If there’s any question about Richard Powers being the greatest living American novelist, the cerebral Playground settles it definitively.
Powers has published 14 novels, including 2018’s Pulitzer winner, The Overstory, about humanity’s destruction of forests. Turning this time to the oceans, Powers harks back to his childhood fascination with the sea.
In his latest masterpiece, artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change meet as Powers weaves together themes of ambition, neocolonialism and environmental preservation. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, the novel follows four lives — a marine biologist, an artist, a schoolteacher and an AI pioneer.
In all his novels, scientists are heroes because they possess a near-infinite capacity for wonderment. Canadian oceanographer Evie Beaulieu is a lifelong lover of the sea who, even in her 90s, experiences life beneath the surface with childhood wonder. One of the world’s greatest divers, she has spent decades studying marine life, often forgetting that she “was doing science”.
“The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs,” Powers writes. “She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see... She felt like a babe in Toyland, set loose in the greatest playground any child had ever seen.”
An artist with Hawaiian and Tahitian roots, Ina Aroita grew up on naval bases and worked as a hotel maid before making her way to Makatea, a tropical island paradise in the South Pacific Ocean, and part of French Polynesia. With its raised coral atolls and limestone cliffs — and just 82 inhabitants — the island’s geology and ecology are unique and invaluable.
Ina is caught between the island’s promise of prosperity and her deep respect for its natural integrity. For her, Makatea’s future is profoundly personal; she embodies the delicate balance known to all indigenous communities — striving to preserve cultural and environmental heritage amid the pressures of relentless modernisation.
Rafi Young grew up on the wrong side of Chicago. He and his long-time, now-estranged friend, Todd Keane, played chess against each other as kids, and then the more complex Go when they were students in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois.
Keane studied programming and Young wanted to be a poet. Young claimed that AI would never master poetry, but Powers hints that AI might just be capable of writing a novel. Rafi’s path diverges from Todd’s as he meets Ina and moves with her to Makatea, becoming an activist and storyteller.
Todd, a former coding prodigy turned tech mogul, narrates much of the story. Now 57 and diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, he reflects on his career, his pioneering yet unsettling work in AI, and his “virtual economy” platform called Playground. What he once saw as revolutionary, he now views with regret, confronting both the allure and peril of unchecked digital innovation.
“I may be the public face of Playground,” Todd says, “the only person anyone thinks of when they think of the company. But my little experiment in empowering and connecting people got away from me 20 years ago. I haven’t been running it for years. No-one has. It’s a living system, with its own agenda. Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hivemind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was.”
And now, there’s a new venture on the horizon, one that will make companies seem as “slow, small and powerless as companies make human beings”. Once ravaged by phosphate mining, Makatea is threatened by a certain digital tycoon’s lucrative proposal to use the island to build floating autonomous cities. Known as sustaining, these floating cities promise autonomy to wealthy people, but are likely to damage marine life, pollute the ocean, and put pressure on island communities, especially smaller ones, by using their resources.
Playground examines the tension between human progress and the fragility of nature, asking whether innovation and conservation can coexist or if one must inevitably overtake the other. Makatea’s people, including Rafi and Ina, must make tough decisions as they weigh the benefits of economic opportunity against the cost to natural and cultural heritage.
Powers toys with the reader, leading us to question if AI might indeed be behind the novel’s intricate structure — though we suspect the handiwork of Richard Powers’ remarkable, near-otherworldly intelligence.
This fragmented, multilayered narrative touches on friendship, loss, and the ocean’s allure, capturing how both people and animals play, from chess games and graceful manta rays, to the author’s own subtle tricks that draw readers ever deeper into his wondrous Playground.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.