Richard Powers’ latest epic: fragile oceans, powerful technologies and exciting writing. First of all

Richard Powers has long been fascinated by artificial intelligence. In 1995, his novel Galatea 2.2 reimagined the story of Pygmalion through this lens, set in a computer lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the author attended and continues to teach as a student. Plowing the Darkness (2000) presents a dual story: the first involves an American hostage in Lebanon who uses mnemonics to maintain his sanity, and the second, a group of researchers attempting to create a virtual environment in three-dimensional space.

In both, the stakes could not be higher: the relationship between memory and imagination, the infinitely renewable possibilities of the human mind and the challenges (or even outright dangers) of technology. The Playground, Powers’s latest novel, occupies a connected territory that moves back and forth between ecological and digital concerns, between the troubled ecosystem of the oceans and the powerful morality and corruption of virtual worlds. And why not? After all, Powers’s books often read as episodes in a larger set of narratives, swirling around one another in a stream of ideas and reference points.

One piece of “Playground,” like “Galatea 2.2,” takes place in Urbana-Champaign; like The Plow of Darkness, the novel relies on a woven structure, with one thread centered on the island of Macatea, in French Polynesia, and the other on the voice of Todd Keen, the AI ​​pioneer behind the Playground project—think Facebook meets ChatGPT meets Google, but with a gamer’s sensibility snapped, making him a billionaire. At its core, though, “The Playground” offers a collection of similar love stories, reciprocal or not, involving parents and children, friends, and, most of all, humanity and the oceans we’ve explored and polluted.

Powers notes: “The course of civilization is broken in the current.” “Where the layers of the seas mix, where rains pass or empty lands spread, where giant hills bathe deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface of energy and fish go mad with fertility, where soils become fertile or anemic, where temperatures become habitable or uninhabitable, where trade routes flourish or fail—all of this is determined by the global ocean engine.”

The epic sensibility of this piece resonates with Powers, who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory. Both that book and The Playground are what we call systemic novels, a term coined in 1987 by critic Tom LeClair to describe the trafficking of fiction across social, political, or global networks.

Because of its scope (or perhaps its success), The Story of Too Much has eclipsed Powers’ work. Moving fluidly through the lives of nine characters, it arrives at the Pacific Northwest timber wars of the 1990s, a point of confrontation that allows the author to address the interdependence of humanity and the biosphere. Thus, the “playground” can be read as an extrapolation, where it is not the forests (the so-called lungs of the planet) but the oceans (let’s call them the Earth’s circulatory system) that are at risk.

You might think of “Playground” as “Playground.”

At first, the novel is gripping. Powers is a vivid writer, and getting lost in his words can be intoxicating. “For centuries, my ancestors recorded hundreds of islands spread across several thousand miles of ocean in song maps they kept in their heads,” explains Makatea artist Ina Aroita. “All those islands, and the paths of all the stars, and the swirls of a hundred currents, and the migrations of every sea creature… Now all those maps are gone, and my descendants wander from islands to seashore, wandering through history.”

What Ina describes is folk knowledge, spiritual knowledge, which is now unknown to all of us, but the brilliance of the piece lies in the language, the richness of how it describes and embodies. After all, Ina is traumatized and moves from Makata to Urbana, where she meets Todd and his best friend, Rafi.

The men are odd fellows, the first a white boy from the prosperous Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, the second a black man who grew up on the city’s South Side. What unites them is a love of games — first chess and then, with the consumer, Go, an ancient Chinese pastime characterized by near-infinite choices and outcomes. For Powers, these endeavors offer a portal to a new kind of potential that is less renewable than exponential.

As the “playground” evolves, however, its poles become increasingly swamped. On one side are the seemingly limitless capabilities of technology that can (or so Rafi believes) even resurrect us from the dead. On the other, the tunnel vision of the technology’s creators is often exploited. It’s a rich binary that Powers has explored with nuance before. But here the exploration never comes to full, three-dimensional life. Even in Rafi’s relationship with Todd, partially destroyed by the corrupting influence of Big Tech, Powers remains strangely neutral, even distant.

A similar distance can be seen on Makatea, an island mined for phosphates until the 1960s, after which it was largely abandoned, until an obscure group of Californians proposed reindustrialising it in the service of a “sea” – a form of ecological colonisation in which floating modular settlements are built and then released into the ocean. 82 islanders, including Ina and Rafi (to whom she is married), put the matter to a vote. Arguments are made and decisions are made. The ethical implications, however – both the impact on the island and its culture and the environmental impact of the sea itself – remain controversial.

I am not suggesting that there are easy answers to these questions, nor that Powers should provide any answers. As he himself acknowledges, the consequences are always unpredictable and there is no way to predict the outcome (the world as an augmented reality version of Go).

Perhaps the clearest representative of this unpredictability is Evelyn Beaulieu, a 92-year-old French-Canadian marine biologist who appeared in the depths of Makatea to end her stay on Earth.

Evelyn is slipping. Time has its own battles. “Memory,” he stresses, “must be like it is in youth, when a young sailor needs it most. But no one has survived to old age who has not been able to unravel this thread and let go of many of its stubborn arguments.” It is not just Evelyn who is lost; half a world away, Todd is facing the same hard truth: he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at age 57. The connection (intended for Powers, of course) is that Evelyn’s first book, Clearly It’s the Ocean, was Todd’s first influence on the networks after reading it as a child.

Here we see how the “Playground” emerges by chance or randomness as a network of its own, connected beneath the surface, rather than by the intense currents of the sea. Still, and unlike, say, “The Plow of Darkness” or “The Story of Too Much,” it is strangely unsatisfying, or perhaps “predetermined” or “calculated” is a better word. The collapse of Todd and Rafi’s friendship may be inevitable, but it feels more like a narrative conceit than an emotional necessity. Thus Evelyn’s ending, which may be consistent with the novel’s structure, feels unrealistic.

Powers writes: “Games now rule humanity.” “…and it made perfect sense…the machines that destroy us cut their teeth watching humans play.” Yet a novel, like any VR machine, must be a reflection of the world, and in this sprawling story of a Booker Prize-nominated book, that world, and the people who inhabit it, are often read as manques or archetypes, who are triggered by the hand of the author – or the player – rather than by any organic immediacy.

David l. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinions. He is a former books editor and book critic for The Times.