ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The novelist Richard Powers writes about awe. He won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Overstory," a book that helped people see trees in a different way. Well, his new novel "Playground" takes us underwater into the world's oceans, specifically the reefs around an island in the South Pacific called Makatea and the people whose lives intersect with it. "Playground" has made the long list for this year's prestigious Booker Prize. Richard Powers, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. What a privilege to talk to you.
RICHARD POWERS: Well, thanks so much. It's a thrill to be here.
SHAPIRO: Like many of your novels, "Playground" is sweeping. It weaves lots of different stories together over decades. It travels the world. But a lot of the action takes place on this one small island that I had never heard of before. How did you learn about Makatea?
POWERS: You know what, I've been fascinated by the story of the Pacific phosphate islands for decades. My...
SHAPIRO: Phosphate islands?
POWERS: Yeah, so there were three or four very small Pacific atolls that in the early 20th century turned out to have vast deposits of phosphorus in rock form. And this was right at the point in world history where the global population was taking off, food production was having trouble pacing it. And it was discovered that this form of phosphate could be used to make fertilizer and vastly increase the productivity of farming all around the world. So here were these tiny islands, who up until then had mercifully escaped history and the vision of the West, but now suddenly were center stage and were being literally eaten up and distributed all around the world in order to feed the rest of the globe. And I had tucked that away in the back of my mind as an incredible story of exploitation, abandonment and rejuvenation.
SHAPIRO: So you have this tiny island that was once some sort of paradise that was absolutely eviscerated and now decades later has begun to recover. What struck you about that as the kernel of something that could become this novel, "Playground"?
POWERS: I had become increasingly conscious of just how important the exponential growth of the products coming out of Silicon Valley were for new forms of capitalism and new forms of colonialism. And this idea of trying to situate a book at the moment of this fourth industrial revolution, this kind of creation of new forms of intelligence...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
POWERS: ...Through human handiwork, it seemed to be an entirely separate preoccupation until I discovered this strange fascination that the tech bros of Silicon Valley have with something called seasteading.
SHAPIRO: So seasteading is this idea of building floating cities that can be a kind of libertarian paradise free of any governmental controls, which I thought was a product of your imagination, but you're telling me it's an actual obsession of the Elon Musk types.
POWERS: Oh, yeah. And as you say, it's kind of the extension of the libertarian dream, this idea that somehow human capacity, human industry, human ingenuity can escape all of the regulations of having to, you know, abide inside the confines of a nation state and go out on the open ocean and make its own rules and build its own cities.
SHAPIRO: One of the things that I love about this book in particular and your writing in general is the way that you manage the balance between the sweep and scope of subjects like colonialism and ecosystems and artificial intelligence, along with the human intimate, specific.
POWERS: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: And so I want to get to the specific human, intimate detail that you mentioned in the dedication to this book, which says...
POWERS: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...(Reading) For Peggy Powers Petermann, who gave me a book on coral reefs when I was 10.
One of the characters in this book also gets a book on coral reefs when he's 10 years old. Can you tell me what impact that book that you received as a child had on you?
POWERS: My sister - big sister, Peg, died a couple of years ago, and in...
SHAPIRO: Oh, she was your sister.
POWERS: Yeah. And in remembering her life and celebrating my memories of her, I remembered all of a sudden, you know, at the age of 10, I had dropped into my lap, this book that suggested to me that there was this alien world and that there were creatures in the deep sea, some of whom were - you know, have been around there for 4 billion years before life came up on land. You know, this was a pretty rich thing for a 10-year-old to try to wrap his head around. And, you know, looking at the book, reading the book, raising my eyes, looking out the window on the north side of Chicago suburbs, I just couldn't fit the two together. Until the following year when my father picked up the family and moved us to Bangkok, Thailand, and I found myself swimming in the South China Sea in those same reefs in the book that the - my sister Peg had given me.
SHAPIRO: There's a beautiful passage here that recontextualized the way I think about the world, where about 100 pages into the book, you write - (reading) no human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth's main stage.
POWERS: Yeah. You know, it's hard to treat the oceans in a way that gives you that sense of grandeur because we can't live there. And we can't stay there for more than very short periods of time. And we can't see very far. And we can't survive below a certain depth without, you know, huge artificial contrivances. But to know that the planet is 99% living ocean and to know that our own existence is this very, very late chapter, you know, that's - to me, that's hugely consoling. Our place is somewhere off to the side of this enormous engine that's, you know, at the heart of what keeps the planet alive.
SHAPIRO: Your sister died in 2022, and she played such a seminal role in planting the seed that became this book. Did she know that you were working on it?
POWERS: No, sadly, no. My other brothers and sisters, though, I think, will see this book as a celebration of her and her playfulness. Play and games are so much at the heart of the book as well.
SHAPIRO: So much the heart of the book. There is chess. There is Go. There is play by nonhuman creatures. I mean, yeah, talk more about that.
POWERS: Play as the engine of evolution - that life is in this enormous patient game of trying to figure out how to respond to change - and I take this idea of two kinds of games throughout the entire book. There's the finite game that we play to win and this story of two high school friends in Chicago who end up following very different paths, which is, you know, very much at the center of the book. The narrator of the book is one of this pair. They're constantly trying to best each other in this game of human ingenuity and dominance.
The other kind of game is the infinite game, and we play infinite games to keep on playing. And ultimately, awe and wonder are moves in that game. They are states of mind that allow us to say, whatever happens to us individually, whatever happens to our moment in history, we are part of an infinite game, and we had better learn how to try to keep on playing.
SHAPIRO: Well, Richard Powers, thank you for the extraordinary read and the wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed both.
POWERS: Oh, thank you so much.
SHAPIRO: His new novel is "Playground."
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