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Authors
Richard Powers (b. 1957)
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Powers has published nine novels: Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Galatea 2.2 (1995), Gain (1998), Plowing the Dark (2000), In the Time of Our Singing (2003), and The Echo Maker (2006). A special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1998) is devoted to the study of Powers’s work. Joseph Dewey’s Understanding Richard Powers (2002) is comprehensive, while an extensive discussion of Galatea 2.2 forms part of Arthur Saltzman’s This Mad “Instead”: Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction (2000).
Since Galatea 2.2 is a novel about computers, artificial intelligence, and kinds of knowing, it makes sense to have the Internet handy as you think about this story. As you read it, think about the different worlds in which you yourself have to live: the literary world of printed pages, allusions and “cultural literacy,” and deep complex ideas evolving over long hours of reading and reflection; and the electronic world in which speed and change and visual experience can lead to a very different kind of knowing.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Powers is known for his ambitious novels, works that ponder the complex impact of new knowledge on the human condition. He writes about genomics and discoveries in the cognitive sciences as well as about the ongoing revolution in information technology, the cultural compaction of the world, and the breakdown of old national and literary boundaries of every sort. In “The Seventh Event,” a short narrative, dislocations are a theme, and also an effect. What are we reading?
1. Try a web search for “Mimi Erdmann,” the supposedly famous author of books of eco-criticism, and see what happens. Then think about possible puns in the name. Richard Powers is real, of course (we can presume), and some of the personal past that he describes here is borne out by the facts. Other parts mentioned in this narrative, from Jonathan Swift to Cheryll Glofelty, can be looked up and known. What are the effects, for you, of mixing biography, history, science, and fiction in one discourse?
2. Read carefully the paragraph late in “The Seventh Event” that begins with the line, “All art was a formula, I said.” What light does this paragraph shed on Powers’s intentions here?
3. Why is the memoir, or story (or whatever it is) written in a series of sections that follow the pattern of a countdown?
