Galatea 2.2

a novel by Richard Powers (1995)

A contemporary and imaginative reworking of the Pygmalion myth. A novelist (very like Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion") returns from a failed love affair in the Netherlands to take up a post as ``Humanist-in-Residence'' at a major university. Unable to write, he meets Philip Lentz (very like Colonel Pickering in the play), a cognitive neurologist who entices (there is a bet involved, as in "Pygmalion") him to spend his year teaching a computer network (think Galatea or Eliza Doolittle) enough classical literature to outscore a graduate student on a comprehensive exam in English literature.

The fictional Powers (our fictional novelist happens to have the same name as our real novelist) programs the neural simulator, reads to it great chunks of literature and history, questions it and eventually is questioned by it: "What race am I? What races hate me?" The big network likes Mozart and knows "something about the Dreyfus case and the Boer War" but is ignorant of such things as "corks stuck in bottles, the surface of a liquid reflection ... wrappers and price tags, up versus down, the effects of hunger ..." The novelist comes to think of the computer as female and calls it Helen. Like Liza Doolittle, who appears in high society when she has acquired a correct accent but has no notion of polite conversation, Helen falls a few characteristics short of what her creators dreamed.

Does he fall in love with what can never become more than a mock-up of human intelligence? Not really, though he is repulsed by Lentz suggestion to "lobotomize it" to test its workings. Throughout the book there are other story threads about past and current failed love relationships.

This sad and gentle story winds down with "Powers" and "Helen" fully and separately aware of loneliness, and neither able to help the other.