The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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Powers's tenth novel, 2009's Generosity: An Enhancement, has writing professor Russell Stone encountering his former student, Thassa, an Algerian woman whose constant happiness is exploited by journalists and scientists. This is a very different book to the 8 Powers’ novel that precede it chronologically. The narrative style is very different: for at least three-quarters of the book, the writing is fairly straightforward story-telling with little of the erudition and complexity that has marked earlier works. Powers sort of makes up for that in the final quarter, though.

Artificial intelligence, we need to recognise, is as much an ideology as a process. Siliconvalleyism we might call it. No matter that the very idea that the human brain is a kind of computer is, in the words of the great neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, “one of the most remarkable misunderstandings in the history of science”; no matter that human judgement and creativity are not the output of a series of syntactical rules. Silicon Valley makes huge profits by seeking to persuade us that they are – to make us, like the architects, the servants of whatever their algorithms dictate. It isn’t that artificial intelligence is becoming more human. It’s that human intelligence is becoming more artificial, more conformist, more rule-bound. Siliconvalleyism and the flight from critical judgement is a greater threat to the liberal ideal than anything in Putin’s armoury. The Echo Maker is a mystery novel in which mysteries planted in the plot point to larger enigmas about the frailty and impermanence of personal identity, the factitiousness of memory, the tenuous bonds between mind and body, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Immediately after the near-fatal accident, when Karin visits her comatose brother in the hospital, she finds an unsigned note beside his bed:Colson Whitehead, writing in The New York Times, called it a "post-911 novel .. not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day." [6] See also [ edit ] A kind of neuro-cosmological adventure . . . an exhilarating narrative feat . . . Powers is a formidable talent, and this is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel.” — The Washington Post Book World of, Department. "Richard Powers | Department of English | University of Illinois". www.english.illinois.edu . Retrieved 2018-04-19.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. —The Gold Bug Variations The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it. —Galatea 2.2

Book Summary

I’m a bit conflicted after completing this re-read of The Echo Maker. Somehow, it was simultaneously better than that the first time through and also not as good. I’m not sure how that can work, but it is how I felt on completing it. Richard Powers has written extensively, both fiction and non-fiction, over the past two decades for many publications, including The New Yorker, New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, and The Paris Review. 1 On video games