CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
November 2000, Vol. 42, No. 10
Graven Images:
Two Technology Novels By Richard Powers
Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Plowing the Dark (2000)
(Both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A Review by Vince Juliano
Computers are now so much a part of our lives and our thinking that a writer like Richard Powers can employ them creatively in novels that are not strictly science fiction. Instead of killer robots, cyber-punks, or misanthropic networks, Powers employs computers that illuminate the human condition and shed light on what it means to be an artist. Galatea 2.2 features artificial intelligence. Plowing the Dark deals with virtual reality (VR).
Powers himself, or a namesake with similar literary achievements, is the main character in Galatea 2.2. Protagonist Powers returns to America following the breakup of a long relationship. Because of the success of his first novels, his alma mater honors him with a fellowship, a one-year assignment to the on-campus Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. Serving as "resident humanist," he meets the brilliant, but odious Dr. Philip Lentz. Lentz enlists Powers' assistance in his own version of the Turing Test. Computer pioneer Alan Turing devised a legendary test to judge whether or not a machine could think. He proposed that the machine and a human type out answers to a set of questions. If an observer could not tell which answers had come from the machine, then the machine was to be judged intelligent. Powers and Lentz collaborate to create a machine that not only could pass a master's degree examination in literature, but also could provide answers indistinguishable from those of a human MA candidate.
Protagonist Powers reflects upon his long relationship with the woman he calls "C." Her personal life and family history often provided material for his books. While they were together, "C" read every word of his books, chapter by chapter, as he wrote them. When she left for Holland to re-join her family, Powers had followed, again finding inspiration for a novel. Their romance, however beneficial to his creativity, had failed "C," and they had parted. At the Center, Powers develops a new circle of acquaintances. However, his key relationship is with the machine intelligence that evolves from several rickety early implementations into Helen. While Lentz repeatedly re-engineers Helen's hardware, Powers delineates her curriculum and begins reading aloud to her. As her literary inventory expands, so does her insight. Even the cynical Lentz is sometimes touched by "Helenic" metaphor.
Plowing the Dark begins with the recruitment of disillusioned artist Adie Klarpol by former college boyfriend, and failed poet, Steve Spiegel. He proposes that she leave New York for Puget Sound to work on the Realization Lab's "Cavern" project. Once she experiences the Computer-Assisted Virtual Environment, Adie is hooked. The empty white Cavern becomes a three-dimensional world of crayon-drawn grass, trees and flowers where crudely sketched honeybees buzz around "tickle me pink" blossoms under a "blizzard blue" sky. Technicians help her paint with electronic palettes. She is free to generate a VR world whose dimensions, furnishings, and contents are those created by master painters of the last six centuries. Imagine entering van Gogh's apartment, sitting on his bed, peering out his window, and then, perhaps, climbing out that window to stroll through Monet's garden.
Paralleling Adie's high-tech enterprise, is the kidnapping of Taimur Martin, an American of Persian ancestry who has fled an unsatisfying domestic life for the adventure of teaching in Lebanon. It is not long before he becomes the hostage of one of that fragmented country's myriad terrorist parties. As hope for early release fades, Martin struggles to survive. He learns to placate, and sometimes manipulate, his captors. He obtains a novel and carefully rations his reading time in order to prolong the relief it brings. The guards refuse him a second title, but eventually relent, giving him a copy of the only book that matters, the Koran. To pass the time, he devises mental activities. Gradually, he creates a virtual reality of his own; a reality based on past, present, and never.
These novels force unfamiliar connections on the reader. Poet Steve Spiegel finds in software what he never found in his poems: "Fourteen lines [that] can open up to fill the available universe." A "techie" explains to Adie Klarpol that anything she can describe in software, she can reproduce. Another co-worker reasons that God prohibits "graven images" because "everything we paint comes into the world somehow," and He does not want human amateurs dabbling in something they cannot control. Protagonist Powers, once a science student, may understand that an observer cannot measure a phenomenon without changing it. Yet, he seems not to notice that his literary creativity, inspired by his observations of personal relationships (measurements, of a sort), also destroys them.
As I reflected on these novels, I wondered if dimensionless corridors connect the spiritual afterlife of our religions, the virtual worlds of our technology, and the misty realms of our imaginations. I wondered if Helen, Adie Klarpol, Taimur Martin, and Richard Powers were meeting in those corridors.
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