Interested in multiple sciences as a teenager, he enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois, but was soon seduced into literature and received an M.A in 1979. Nevertheless, 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.
He then moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, a work that somehow 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 written during a year's stay at Cambridge University, and completed when he 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, of 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 a 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.
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