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.