I'm eagerly anticipating
Playground… and the
e-book is currently on sale, just $9.66. Maybe we should add it to our reading list. I'll definitely be adding it to mine.
Asked if we should we be feeling awe, delight, or terror about the environment, AI, etc., Powers smartly says:
"Do I have to choose one of them? I mean, all of them. Don't you feel all of them?
It's been said that this book will do for the ocean what The Overstory did for trees..."… Since the nineteen-eighties, Powers has built a reputation as a novelist of unusual intellectual curiosity and range—as interested in probing the frontiers of technological innovation as in expanding the possibilities of fiction. He's written prize-winning, best-selling novels about computing, virtual reality, neuroscience, and nonhuman forms of consciousness, often focussing on the process of discovery and invention. But it was his twelfth novel, "The Overstory," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019 and sold more than two million copies, that turned him into an unlikely sensation. The book is a five-hundred-page multigenerational epic that follows nine characters whose only overlap is some form of relationship to trees—a chestnut tree that symbolizes a family's resilience, a banyan that saves a parachuting pilot from danger, a California redwood that a band of activists risk their lives protecting. (Passages of the novel are even narrated from the perspective of a tree—an attempt, as Powers put it, to shake us out of our "human exceptionalism.") "The Overstory" is about the damage that humans do to the natural world, but it is also about the natural world's innate resilience to the worst we can inflict. To many readers, Powers became "the tree guy."
Powers lives in eastern Tennessee, in a small town very close to one of the main gateways to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which he visits multiple times a week. He walks the trails as though he's checking in on old friends, remarking on flowers that are "brand new," pointing to barren-looking patches that will be "all bloomed out" within a couple of weeks. Judging by how frequently he hosts friends or journalists in the Smokies, he seems to relish being "the tree guy." As we hiked, he would occasionally pluck a leaf off a tree and encourage me to chew it, or point to a plant and tell me to take a whiff. He joked about "doing the 'Smells of the Smokies' tour."
…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/richard-powers-profile
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