SOURCE: "Soul of a New Machine," in Book World—The Washington Post, July 9, 1995, pp. 1, 12.

In the laudatory review below, Moore discusses autobiographical elements in Galatea 2.2.

Richard Powers is your reward for graduating from college with a liberal arts degree. His engagingly erudite novels richly repay those art history courses you took, all the reading in literature, those electives in music and foreign languages. He does make you wish you had paid closer attention to those science requirements you struggled through, but he is a good teacher and fills you in on what you need to know. In his magnificent Gold Bug Variations (1991) it was genetics; in his new novel, it's cognitive neurology. But Galatea 2.2 is not merely a novel about science, nor science fiction; it's an elegant attempt to use cutting-edge research on cognition to explore the nature of memory and literary creation.

As in all his novels...