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Galatea 2.2

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Galatea 2.2

Written by: Richard Powers
Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
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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.

©1995 Richard Powers (P)2019 Recorded Books Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Science Fiction
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Complex, thoughtful, equal parts love letter to and critique of the Western canon. Highly recommend.

Breathtaking and Beautiful

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I suppose it is inevitable that the first work of a well-loved author suffers by comparison to what comes after. In Galatea 2.2 Powers seems unable to envision any ability to create in future. He attempts to spill the entire contents his formidable memory and imagination into one fragile vessel, one that is ultimately incapable of containing it. We are treated to a labyrinthine tangle of vocabulary that requires a dispassionate distance to appreciate. The whole is irresistible, but enjoyable only by allowing the tsunami of poetry, metaphor, analogy, every literary trope imaginable, wash over you and sweep you under. Should you again reach the surface it is then possible to view it in an altered, shifting light.

Be prepared.

Brilliantly Impenetrable

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