The Source of All Amazement

M. Keith Booker reviews “Playground” by Richard Powers.

By M. Keith BookerSeptember 24, 2024

• Fiction

• Environment

IN HIS 2016 BOOK The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh discusses some of the political and economic reasons why the powers that be remain shockingly oblivious to the urgent threat posed by climate change. While his title makes clear just how insane he finds that lack of action, he focuses closely on the failure of literature, especially the mainstream literary novel, to deal effectively with climate change and thus help make people more aware of the problem. On the other hand, after the publication of Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Overstory in 2018, Ghosh declared in a conversation with David Wallace-Wells that the novel might be “a major turning point—not just because it is a great book, which it is, but because it was taken seriously by the literary mainstream.” Ghosh does not go into detail in the interview about why The Overstory might be something genuinely new, but a look at that novel shows that it does indeed overcome the limitations cited by Ghosh in The Great Derangement, largely because it escapes the humanist-individualist ideological straitjacket that has historically made it difficult for the novel to deal effectively with large, complicated problems. By contrast, The Overstory uses an array of postmodern literary techniques to make some telling political points about the nature of the current climate crisis and the possible human (or posthuman) future this crisis portends.

Powers’s new novel Playground is very much a follow-up to The Overstory, both in its central concern with climate change and in its complex postmodern form, again undermining the individualist bias that has conventionally informed the novel as a genre. Both novels are constructed via complex and sophisticated (but also playful) literary techniques that would be at home in a novel by someone like Percival Everett or Jennifer Egan. Yet both are also enriched by the kind of adroit handling of scientific detail that might be found in a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Indeed, if The Overstory is something of a treatise on computer science and trees, Playground is (among other things) a sort of treatise on computer science and oceanography.

Playground joins The Overstory as an important and innovative addition to the burgeoning genre of climate fiction, but it also parallels the earlier novel in suggesting that one reason human rule on earth might be coming to a close is that we could potentially be supplanted by artificial intelligences. The novel thus directly addresses two of the most pressing issues in today’s world, issues that bear on the very survival of the human race. The novel may be a warning of the potential disaster looming as a result of our treatment of the natural world as a mere playground for humans, but it is also an oddly cheerful paean (complete with a key allusion to Johan Huizinga’s classic 1938 book Homo Ludens) to the value of play in our attempts to define ourselves in relation to each other and the world.

The most obvious formal similarity between Playground and The Overstory is that both are complex, highly self-conscious literary works that interweave the stories of a number of different characters to make broader points about the world. Both novels also draw upon information from a variety of disciplines, while participating in a number of different literary genres. Playground is shorter and a bit simpler, in that it has fewer characters and thus fewer interwoven narratives. The core story, in fact, concerns only three people, all closely interrelated despite coming from very different backgrounds. Indeed, these differences are a key element, indicating the way today’s globalized world makes relations among diverse people more feasible than ever before, while also showing how individuals from very different backgrounds can still have a great deal in common.

If there is a central character in Playground, it is Todd Keane, who grows up in a mansion (sometimes referred to as a “castle”) in a posh, all-white suburb of Chicago, his life of ease funded by the wealth of his investor father. This wealth is eventually squandered, however, due to the father’s drug use, a fact that is only revealed to Todd and his mother after the man’s death in an auto accident—an event that leaves Todd, still in high school, in much more meager financial circumstances. But Todd is a brilliant computer scientist, and he eventually becomes a billionaire in his own right, founding a giant tech company that spearheads the growth of social media in the late 1990s and then later takes the lead in the development of advanced artificial intelligence. The elements of Playground that are related to AI thus revolve around Todd, but he also occupies an especially central position in the novel as the only character who relates his own story in the first person, his narration set off from the rest of the text via italics. Meanwhile, the fact that the older Todd who looks back on and narrates his earlier experiences is suffering from Lewy body dementia adds significant drama while providing readers with insight into this little-understood disease, much as the psychiatric disorder known as Capgras syndrome plays a key role in Powers’s 2006 novel The Echo Maker.

While attending an exclusive prep school, Todd makes an unlikely best friend in Rafi Young, a young Black boy from South Chicago whose intellectual brilliance and hard work have opened opportunities for him. We get an especially detailed view of Rafi’s childhood and adolescence via a narrative that becomes an almost Dickensian bildungsroman. In addition to their disparate social and economic backgrounds, Rafi and Todd also have very different academic inclinations, with Rafi tending more toward literature than science. In this sense, they represent two important interests of the novel, and of Powers himself.

Despite their differences, Rafi and Todd bond over their mutual love of gaming, first playing regular games of chess and then moving on to Go, which becomes a mutual obsession (while also becoming a sort of structural analogue to Playground). After high school, both friends attend the University of Illinois sometime in the 1980s, a university where Powers himself studied computer science as an undergraduate and later taught as a professor of English. In college, they solidify their friendship as roommates. Rafi, meanwhile, meets and falls in love with Ina Aroita, a Pacific Islander who is studying art at the university. We learn less about Ina than about either Todd or Rafi, even though she at one point provides an efficient list of things we need to know about her. Perhaps the most important of these is the fact that history has essentially destroyed the island world she knew as a child, leaving her feeling that she is now an alien living on a different planet from the one where she grew up. Her character thus provides connections to an important theme of Playground, which at times becomes a virtual primer on the geography and colonial history of the Pacific Islands, providing an opportunity for the author to link the environmental damage done by modern civilization with the rapacious attitudes that drove colonialism (and that, the novel reminds us, continue to drive new forms of postcolonial exploitation).

The novel’s fourth major character is French Canadian marine biologist Evelyne Beaulieu, whose underwater research makes her a pioneer in a world once entirely dominated by men. Evelyne, a generation older than the other three main characters, does not know them and is not directly involved in the central plot. Instead, she is the well-known author of a popular book, Clearly It Is Ocean, which emphasizes the centrality of marine life to all life on earth—a book that becomes an inspiration for Todd when he discovers it as a 10-year-old. Evelyne’s own story also provides important insight into the difficulties often faced by women in the sciences. Most crucially, though, her professional knowledge of marine life allows her to serve as a sort of mentor figure, not just to readers of her book but also to readers of Playground, the awe she experiences when studying the undersea world as important as the specific technical details she supplies.

Clearly based in part on real-world oceanographic pioneer Sylvia Earle, Evelyne thus plays very much the same role in Playground that is played in The Overstory by botanist Patricia Westerford (herself based on actual Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard): informing and inspiring both Powers’s characters and his readers. In fact, several figures in Playground can be mapped directly onto their counterparts in The Overstory. In addition to the corresponding roles of Beaulieu and Westerford, Todd’s role as a computer scientist who begins with an interest in gaming and then moves into groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence directly parallels the role of Indian American programmer Neelay Mehta in The Overstory. Meanwhile, the previous novel’s Nicholas Hoel, an artist who makes tree-themed art, echoes Ina, who eventually becomes a sculptor of environmentalist artworks, including a large bricolage structure made from bits and pieces of plastic and other garbage collected from the seas around the island of Makatea, where she ultimately makes her home. And both Hoel and Ina parallel Powers himself in attempting to use their art to call attention to important ecological issues.

Playground’s central concern with climate and the environment is so reminiscent of The Overstory’s that one is tempted to say that the new novel does for the world’s oceans what the previous one did for the world’s trees (and related plants). But Powers’s involvement with climate fiction extends well beyond the remarkable achievement of The Overstory. That novel was quickly followed by Bewilderment (2021), another book that veers into the realm of science fiction in its examination of the potential of advanced computer technologies. But Bewilderment is fundamentally about the relationship between humans and their natural world, set in the near future, though one of the key ironies of the novel is that this future world seems suspiciously similar to our own. Climate change is wreaking havoc with the weather while the political climate is roiled by right-wing forces, led by an unnamed, semiliterate, tweet-happy president who wants to undermine elections and declare himself dictator. Meanwhile, even as far back as The Echo Maker, Powers explored the existential threat posed by human development to migrating sandhill cranes in a narrative that arraigns the power of capitalist forces, with overmatched activists as nature’s only advocates. That novel displays Powers’s gift for nature writing as he describes the beauty and majesty of the cranes, presaging the descriptions of forest life in The Overstory or the world beneath the ocean surface in Playground. The Echo Maker also makes the same sort of eloquent plea for the importance of saving the cranes, and for their kinship with us as fellow creatures of the earth, that the later novels make about trees and marine life.

If Playground thus contains echoes of much of Powers’s earlier writing, it also covers important new territory in its focus on the oceans, a particularly welcome contribution to a topic that has not been sufficiently explored in climate fiction, despite a science-fictional fascination with the topic that goes back to Jules Verne. Recent works such as Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022) have also begun to update underwater-based SF with concerns related to animal ethics and artificial intelligence, while Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean (2017) emphasizes the dominant role of earth’s seas in determining the planet’s climate. Indeed, Lunde’s book makes a point that is quoted almost directly in the title of Evelyne Beaulieu’s book, noting that our planet should probably be called “Water” rather than “Earth,” the latter name indicative of the land-centric nature of so much of our thinking.

This sort of thinking, of course, is difficult to maintain when the land at stake is a Pacific island, which makes Powers’s focus on Makatea particularly important. Powers informs us that the island has a long history of colonial exploitation, having been ripped apart by phosphate mining companies for fertilizers to help feed the world, then abandoned when the supplies of the chemical were exhausted. Meanwhile, Makatea just happens to have an unusually high altitude (for a Pacific island), which once again gives it special value as the world’s oceans begin to rise due to climate change. Thus, the small island once again draws outside attention, this time from American investors who want to use it as a launchpad for building futuristic floating habitats. This project, incidentally, is spearheaded by Todd, who has long been fascinated with the oceans (thanks largely to Evelyne’s book); however, he was particularly inspired to pursue this “seasteading” idea by investor Peter Mathias. Mathias seems suspiciously similar to real-world investor Peter Thiel (patron of GOP vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance), who has touted similar projects but whose right-wing political leanings add a distinctly sinister note. Indeed, it’s clear that Playground’s seasteading project is largely driven by a libertarian desire to give billionaires the means to relocate to international waters and thus escape regulation by land-based governments.

It seems evident enough where Powers’s own sympathies lie, but Playground leaves it up to readers to make up their own minds as they listen to the debates among the people of Makatea about whether to accept the Americans’ offer, which would bring considerable economic benefit to the impoverished island but at the cost of a loss of autonomy and possibly serious environmental damage. The small island thus faces choices that are crucial to the future of humanity itself, and the reminders in Playground of the historical complicity linking capitalism, colonialism, and human-induced climate change make it an especially valuable contribution to the already diverse collection of climate novels that have emerged in the past few decades.

While Playground’s central emphasis is clearly on climate, its secondary focus on artificial intelligence should not be underestimated. AI, of course, has been a key concern of science fiction for decades, usually in the cautionary mode exemplified by the HAL 9000 computer of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Still, Playground is surely the most important literary novel about artificial intelligence to have emerged since the topic went viral in the American imagination with the emergence of AI software based on “large language models,” such as ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022. Playground incorporates that launch directly into its narrative, while also providing a sort of tutorial on the history of artificial intelligence and giving us a peek into its possible future developments. Among major American novelists, Powers is certainly one of the most knowledgeable about AI and computer science in general, so he is well suited for this task. Powers acknowledges the widespread concern that AI might pose an existential threat to the human race, clearly identifying it as a problem that parallels climate change in importance. However, Playground is anything but a call to squelch AI research. In fact, the novel’s approach suggests that AI just might be earth’s salvation, though it leaves open the possibility that this salvation might involve saving the rest of the planet from humans rather than saving humans themselves.

Playground repeatedly emphasizes that most of the earth is covered by its oceans, most life on earth lives in the oceans, and all life on earth originated in the oceans, described in the novel as the “source of all amazement.” Powers conveys the wonders of the deep seas quite effectively and with the same kind of loving attention that he paid to trees in The Overstory. Meanwhile, Playground also effectively portrays the damage that human activity inflicts on ocean life—for example, by dumping plastics—much as The Overstory conveyed the urgency of the threat posed to the world’s forests by human activity. At the same time, both The Overstory and Playground avoid literary fiction’s typical humanistic focus by being surprisingly sanguine about the possibility of the extinction of the human race, expressing confidence that the earth would be inherited by new rulers (possibly biological, possibly digital, possibly both) who might do a better job in their stewardship of the planet.

Finally, this oddly positive note also extends to human activities, as Playground reminds us that humans are at their best when at play, even competitive play, especially when they are “playing in the world” in harmony with their fellow creatures and with the natural environment, rather than simply exploiting the world for their own gain. This point is effectively reinforced by the postmodern playfulness of Playground itself, which sometimes recalls some of Powers’s earlier, more Pynchonesque and metafictional works, such as The Gold Bug Variations (1991) or Galatea 2.2 (1995), the latter of which also features an extensive exploration of artificial intelligence. In the case of Playground, the fragmented, nonlinear narrative, featuring multiple narrators and points of view, leaves it to readers to piece together the story in a rather gamelike fashion, reinforcing the theme of gaming that runs through the text.

The novel poses other challenges to readers as well. For example, Powers only occasionally provides actual dates for the narrative’s events (which go all the way back to Evelyne’s childhood in the 1940s and extend several years into the near future). More frequently, he mentions real historical incidents taking place in the larger world, which can be used to date the fictional events. Despite such complexities, the process of making sense of Playground is not especially difficult (and can be quite enjoyable), though Powers provides some late twists and last-minute revelations concerning the narrative voices that complicate matters, potentially asking us to revise (or at least reconsider) our understanding of everything that came before. Far from frustrating, though, these twists support the emphasis on play that informs the entire text. After all, the novel is itself a literary playground of sorts, even if there is so much more at stake than mere literary shenanigans. The story might be a game, but it is a game in which the stakes are extremely high, exemplifying the potential of literature as a means to explore the most serious (and deadly) challenges that humanity faces in the 21st century.