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Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is a novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology on human lives, but without "gee-whiz" or Luddite overtones.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, and interested in multiple sciences as a teenager, Powers enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois. He was soon seduced by literature, however, receiving his M.A. in that subject in 1979. After graduation, he worked in Boston as a computer programmer, until an encounter with a photograph at the Museum of Fine Arts haunted him so much that he quit his job and spent the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985.
Powers then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, a work that juxtaposes Disney and nuclear warfare, and then his best-known work to date, The Gold Bug Variations, a story that ties together genetics, music, and computer science.
Operation Wandering Soul, about a young doctor dealing with the ugly realities of a pediatrics ward, was mostly written during a year's stay at Cambridge University, and completed when Powers returned to Illinois in 1992 to take up a post as writer-in-residence.
Galatea 2.2 (1995) is a beautiful but tragic Pygmalion story, about an AI experiment gone awry.
Gain (1998) is a withering look at the proud history of a 150-year-old chemical company, interwoven with a story of a woman living near one of its plants succumbing to ovarian cancer.
Plowing the Dark (2000) is another parallel story, this time of a Seattle research team building a groundbreaking virtual reality, while at the same time an American teacher is held hostage in Beirut, with a stunning outcome.
Powers' latest novel is The Time of Our Singing, published in January 2003.
He was a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and received a Lannan Literary Award in 1999. He teaches in the Creative Writing M.F.A. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Bibliography
- 1985 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, Harpercollins (ISBN 0688042015)
- 1989 Prisoner's Dilemma, McGraw Hill (ISBN 0070506124)
- 1991 The Gold Bug Variations, Harpercollins (ISBN 0688098916)
- 1993 Operation Wandering Soul, Harpercollins (ISBN 0688115489)
- 1995 Galatea 2.2, Farrar Straus & Giroux (ISBN 0374199485)
- 1998 Gain, Farrar Straus & Giroux (ISBN 0312204094)
- 2000 Plowing the Dark, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (ISBN 0374234612)
- 2003 The Time of Our Singing, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (ISBN 0374277826)
See also
External links
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