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Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us
“Playground,” Powers’s new novel, aims to do for the oceans what “The Overstory” did for trees, shaking us out of our human exceptionalism.
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. Popular novelists of the nineties often used technological change as a metaphor for uncertainty—the surveillance-state dystopia of Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” the dull, spirit-crushing corporatism of Douglas Coupland’s “Microserfs”—but Powers’s interests were more granular. He feels a constant “low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed.” This gradually gives way to a realization that “people who used the Web turned strange,” likening it to a “vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.
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