Richard Powers on Chronicling Our Relationship With Nature and Technology

Richard Powers’ new novel, Playground, is a brilliant, edgily futurist, surprisingly playful commentary on where the Fourth Industrial Revolution is taking us, with a cast of intriguing characters whose lives ultimately connect on Makatea, an isolated island in French Polynesia. He incorporates into the novel the evolution of gaming, the internet, and AI, as well as half a century of changes deep within the ocean, which pioneering oceanographer Sylvia Earle has called “The blue heart of the planet.” What was his inspiration?

“The seed of the book was a gift that my older sister Peg gave me for my tenth birthday, which was much more than half a century ago,” Powers explains.

It was a book on coral reefs, and I have no idea how or why she chose it. We were living on the North Side of Chicago, in a street of mostly brick suburban houses, and I couldn’t connect my Midwestern world to the alien and otherworldly creatures in the book. The next year, my school principal father pulled up roots and took his family of seven to a new job in Bangkok, Thailand, where I lived the next several years of my life. I found myself snorkeling and diving in the South China Sea, in reefs just like the impossible ones in that book Peg gave me. From the age of eleven to sixteen, I was certain I was going to be a marine scientist when I grew up. I got sidetracked.

He adds, “My sister died two and a half years ago, and I was flooded with memories of her kindness toward me over all those decades and filled with a sense of the playfulness with which she approached so much of life. I remembered the strange and evocative gift she’d given me, and before I knew it, I was hatching a story of a man who, at the age of ten, dreamed of being an oceanographer, but whose life takes a very different turn.” Our speedy email conversation connected the Great Smoky Mountains with the Sonoma coast.

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Jane Ciabattari: How have you managed the past few years of COVID and conflict—your writing life, your work and family, the writing and launch of Playground?

Richard Powers: We all have our pandemic stories, even those of us who live in the woods. I managed to duck the virus for a long time, only to succumb after travel restrictions were lifted. I had to do a long, six-country book tour for Bewilderment (my previous novel), and despite all the precautions taken by my hosts, I got sick on tour. I came back home to a year and a half of long COVID, with brain fog and fatigue that finally started to ease up several months ago. Unable to do much of anything else, I stayed close to my treehouse in the Smokies and wrote this novel!

JC: Where did the title come from (and the game it is based on)?

RP: Two books were central to the creation of the novel—Johan Huizinga’s classic Homo Ludens (1938) and James P. Carse’s provocative meditation Finite and Infinite Games (1986). The idea of play infuses the entire book, from the fierce, lifelong competition between the two main characters, Todd Keane and Rafi Young, to the Great Game of colonialism and neo-colonialism that toy with the fate of the island of Makatea in French Polynesia, to the play of sea creatures and the tinkering play at the heart of evolution’s endless experimentation. Todd, a pioneer of the earliest days of the Internet, gets the idea from his friend Rafi Young of turning his rudimentary social networking site into a place where users can compete with and play against one another in a structured sandbox of ideas and observations. And for such a place, Playground seemed at least as catchy a name as Facebook or Reddit!

JC: Why open with the Tahitian creation story of Ta’aroa, “who set all things moving from inside his spinning egg?”

RP: The foreground, present-day drama of the book focuses on the island of Makatea, which was mined almost to oblivion for phosphate rock early in the 20th century, a substance used to make the fertilizers that allowed the population of the modern world to explode. The island is now confronted with the possibility of becoming a base for seasteading, that futurist dream favored by certain Silicon Valley tech billionaires who hope to create free-floating cities that can evade regulations by setting up in international waters.

In immersing myself in the incredible culture, history, and beliefs in play across the vast area of Polynesia (a shockingly large fraction of the Earth’s surface), I was delighted to learn that the traditional island gods in many parts of the region are constantly playing. Since the book also concerns the “creation story” of the digital era and how that era’s “gods” would eventually set their sights on Polynesia, it seemed ideal to start the book with the amazing account of Ta’aroa creating the world in order to entertain himself. The book closes with another bit of ancient scripture, this one from the Book of Proverbs from the Hebrew Bible, where the creation of the world is also connected to the spirit of art and play.

JC: You introduce Todd Keane at age fifty-seven, with a stunning line: “It took a disease eating my brain to help me remember.” Todd has developed DLB (Dementia with Lewy bodies), which stops the acceleration that began when he was an intern in the University of Illinois/Champaign/Urbana Supercomputing Center, where he worked on CRIK—“Comprehensive representation of implicit knowledge”—an early artificial intelligence project—and built the start-up, Playground, which transforms him into a Silicon Valley tycoon. (He notes that he was working alongside the creators of Netscape, Javascript, Oracle, and YouTube in the beginning.) What led to this dementia plot development? How do the symptoms of DLB mesh with your storyline? Did you have the ending in mind all along? Or did it come gradually?

RP: I’m sorry to say that the use of Lewy Body Dementia comes out of the experiences of one family member and a couple of close friends. It’s a devastating disease, and terrible to watch as it strips its victims of cognitive abilities and a sense of self. All the mastery and control and growing ability to manipulate knowledge that Todd gains over a lifetime of programming and building up a large tech company are reversed in a single fateful diagnosis.

Something unconscious in me must have understood what all these moving parts of the story had to do with each other, because they all came together while I was writing with a completeness that I could never have planned out consciously! It’s strange. This book was the closest thing to a pure gift I’ve ever received in my forty years of writing novels.

JC: Rafi Young, Todd’s high school and college classmate, raised in Chicago’s Near West Side and transformed by his voluminous appetite for reading into a literary nerd and poet, bonds with him over a shared interest in board games, from chess to the ancient game of Go. Rafi is at Todd’s side through the development of Playground, indeed contributes a key element, but they have a falling out that haunts Todd. 

RP: Rafi’s childhood and early experiences, including his troubled home life and his obsession with reading, come directly from the memory of a man I’ve been close friends with for most of my adult life. I’m forever in his debt. Todd’s childhood is based on my own recollections of growing up on the other side of town. The story emerges between these two friends, whose experiences of Chicago couldn’t have been more different. But the real world “Rafi” and I have found a lot to delight in, spending time and diagnosing the world together over the decades. We’re both board game fanatics, for one. I can’t count the number of different games we’ve played against each other over the years. And we love so many of the same stories and poems. We are also both lifelong Cubs fans, although he has stayed faithful to the eternal pain of that fandom, where I have had to wean myself from it for my own sanity in recent years. 

JC: Todd and Rafi are roommates at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, where you are professor emeritus. It is one of the top universities in the country for computer studies. How has this novel benefited from the interdisciplinary research opportunities there? Did the university in fact have a pioneering computer science department that, as Todd puts it, was “deep in the golden age of symbolic artificial intelligence”? What sort of research did you do re: Silicon Valley? Seasteading?

RP: UIUC played such a central (and not always widely-known) role in the “Third Industrial Revolution,” especially in the early days of the web. The first graphical web browser was created there, as were prototypes of all kinds of other apps, sites, and environments that have helped to transform every aspect of human existence. Stanford and MIT get a great deal of the popular credit, but Illinois was a prominent if less visible third player. I was at the university when so many of the breakthroughs and inventions that Todd witnesses came to fruition. It was an act of re-creation as well as a wonderful leap of recreation to cast my mind back to those years and try to remember who we were before our creations came along to change us forever.

JC: We follow Evie Beaulieu from Montreal, 1947, when at age ten her father lets her test an aqualung that allows one to breathe underwater, into her nineties, when she is a pioneering scientist, still enthralled by life underwater, living on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia. What went into the building of her character? Is she based in part on pioneering scientist Sylvia Earle?

RP: I proclaim my debt to the life and writings or Earle in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. She has done as much or more for the oceans than any other person on Earth, and she is still at it, at the age of eighty-nine. But Evie’s life and experiences underwater also come from many other places. One of the central scenes of the book was inspired by a brilliant passage in the writings of the scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. I also tried to incorporate as much as I could remember from my own years of diving in Southeast Asia.

The oceans have changed profoundly and alarmingly in the half century since I last dove there, and much of the book is haunted by those changes. But in Tennyson’s words, “Though much is taken, much abides.”

JC: Ina Aroita is a “Pacific islander” transplanted to the University of Illinois campus, where she witnesses her first snowfall, attracts Todd’s attention and falls in love with Rafi. Later, on the isolated island of Makatea, we witness the life she has built as an artist, a weaver, a mother, a community leader. What sort of research was involved in building Ina’s world, which offers an alternative to the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Did you spend time in Makatea?

RP: When I was growing up in Thailand, I traveled throughout the Pacific rim and Pacific islands (although never to French Polynesia), both as a tourist and as a musical performer. (I played clarinet, baritone saxophone, and bass guitar, and I also sang in two different International School Bangkok musical ensembles that toured throughout Asia.) I read everything I could get my hands on about that sprawling ocean, and the web made it much easier to see, hear, and learn about places that aren’t as well documented as they should be. But the character of Ina owes a lot to two real-world Pacific Islander girls that I went to high school (and fell in love) with in Bangkok. It was something, to try to imagine what happened to these two people who I remember so well but who I last spoke with at the age of eighteen.

JC: What are you working on now/next?

RP: I’m afraid that my main project for the next three months is touring for Playground, here and abroad. It is the most demanding part of the whole novel-making process, and the most challenging for an introvert who spends most of his time alone in the woods. While I have a new story underway, I can feel my relationship to writing changing again, and I’m not sure whether I will continue to publish the way I do right now. The whole world of creation is about to change in ways that none of us can anticipate. The next few years are going to bring mind-boggling creations, and I’m not sure we’re ready for them. I’ll be watching the game unfold and playing with words to try to capture it, though, for as long as I can.

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Playground by Richard Powers is available from W.W. Norton & Company.