Rating: 
Summary: There is only one thing to say...
Review: ...about this book, and I've said it to the author: In the end, it makes you feel exquisitely lost.
Rating: 
Summary: unengaging and straining
Review: A friend recommended one of Power's novels just as the New York Times piece about him came out, and I was intrigued: another "cerebral" writer, à la Calvino, Borges, Nabokov? I've also been tremendously interested in AI--but the novel was disappointing: the actual writing is strained and even pretentious at times, while the narrative never becomes engaging. He works with big, interesting ideas, but they don't seem to result in big (or even small) interesting novels.
Rating:
Summary: unengaging and straining
Review: A friend recommended one of Power's novels just as the New York Times piece about him came out, and I was intrigued: another "cerebral" writer, Ã la Calvino, Borges, Nabokov? I've also been tremendously interested in AI--but the novel was disappointing: the actual writing is strained and even pretentious at times, while the narrative never becomes engaging. He works with big, interesting ideas, but they don't seem to result in big (or even small) interesting novels.
Rating:
Summary: unengaging and straining
Review: A friend recommended one of Power's novels just as the New York Times piece about him came out, and I was intrigued: another "cerebral" writer, à la Calvino, Borges, Nabokov? I've also been tremendously interested in AI--but the novel was disappointing: the actual writing is strained and even pretentious at times, while the narrative never becomes engaging. He works with big, interesting ideas, but they don't seem to result in big (or even small) interesting novels.
Rating:
Summary: You can still learn and be moved
Review: A magnificent book. I have loved all of Richard Power's books, and this is no exception. His writing is superb on several levels, and I'd like to mention just 2 of them. First of all, he is not afraid of feeling. Many young writers display his verbal virtuousity, but he is one of the only to indulge in true, heartfelt, unadulterated emotion. He is not ashamed to feel for his characters, even as an omnipotent storyteller (which he is in this book). The emotional makeup of a person seems to be his beacon in navigating his protagonists' lives and times. Second, he certainly manages to teach us and delight us simultaneously. This is a problematic genre, because most times these two goals come to blows somewhere in the book. I think this is because the authors usually begin to write (About science, music etc.) with set opinions. They want to transfer knowledge. Powers does not do this. He is immensely knowledgable on almost everything, but never does he force his opinions on us. He questions, sharing with us the basic premises leading him to these questions, and thus truly teaches and illuminates. His quests keave us no option but to join, making us better persons at their end. He has no answers, only the ever-continuing process of learning and questioning. I hope he continues this quest for a long time. Buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A pleasurable struggle
Review: A sometimes difficult book, especially with all of the computer references that are included (which are not exactly my forte'). Still, it remains a very good book, for we get a good sense of the protagonist's being adrift in a new life. It is interesting how he tries to find some handhold on his world while mixed in with people who very nearly speak a whole other language than himself. I am always attracted to characters who are spiritually wounded, yet manage to summon the courage to continue on with their lives, as well as to tackle daunting tasks. However, this isn't one of those books that will leave you happy and fuzzy after the last page. Those of you who swear by a certain talk show host's club's selections may want to avoid this one. But, if you like giving your brain cells a bit of a workout, this work is definitely a good choice.
Rating:
Summary: Always intellectually engaging, frequently moving
Review: Aside from the first 20 pages or so, which struck me as sort of pretentious (I started and stopped a couple of times), and the romantic interest in the graduate student, which seemed forced and poorly developed, this novel is pretty close to perfect. The amount of emotional weight Powers can make one feel for a machine - and almost all of the novel's characters - is astonishing. Plus this whole book has a sincerity that a lot of other erudite modern fiction seems to lack. One can feel that Powers put of lot more of himself into this book than just his knowledge of artificial intelligence and literature, which is more than I can say for most of the brainy/flashy stuff that people are writing nowadays.
Rating:
Summary: A Highly Intelligent Novel about Artificial Intelligence
Review: Before buying this book, I read a review of the Japanese edition of the book, and thought that even I, a non-native speaker of English, should be able to read its original English edition rather easily because of the following reasons: (1) The author Richard Powers studied physics before becoming a writer, and I am a physicist. (2) This is a scientific novel about artificial intelligence. In fact, this book has very rich contents more than computer-based neural networks, and full understanding requires much knowledge about Western literature. Thus it was rather tough for me to read through it. After finishing, however, I am quite satisfied with the struggle I had with this book. The protagonist, named after the author, joins the project being undertaken by the cognitive neurologist Philip Lentz, and trains a series of neural networks, which are named Imp A, B, C, and so on (Imp is an abbreviation for Implementation). Their work place, the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences, is located at U. Along with this story, Richard's love affair with his former student C. is told. They once lived together in B. They are however separated, and Richard is attracted to another young lady, A. Imp A, B, C, etc. are okay, but as for ladies C. and A. and places U. and B., what rough naming the author made in this work! But wait. This might be a technique to give the story much reality like a private note. I have been training a female friend of mine to read and write in English only by exchanging e-mail messages written in English these several months. This limited method of training is in a sense quite similar to Richard's training of neural networks, and I have found many parallels between this novel and my experience. Even from this fact only, I can conclude that this book is well written. Imp H or Helen learned too much and finally . . . Oh, this is not what I want to happen to my pupil and me. I highly recommend this novel to all intelligent readers.
Rating:
Summary: To Plough Through Tough Dough:
Review: Blah. Anyone who would wish Tom Clancy to come by and drop a bomb on this story (in reference to the previous review of 1 Star) is not of the calibre of person who would most benefit from, or enjoy this book. No, that person would more likely enjoy reading the kind of novel, that when turned into a film, is full of exploding buildings, is one of the top ten grossing films for the year, and has "marketed to the adolescent male" written over it. Galatea 2.2, in film form, would be shown at one of the "Alternative" or "Art-House" cinemas, the kind where you can buy a beer at the concession stand, and no one throws Jujubees at the screen. The novel is a complexly intertwined dual narrative about a character named Richard Powers--in one plot, involved in a love that is succumbing to a heat-death theory of love; in the other plot, involved in a heated contest to create an artificially intelligent computer that can outperform a graduate student on the English Lit. Master's Comps. exam. The prose is riveting. I'd pay to read Powers's shopping lists if they're worded as cleverly as the bulk of this text. In descrbing the AI machine's (aka Helen) learning of the pronunciation of the English Language, Powers writes that it learned how "to plough through tough dough." Clever, eh? This book is large--it raises all sorts of questions regarding consciousness, intelligence, love, literature, the western canon, et. al.
Rating: 
Summary: Should have waited for version 3.0
Review: Cognitive science and complex fiction are two of my favorite things, and so after finishing Powers' _The Gold Bug Variations_ (a stunningly good novel) this seemed like a natural. In Galatea 2.2, a novelist named Richard Powers retreats to his old university (known only as U), now as a visiting professor, to recover following the end of a love affair and a poor critical reception of his latest book. While at U, he falls in with a bunch of cogntive neuroscientists who are trying to build an artificial intelligence using "neural network" or "connectionist" computer models. He spends his one-year temporary appointement as a humanities tutor to the slowly developing computer program, while also ruminating about his lost love. I had some trouble believing that this was written by the same person who wrote The Gold Bug Variations. Much of the dialogue is unconvincing academicspeak in which a lot of 1980s era computing jargon gets thrown around pretty carelessly. I could not decide whether Richard Powers, character, or Richard Powers, author, is the self-indulgent jerk, but I knew that it was one or the other. Many elegant turns-of-phrase, but the whole thing seemed lifeless, surprisingly static, and none of the characters (except perhaps the computer program) were remotely believable, interesting, or even human. A feeling of tiredness or fatigue seems to pervade the entire book, although whether that was by design, or whether it's the author's own world-weariness poking through, was very hard to say. Altogether, not Powers' strongest work, or one of the best "takes" on this theme.
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