Nikki Lee and Galatea 2.2
Our Nikki Lee discussion in class brought up some interesting issues. I like how we came to the conclusion that if it were a white person, not a minority, making this critique it would have come out completely different. I like her style and I think she makes a very interesting and important point about our society. I think she’s very original. Before this I’d never heard or seen anything like what she does.
As for Galatea 2.2… I liked it more before we started talking about it. Today’s class just made me more confused and kinda made my head hurt. Unless my idea of the neural net is too basic, I didn’t find it all that confusing. Or maybe I just didn’t look deep enough the first time. What I find more confusing than the neural net is all the abbreviations and what they mean. But I guess it wouldn’t be considered postmodern if there wasn’t some kind of ambiguity in this novel. When I first started reading it I was completely lost and had no idea what was going on. I might as well have been dropped in the middle of Mongolia and told, “well, you’re on your own now… have fun with that.” But as I read on things are starting to work themselves out. It’s so weird how I’m not completely in love with this book, but I find myself compelled to read on.
Hi Aprille, I found your last line particularly interesting, when you said, “It’s so weird how I’m not completely in love with this book, but I find myself compelled to read on.” I think that this is a very conscious move by Powers, and you are certainly not the only one to feel this way. In so many ways this book is hard to access for non-sciency people such as ourselves. Because of that, we cling to those things we recognize, such as the relationship between the characters, the character types themselves, and the narrative form. However, Powers prevents us from getting too comfortable by messing with those, too. In a way it seems like he is asking us to question our ideas of how a book is written, and it is precisely because we are thrown off-balance instead of lulled by the narrative that we cannot stop because we need to know wtf is going to happen.