This text accommodates spoilers for Playground.
From work on historic cave partitions to parables, fables, and memes, animals have served as necessary storytelling instruments. For example, in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Present, the narrator describes the novel’s title character, a fearsome, mercurial poet, by observing, “A surfaced whale beside your boat would possibly take a look at you as he seemed along with his wide-set grey eyes.” This deceptively easy metaphor challenges us to think about an unsettling encounter with a giant, unusual presence, and situates us in a literary custom with its sly allusion to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bellow’s simile is instructive insofar because it’s evocative, and appealingly demanding in its layers of which means compressed right into a single sentence.
Distinction this with an artist’s encounter, in Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, with a juvenile albatross: “Ina reached her hand into the chest of the decomposing hen and drew out two bottle caps, a squirt prime, the underside of a black movie canister no less than fifteen years outdated, a disposable cigarette lighter, a number of meters of tangled-up monofilament line, and a button within the form of a daisy.”
Like many passages in Playground, this teaches me necessary and well timed issues in serviceable prose: Plastics are unhealthy as a result of they kill birds; the results of human despoilment are ugly if we dare look intently sufficient. I get it, I get all of it too simply, after I learn Powers’s preachier novels, whether or not they’re about timber (The Overstory), race (The Time of Our Singing), refugees (Generosity), or the challenges of single fatherhood for astrobiologists (Bewilderment). Powers has additionally written novels of higher subtlety, pushed by a purist’s fascination with the inside workings of advanced techniques and devices: The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Orfeo, Plowing the Darkish.
Playground appears on the floor to belong within the first group—the flat-character morality performs which have come to outline Powers’s later profession. It extends and deepens his ongoing venture of telling tales that mix lyrical mastery with environmentalist didacticism to criticize humankind’s therapy of the world whereas attending to the promise of the nonhuman—pure and synthetic. The setup of his newest additionally addresses the reader’s dilemma in confronting such work: What, precisely, is the modern novel for? To show, or to problem? Happily, for many who follow Playground to the tip, Powers doesn’t reply the query in flattering methods however as an alternative complicates it confidently, exploring what artwork would possibly appear like in a much less human future.
The brand new novel begins with a creation story cum prayer about Ta’aroa, the Indigenous Polynesian creator god, earlier than continuing to element the dilemmas of individuals dwelling on the distant South Pacific island Makatea. Through the early years of the twentieth century, when the island was wealthy in phosphate essential to industrial agriculture, it was ruined by the extraction work of overseas corporations. It’s lastly recovering when its 82 remaining human inhabitants are approached by a conglomerate looking for a number to construct parts of future floating cities. These new synthetic islands will function swanky sanctuaries for uber-elites hoping to trip out the collapse of human society (or perhaps simply escape state laws).
The novel’s human drama performs out because the islanders decide whether or not to vote sure to the seasteading venture, and focuses on the intertwined tales of 4 fundamental characters. Ina, a half-Polynesian sculptor and an attentive mother, and her husband, Rafi, a literary-minded Black educator, each stay on Makatea. Todd, who’s white, is Rafi’s boyhood pal turned enemy: They first bonded as bookish Chicago youngsters from dysfunctional households who beloved enjoying Go. Todd is now the billionaire founding father of a world-beating, all-in-one social-media, gaming, and commerce platform known as Playground—and likewise the discreet cash behind the seasteading endeavor. The venture is in some ways motivated by Todd’s lifelong love of the ocean, itself impressed by the novel’s fourth main character, Evie, a trailblazing French Canadian scuba diver and scientist who holds Jane Goodall–grade movie star standing.
Playground is advised in two ways in which really feel by turns overlong and undercooked—till they add as much as one thing sudden and genuinely fascinating. The dominant thread suggests a seemingly standard, multi-perspective third-person novel that includes braided backstories interspersed with a chronicle of deliberations among the many atoll’s inhabitants about whether or not to approve the venture. One other narrative runs in tandem: a first-person sequence of reflections on Todd’s life and work, provoked and likewise marred—of their undulance and ellipsism—by his analysis of the degenerative mind illness often called Lewy physique dementia. “I’m affected by what we pc of us name latency,” Todd observes early on. “Retreating into the previous … as more moderen months and years develop fuzzy.” Three feelings recur for Todd: his remorse over the break with Rafi and (by extension) Ina, the one individuals he’s ever felt near; his longing, as a Midwestern boy, for the ocean wonders he first examine in Evie’s best-selling e book; and his self-satisfaction as a Massive Tech visionary. (“I bent below the duty to change into the primary individual to succeed in the Future. And right here I’m, profitable ultimately.”)
The place is Todd, precisely? Ostensibly, he’s dwelling in a splendid isolation afforded by his excessive wealth whereas his slick minions press the individuals of Makatea to comply with the conglomerate’s provide of large-scale financial renewal—whereas additionally implying that they may simply as simply ask inhabitants of one other Pacific island. On Makatea, Rafi broods and minds the kids, no less than till he turns into very upset after studying about Todd’s involvement within the venture; Ina makes a dramatic protest sculpture out of rubbish, a few of it discovered within the our bodies of little birds; the opposite islanders debate their voting rights versus the rights of the encompassing marine life; and Evie, now in her 90s, visits like an ethereal, demure white sage, commanding credibility from the islanders due to her mystical relationship to sea creatures, which we hear about time and again (and once more). Ultimately, nearing whole psychological and bodily breakdown, Todd makes a dramatic journey to Makatea to fulfill Rafi and Ina and Evie, in hopes of attaining an ideal confluence of his targets within the realms of enterprise, relationships, and world-building.
If this all appears like fantasy fiction for wealthy white individuals, that’s as a result of it’s. I’m not being a crank right here, whining once more about how Powers falls wanting the nice American masters of marine-life metaphors. I’m pointing, in actual fact, to a revelation close to the very finish of the novel, which discloses its beautiful conceit. The spoiler is warranted right here, as a result of revealing Powers’s vacation spot serves his potential readers by inserting fewer calls for on their endurance than he does. Todd is in actual fact immersed in an AI-generated story, created by a successor model of his first main creation. Within the first-person sections, set off in italics, he’s been talking to the AI, not us, the entire time. He’s fed it as a lot materials as he might, from reminiscence and data, about Makatea and about himself, Rafi, Ina, and Evie. In flip, the AI has created for him the very story we’ve been studying, interleaved along with his reflections. His success lies in crafting and studying an artificially constructed story that fulfills needs, solutions unmet wants, and resolves regrets that ring his precise life.
The AI-generated parts are incoherent, clichéd, cloying, and condescending: complicated chronologies, stereotypes in regards to the easy the Aristocracy of Makatea’s Indigenous individuals and the resilience of inner-city Chicagoans, the sacral grandeur of animal and technological sentients. However immediately, all of that is smart, as a result of the writer has constructed a Powersian corridor of mirrors: a novel that imagines what a novel would possibly appear like if it had been composed by an AI developed by a misanthropic genius loner.
Ingenious tips and intelligent gadgets abound in Powers’s fiction, however by no means earlier than with the provocative implications of the flip in Playground. The novel affords an outstanding reversal of the scaled-up scavenging normative to AI artwork, however greater than that, Playground challenges the readership—each admirers and critics—that Powers’s previous work has created. Will true believers in Powers’s literary-ethical divinity really feel betrayed by the late revelation, given their honest funding within the story? Will they not solely be moved by a fairy story machined for a giant, unhealthy tech man, the hardest of antiheroes to facet with, but additionally imagine {that a} nonhuman intelligence can capably seize and compel their imaginations? I hope so, inasmuch as this might result in an mental reckoning of a special order than the floor expectation—that Powers’s newest novel merely teaches us that plastics are unhealthy and Pacific Islanders are good. Furthermore, studying Powers on this tougher, demanding manner affirms the crucial that Literature—recalcitrant in its concepts, characters, and storylines—ought to invite and maintain extra of and from its readers.
Ultimately, Playground is strictly what I’d presumed it wasn’t: troublesome, ambiguous, and immune to au courant notions, all whereas trafficking in such concepts with misleading coolness and ease. The novel exposes our dependency on fiction that guarantees morally clear accounts of our right-ordered relationship to animals, nature, one another, expertise, literature—and to story itself.
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