Galatea 2.2/a Novel by Richard Powers (1995, Hardcover) - eBay (item 130341359309 end time Nov-08-09 10:47:08 PST)


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Item specifics - Fiction & Literature Books

Author:	Richard Powers	Format:	Hardcover
Publisher:	Farrar Straus & Giroux	ISBN-10:	0374199485
ISBN-13:	9780374199487	Subject:	Science Fiction
Publication Year:	1995	Topic:	--
Special Attributes:	1st Edition	Language:	English
Condition:	Very Good

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Detailed item info

Synopsis
Leaving behind the ruins of a love affair, the protagonist of Richard Powers's fifth novel--a novelist named Richard Powers--returns to the United States and takes a position as a Humanist-in-Residence at the Center of Advanced Sciences. While there, Powers meets the brilliant cognitive neurologist Philip Lentz, who challenges Powers to teach a neural network to appreciate art and literature. This brilliantly conceived novel, infused with shades of FRANKENSTEIN and PYGMALION, challenges our notions of identity, communication, art, and meaning, and proves that Powers is one of the most intellectually and artistically ambitious living writers.
Size
Height:	8.5 in.
Width:	6.3 in.
Thickness:	1.2 in.
Weight:	17.6 oz.

Publisher's Note
After four novels and several years of 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 falls 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 until the machine becomes capable of passing a comprehensive exam in English literature. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing. Powers drills it in Chaucer and Austen and James, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master's candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete.
Industry reviews
"Powers is as gifted and important a novelist as we have....He has already proven himself a master of incorporating science into fiction, a poet of chaos and fuzzy logic. Here, he shows himself to be a poet of love, For 'Galatea 2.2' is a once dazzling novel of sustained thinking and a piercing cri-de-couer." Boston Book Review - Paul Gediman "...It takes a pedantic flair to particularize the ins and outs of artificial intelligence, and Powers' exposition of the linguistic and perceptual intricacies underlying consciousness is nothing less than brilliant." New Yorker - John Updike (08/21/1995) "GALATEA 2.2 is an ingenious, ambitious, at times dizzily cerebral work....[Richard Powers] has stitched together out of disparate materials a heady and provocative experiment and brought it to life." (07/23/1995) "Richard Powers' people are ideas and his ideas are people; and so, right away, he sets himself apart from writers who sketch an engaging intellectual path but don't find characters to tread it." Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (06/18/1995) "A splendid intellectual adventure, a heartbreaking love story, a brief tutorial on cognitive science, and the autobiography of one of the most gifted writers of the younger generation." Washington Post Book World - Steven Moore (07/09/1995) "The kind of delicious novel of ideas that a computer-literate Vladimir Nabokov might have written." San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Michael Berry (08/13/1995)

Great book in very good condition. First edition.

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Item location: Yorba Linda, CA, United States

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