Playground

a Novel

English language

Published 2024 by Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W..

ISBN:
978-1-324-08604-8
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5 stars (1 review)

Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to …

8 editions

Fiction to broaden the world view

5 stars

(texto integral com links, em português → sol2070.in/2024/09/livro-playground-richard-powers/ )

"Playground" (2024, 400 pgs.) by Richard Powers was one of the books I was most looking forward to. After all, "The Overstory" was probably the best fiction I've ever read -- I wrote about this last year and it still holds up.

It didn't disappoint. It's magnificent speculative fiction (bordering on science fiction), now forming the author's ecological trilogy, with "The Overstory" (2018) and "Bewilderment" (2021). Instead of the word ‘ecological’, he prefers the term ‘trilogy about belonging to the world’, in the sense that it goes against the dominant narrative that humans, because of a supposed superiority, are practically beyond nature and can then do whatever they want with it. This is at the root of the current environmental emergency. In these books, nature is not something separate, a backdrop or a source of resources. It is the protagonist. Nature …