Richard Powers’s fiction treats the novel as a way of thinking across disciplines: his books ask how human beings are shaped by biology, technology, music, memory, game theory, and the more-than-human world, while also showing how narrative can connect those systems into moral and emotional meaning.
Week 1: Prisoner’s Dilemma — One week, since it is the shortest book on your list at roughly 348 pages. Focus: family, Cold War anxiety, systems thinking, and the emergence of Powers’s interest in game theory and social structure.
Weeks 2–3: The Gold Bug Variations — Two weeks, since it is a long novel at about 688 pages. Focus: DNA, music, code, pattern, and the novel’s effort to link science with art.
Week 4: Galatea 2.2 — One week, at roughly 329–352 pages depending on edition. Focus: artificial intelligence, education, personhood, and the limits of machine learning as a model for consciousness.
Weeks 5–6: The Echo Maker — Two weeks, at about 451–576 pages depending on edition. Focus: brain injury, identity, rural America, and the instability of perception and selfhood.
Weeks 7–8: Bewilderment — Two weeks, at about 278–288 pages. Focus: grief, parenthood, ecology, planetary fragility, and ethical imagination in a damaged world.
Weeks 9–10: The Overstory — Two weeks, and the course capstone, since it is one of Powers’s longest and most consequential novels and a major ecological work. Focus: trees, networks, kinship, activism, and the novel’s challenge to human exceptionalism.
Weekly emphasis
Week 1 should establish Powers’s recurring method: systems, institutions, and moral consequence.
Weeks 2–4 should develop the “science and representation” unit: code, AI, music, and knowledge.
Weeks 5–6 should shift to consciousness and embodiment: injury, memory, and unstable selves.
Weeks 7–10 should build the ecological arc: grief, environment, interdependence, and activism.
