Playground by Richard Powers: Review by Niall Harrison

Playground, Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Company 978-1-32408-603-1, 383pp, $29.99, hc). September 2024.

Richard Powers is another writer whose work – omnivorous, full-bodied novels of both character and idea – you would think difficult to replicate via generative technologies, but his new novel Playground suggests the man himself is not convinced that will always be the case. Genera­tive tools owned by one of the protagonists, the tech billionaire Todd Keane, play an important role in the plot, and while the ethics of their development and deployment are given a side-eye, the basic capabilities of the technology are sympathetically imagined. Powers builds his case by weaving Todd’s life through the last 50 years of AI research, and through a lifelong debate with his friend Rafi Young.

The two of them meet at a Jesuit private school in 1980s Chicago and embody a schematic contrast of class, race and worldview. Todd’s family is wealthy, Rafi’s is poor; Todd is White, Rafi is Black. For Todd, chess – the game over which they initially bond – is about “actions and patterns and deterministic consequences,” whereas for the more artistically inclined Rafi its fascination is in how it depicts evolving power relations: “It’s a story… an epic work in progress.” In this telling, when computers conquer chess, they master a basic form of storytelling; when they become capable of besting humans at Go, they are demonstrating a more creative form of problem-solving; and so on towards current generative tools, and past them. From humanity’s tendency to move the goalposts every time such a milestone is reached, Powers derives scepticism that machine learning is inherently incapable of producing what one character calls “rich, robust, and convincing” art. And he parallels this line of argument with a Facebook-like origin story for Todd’s first company, a gamified social media platform from which the novel takes its title, and for which Rafi provides a key intellectual concept. Although, as with Facebook, a settle­ment is reached between the two men, Todd’s baseline response is that “All inventions come from everywhere,” and that it’s the remix that matters, a sentiment that echoes through the novel, all the way to acknowledgments, where Powers offers thanks to “these [named] authors and to the myriad others whose work and play are recombined in this book’s genes.”

Don’t be so quick to argue for human unique­ness, Powers seems to be saying: People haven’t made much money betting against the potential of machine creativity so far. This position shouldn’t be too surprising. Powers has been interested in the potential of artificial intelligence since at least Galatea 2.2 (1995), has explored variations in human neurology in novels such as Generosity (2009) and Bewilderment (2021), and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory (2018), with its exploration of nonhuman perception of the world. He is enduringly fascinated by stories that chal­lenge our sense of “human nature,” and perhaps increasingly by stories that challenge our sense of the-human-in-nature – which is where the second major strand of the current novel comes in.

Like a number of other recent SF novels – Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022) comes to mind, as does E. J. Swift’s The Coral Bones (2022) and Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension (2023) – Playground is in part a rhapsody to the blue. In parallel with Todd and Rafi’s story, we are taken through milestones in the history of undersea exploration, primarily through the eyes of Evelyne Beaulieu, a pioneering Quebecois marine biologist. In 1947, as a teenager, Evelyn becomes one of the first people to use an aqualung, and experiences diving as a revelation: “She had been made for water,” she realises. “Life had just revealed itself, and she was in a hurry for more.” She studies, she struggles against the sexism of the times, but she succeeds, and more than not, Powers succeeds in taking us with her, and communicating to us something of the exhilaration of discovery. In 1960, during a research trip in the North Pacific, Evelyn and her colleagues receive word that Jacques Pic­card and Don Walsh have descended to the bottom of the Challenger Deep and seen life all the way down, and their reaction is dazzled joy, laughter and song. Later in the sixties, Evelyn has the chance to participate in one of the Tektite undersea habita­tion missions (“a pod of colonists exploring a beau­tiful new planet”); and at the end of the seventies she publishes a Rachel Carson-esque paean to the oceans for a young adult audience, which goes on to inspire, among others, Todd Keane. Evelyn is a recombinative character, with elements of her life based on that of the American researcher Sylvia Earle, but for me her story was some of the freshest and most enriching material in the novel. And her take on intelligence, in her later years, is shaped by encounters with cuttlefish and giant mantas, but chimes with the novel’s arguments about AI: The caution against anthropomorphism, she reflects, had begun as a safeguard against overprojection, but has become “an insidious contributor to hu­man exceptionalism.”

The technological and oceanic strands of the novel converge on the tiny French Polynesian atoll of Makatea, when a Californian consortium approaches the island’s mayor with an offer of development money in exchange for allowing the construction of libertarian seasteading platforms. Makatea is a place that one of its residents, Ina, an artist with Pacific Islander heritage, describes as “concussed by history”: exploited in the early twentieth century for its phosphate deposits, abruptly abandoned and de-industrialised in the mid-sixties, subsequently adjacent to nuclear test sites, now at risk of climate inundation and largely ignored. Among its remaining population of 82 are other Tuamotuans; the children of Chinese and Japanese citizens brought in by the French as indentured labourers; two priests of different de­nominations; Evelyn; and a handful of Americans, some of whom have adopted Tuamotuan children, and one of whom is Rafi, long after his break from Todd. Inspiringly egalitarian, with an eye on the future, the community decide that everyone who can write their name should be allowed to vote, irrespective of age; the debate that follows seemed to me a thorough analysis of plausible competing points of view, although here and at points in Todd and Rafi’s story I wasn’t sure that all of the inter­personal dynamics, particularly those involving race, rang entirely true.

But then, this is also a novel of unreliable nar­ration. Todd’s recollections of his life are in the first person: “I have a story to tell,” he insists, “the story of my friend and me and how we changed the future of mankind.” But he is old, and desper­ate to get things on the record before progressive dementia removes his ability to reason. The stories of the ocean, meanwhile – Evelyn’s life, and the lives of the inhabitants of Makatea – are told in an omniscient viewpoint, and while the events described mostly line up with Todd’s account, some divergences emerge. The explanation for those divergences goes back to Todd and Rafi’s debates, and means that the final interpretation of Playground, and of its characters, depends heav­ily on its ending. I bought it; I found it usefully challenging. But however you end up feeling, the journey to get there is one that, at least for now, only Powers could have conjured in this way.

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In Niall Harrison‘s spare time, he writes reviews and essays about sf. He is a former editor of Vector (2006-2010) and Strange Horizons (2010-2017), as well as a former Arthur C. Clarke Award judge and various other things.

This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.

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