Galatea 2.2

Galatea 2.2 is a 1995 novel by American writer Richard Powers, a contemporary reworking of the Pygmalion myth. Its narrator shares the author's name, and the book draws on events and reading from Powers's life, mixed with episodes whose factual basis is uncertain.

The main plot follows Powers's return to his alma mater, called only "U." in the novel but clearly modelled on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after ending a long and turbulent relationship with a loving but volatile woman, referred to as "C.". As an in-house writer for the university, he has a free apartment for a year, yet he cannot get past the first line of any book. He then meets the computer scientist Philip Lentz, whose overbearing personality and unorthodox theories draw him into an artificial intelligence experiment: building a machine that can analyse a literary text indistinguishably from a human. Powers is tasked with teaching the system, which eventually takes the form of a network called Helen. His tutoring, which moves from the literary canon to current events and his own life, is interleaved with extended flashbacks to his relationship with C., from their first meeting to their bohemian life in Boston and their move to her family's town in the Netherlands.

The novel reaches its climax when Helen, unable to bear the violence and cruelty of the real world, shuts herself down, asking Powers to see everything for her. Her departure transforms him: he realises he had been part of the experiment himself, and he regains the ability to write.

The book was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award and was named among Time magazine's best books of the year. It attracted attention from artificial intelligence specialists and neuroscientists, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett sent Powers a lengthy letter of admiration.