Electric Literature. In 2013, Fassler started The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, in which he interviewed authors—including Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Carmen Maria Machado, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and more—about the literature that shaped their lives and work. That led to editing Light the Dark, a book-length collection that included favorites from “By Heart” alongside new contributions. Fassler’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Longreads, and The Best American Food Writing. Fassler currently teaches writing at Vermont’s Sterling College. The Sky Was Ours is his first novel.
At Electric Lit Fassler tagged seven "warped versions of reality [in which] tech is expanding the scope of what’s possible, at a cost." One title on the list:
Galatea 2.2 by Richard PowersRead about another entry on the list.
This novel, by far the oldest book on this list, came out in 1995. But its plot could have been ripped from this week’s headlines.The narrator, a mid-career novelist also named Richard Powers, is up late in his campus office when he hears strains of Mozart echoing down the hall, the same passage played again and again. He investigates, and discovers a colleague looping the sonata for his computer system—an early attempt to train a neural net. Powers steps into the teacher role, and over time a new character emerges: Helen, an artificially intelligent machine consciousness, at once eerily human and profoundly not. Their story pulls at knotty questions about machine authorship, human-AI relationships, and the origins of consciousness itself. An astonishing, prescient tale that reads with fresh urgency today.
Galatea 2.2 is among Ceridwen Christensen's twelve stories of truly science fictional romance and Ian R. MacLeod's five top novels on the perils of education.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
