SOURCE: "My Fair Software," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 261, No. 2, July 10, 1995, pp. 64-6.

Below, Howard provides an overview of Galatea 2.2, discussing in particular Powers's focus on consciousness.

The debate dates from those long-ago days when the English majors frequented the library and the engineers hung out at the computer center. The English majors, unattractively smug, held that literature represented the highest form of human knowledge and expression, and that its study and mastery conferred a deeper, richer apprehension of life. The engineers, annoyingly arrogant, scoffed that deciphering a poem or novel was no more complex or privileged an exercise than balancing an equation, nothing a computer couldn't be programmed to do as well as an English major—or better. On into the night in campus bars the arguments would rage. Another pitcher of beer?

This Two Cultures face-off provides the plot for Richard Powers's fifth novel, Galatea...