(Download) "Just Like So But Isn't: Musical Consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2." by Extrapolation * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Just Like So But Isn't: Musical Consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2.
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
For all of its narrative significance and heft, the death of the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a rather quiet event. As HAL dies, he sings the swayingly nostalgic number "A Bicycle Built for Two," a song that signifies his own regressive nature and his own inability to outwit the humans and take over "the mission." Whereas the future for the humans in 2001 was full of god and stars and Gyorgy Ligeti's sprawling voices, HAL's future was confined to the cramped room of his central processes, tight with simple songs, breath sounds, and slowly disengaging memory modules. But despite his small and lonely end, as an entity HAL swelled large into the vast spaces of cultural reference (as well as into the ever growing universe of Clarke's 2001 sequels), becoming a touchstone for many fictionalized intelligences to come. For if 2001 was the "best informed dream" of its period, HAL was the most fully rendered inspiration for many future artificial intelligences (Stork 12). One descendent of HAL is the similar-sounding Helen, the tragic and self-destructive computer intelligence at the center of Richard Powers's novel Galatea 2.2. As critic Arthur Saltzman writes, "Helen shares [an] instinct to expand with such precursors as Dr. Frankenstein's rudely stitched Adam [and] Arthur Clarke's chillingly composed HAL in 2001" (108). But also like HAL, Helen's desire to expand, to comprehend the largeness of human knowledge and experience, is cut short by what 1 see as a failure to connect with and understand her organic predecessors/teachers. She hears more than she is supposed to--more than she can adequately parse, more than she can connect with--and, as with HAL, such listening proves her undoing. She is fated to degrade gracefully under the weight of her own accelerated awareness.
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