Richard Powers
David Long of Faith*in*Fiction gives Richard Powers some love. I've never read Richard Powers, but I'll always remember him since he beat me to a story idea with his novel Galatea 2.2. Well, technically, that's not true. I wrote my short story, Galatea, a straightforward retelling of the myth in modern terms, using a neural network computer to create the perfect woman, in 1990, and submitted it to the county-wide Write Now! contest in Chesterfield county, Virginia. The story won the contest, and I've since rewritten it a couple of times, looking for an opportunity to publish it properly. Unfortunately, in 1995, Richard Powers published Galatea 2.2, which forever ruined the novelty of my story, making the odds of getting it published much longer. My mother remains convinced that Mr. Powers stole the concept from me, and although I suppose it's possible he might have read my story, I don't think the odds are all that high. Besides, merging neural networks with the myth of Galatea is just too obvious an idea for anyone to claim ownership of it, and I think that the stories which we derived from the idea were very different.
