SOURCE: A review of Galatea 2.2, in Boston Review, Vol. XX, No. 3, Summer, 1995, p. 37.

In the following positive review, Gediman provides a thematic analysis of Galatea 2.2.

Richard Powers' first book, Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance, was a gyroscopic meditation on meaning and time based on a photograph taken on the eve of World War I. In his third, The Gold Bug Variations, he appropriated the genetic code as an extended metaphor, adding the twisting pursuit of meaning to the strands of the double helix. His novels teem with history, science, and ideas. They are grounded in an obsession with, and a feel for, the music of pattern that can be compared only to Nabokov and Pynchon. His project is as breathtakingly easy to name as it is impossible ever to complete: he's after a poetics of consciousness.

Galatea 2.2, his fifth novel, is his most direct attempt...