur fellow.
    • 4/5
      very clever. Autobiographical novel, main character is Richard Powers, working on a special grant, in a neuropsych/computer project, working to teach a computer to think, specifically to be able to pass a test at a English literature master's level ... also the heartbreaking story of his relationship (finished) with C...
    • 5/5
      A love letter to English Literature in the form of an AI update on the Pygmalion myth, interleaved with an autobiographical tale of love lost and inertia, and chock full of wry prose and clever reference. Also an at-times disturbing examination of projection and how it shapes our relationships with others. The setting is rather unnerving for me, as it is set at my alma mater, and even in the very buildings where I once worked and learned.
    • 3/5
      This book is a bit of a mixed bag, and it's not as good as the other Powers' novels I've read. Powers takes on the post-modern autobiographical fiction genre, and in a typical twist, he pairs it with a subplot about a computer gaining consciousness. The interplay between the memory of the character, "Richard Powers," and the learning of the machine are often interesting, but other times they are too vague and metaphysical. The book is strewn with quotations from other works of literature, so the pastiche of constructed plots gets to play off the way identity and consciousness is created. It's all very interesting, but it doesn't quite come off. The ending of the novel was a bit predictable and as a result a let down. So I don't think this is Powers' best book, but like all of them, the ideas behind the book are quite interesting.
    • 5/5
      Powers' novel is about a young man (who would never think of himself that way) trying to make sense of his small piece of the world. As an author, he creates narratives to make meaning out of lives that touch his, yet he struggles to find meaning and purpose in his own existence. Powers loads his characters' lives with circumstances that range from merely sad to full-on tragic - cancer, a child with Down's syndrome, failed relationships, a partner with memory loss akin to Alzheimers, homesickness, displacement - yet these characters are never overwhelmed or rendered caricatures by their circumstances. They continue to function, to make jokes, to work, to learn, to complain, and to grow. They are, including the computer simulation, wonderfully human. It is these characters, their interactions and their histories and their journeys, that make this an immensely satisfying novel.
    • 5/5
      Tour de force is a term that's tossed around all too lightly, but this book deserves it if any novel does. This is a marvelous book that at once explicates neuroscientific ideas about how selfhood emerges from reading, experience and memory in humans and, theoretically, computer programs; dramatizes these idea in a compelling, evidently autobiographical narrative; and ultimately makes a compelling case for the value and significance of literature as a source of meaning in a world of human cruelty and chaos.
    • 4/5
      In this novel 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 and the complications that ensue. But in the end the life of reading fueled all of his loves.
    • 5/5
      One of the best American novels of the '90s, and Powers is perhaps my favorite American novelist now writing (well, except maybe Philip Roth, but that's a whole different kettle of gefilte fish).
    • 4/5
      Overwritten and mired in an obscurantist postmodern style, this is nonetheless a fascinating, and strangely affecting, novel, exploring with great plausibility the creation of a "literary consciousness" in the form of an artificially intelligent neural network. As always with Powers, the intellect behind the book is astonishing, and at the end, even if there's not too much left for you to think, there is plenty to feel.