Word: nonhuman
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...imaginative new novel, Galatea 2.2 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 329 pages; $23), a book that should go immediately to the top of the year's 10-best lists. As the title suggests, one of the novel's central themes is the bringing to life, and to independent awareness, of inert, nonhuman matter. The Galatea in this reworking of the myth is not a statue but an enormously complex network of computer circuitry, and the Pygmalions-there are a couple of them-are an acerbic cyber-scientist called Lentz and a becalmed writer named, sure enough, Richard Powers...
...bottom, shows about the nature and meaning of being human. The endless parade of evil aliens and perverted civilizations -- from the bellicose Klingons to the pernicious Borg, with their hivelike collective consciousness -- was always contrasted to the civilized humans on board the Enterprise. The most popular characters were the nonhuman ones -- Spock, the "logical" Vulcan, and Data, the soulless android -- precisely because they were constantly being confronted with the human qualities they lacked: the emotions they either scorned (in Spock's case) or craved (in Data...
...respect for the established traditions of the American musical," Menken says of his blockbuster cartoon movies. Except, of course, for the tradition of filming actors. It seems that people at the end of the 20th century can accept a movie character bursting into song only if that character is nonhuman. And the main audience for today's new musicals is children, who tend to come with very little disbelief in need of suspending...
...joke, inspired by all the insane computers in the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had a surprisingly good sense of humor: he was, after all, a Legal Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and shared -- or surpassed -- almost all the attributes of his creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such disastrous failures that he had abandoned...
David had kept his head, if one could use so inappropriate a phrase, while all the humans around him were in a state of shock. There were some compensations in being a Legal Person (Nonhuman). Though David could not know love, neither could he know fear. He would continue to think logically, even to the edge of doom...