The backstory in Galatea 2.2

Nora Kischer-Browne writes:

I am about halfway through Galatea 2.2. It's... inexplicably sad. I find myself reading the backstory about C. because, as a reader, I'd feel guilty if I didn't. I have no sense yet of those segments being necessary except as a ridiculously extended character development that delays the action in the more interesting present-day story arc. Filler material, you might say.

One of the themes of Galatea 2.2 is that you need a history, what you're calling a “backstory”, in order to be an adult, even though the history includes failed relationships and frustrated striving for personal goals. The technological optimists are trying to take a short cut to adulthood on the theory that information can take the place of experience. Powers wants to draw our attention to the limitations of this idea.

Also, there's a little more to it than that. I don't think it's an accident that Powers uses single letters to refer both to the narrator's human loves and to the early AI implementations that he talks to. The stories come closer together at the end.

It's also amusing to see the age of much of what the narrator says about the Internet--and how much of what he and Lentz are doing is familiar to a modern-day AI enthusiast. (Perhaps because ideas find their way from old books in the sub-genre to new ones?)

It's more that Powers and the modern AI enthusiasts have carefully read the same books. Lentz is, in my opinion, Marvin Minsky as he might be inferred from Minsky's books and interviews.

Your judgement that Powers's writing is “inexplicably sad” is accurate. Most of his books deal with personal loss and grief. One of them, Operation Wandering Soul, is the most intensely sad book I've ever read.

I've reached part three of Accelerando, Charles Stross's celebratory future history of the Kurzweil singularity fantasy. After the somewhat overdone portrait of Manfred Macx in part one -- the technologically extended geek as cultural superhero, all right, I suppose it's not that much of a stretch -- it's particularly entertaining to see him brought to earth by fatherhood, economic transformation, and the perspective induced by spending a lot of time as a Hamiltonian network of passenger pigeons. Comedy mixes into AI futurist novels a lot more naturally than tragedy does, I think.

I've particularly enjoyed Stross's depiction of Aineko, who strikes me as an accurate portrait of an intelligent cat who doesn't have to worry about food. She reminded me a little bit of Eureka, the cat in the Oz books, and a little bit of Joe, a hyperintelligent but vain robot from a series of 1940s science-fiction stories by Lewis Padgett.