Novelist Richard Powers knows something we don’t, but I think he’s a little too kind to say it. Instead, he ends every sentence with right, right? On a Monday afternoon (late evening for him in the Smokies), Powers leaned in close to his iPad camera and told me, in quick succession,  the big secrets.

“We used to know that the human story is a very small part of a much larger thing,” said Powers, gazing off-screen, “If we've alienated ourselves from everything else, of course, we're gonna be neurotic and self-destructive. The fruit wants us to eat it, right? So that we can distribute its seeds, right?”

Right. Powers does not seem self-destructive or neurotic, despite the fact that he’s a self-described introvert with a three-month book tour around the corner. At sixty-seven, Playground from W.W. Norton is his fourteenth novel. When it hits shelves September 24th, fans of his Pulitzer Prize-winning tree epic The Overstory will recognize his patchwork approach to storytelling — A dying tech billionaire, a high schooler from the lower west side of Chicago, fictional neighbors based on the very real island of Makatea and a fictional marine biologist based on the very real life of Sylvia Earle. These characters combine to form Powers’ urgent yet playful commentary on artificial intelligence, seasteading, resurrection and memory. 

Reading Powers, you get the sense that he’s a man for whom observation is a form of love, so it’s gratifying to hear him say something like, “I have learned something every third day here that has changed the way that I think about what life is trying to do in this place.” This place: the eastern edge of Tennessee, at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains, where he lives and walks with his wife, Jane. 

Today’s lesson? The Cardinal Flower, which he thought only grew in clusters at a high elevation, can also be found alone lower down. 

The observational walk is key to the ethos of Powers, for whom writing is essentially a pastime in between miles-long walks. In his view, the two are symbiotic. “I don't have to go much farther than three-quarters of a mile before the scene that I'm working on starts to consolidate,” he explained, “The voices of the characters colliding with each other start to echo in my ears.” 

This cyclical relationship goes for love, too. “When you love, your powers of observation grow and attend to that love,” he noted, “And the process of observation makes you more capable of identifying and loving.”

Powers told me this before quizzing me on the three basic kinds of dramatic conflict. I listed man vs. society, man vs. self and, incorrectly, man vs. man (Powers clarified this falls under the umbrella of man vs. society). 

In fact, Powers lives for the actual third kind of conflict: man vs. nature. “That was the most important part of all our stories from the beginning of time. All places on earth, all Indigenous stories, all traditional stories are always about who the hell we are,” Powers observed, “The realization that the rest of living things might be indifferent to us, might be hostile to us. These were the engines of human existence, of storytelling for most of human history.”

And then, about a hundred and fifty years ago, as Powers sees it, we won. “A lot of literary fiction in the 20th century just kind of assumed that we could have our own way,” he summarized, “And that was no longer an interesting conflict. We won the war, and we disappeared into the social and psychological world.” Since then, we writers and readers have been existing in what Powers calls “a self-created” vacuum.” Most of the media we consume fails to engage with flora or fauna in even the most casual way. 

So how do we welcome nature back into the conversation? Today, climate catastrophe and species extinction are reminding literary fiction of something that, Powers insisted, fantasy and science fiction never forgot: “Our very existence is precarious. If the rest of the world is just here as raw resources for the human project, of course, we're gonna despoil the world. So the question for me was how to write novels that brought that back as an urgent question, maybe the most urgent question of our life.”

Then the kicker: 

“We like to think that we're somehow self-sufficient, and that is so insanely not the case, our atmosphere is created by other living things. Our water is circulated and purified by other living things. Our food supply is other living things. It's only when we think of the victory conditions for the human game being total domination and control that some challenge to our centrality is that anxiety-inducing. If we are the story and everything else is small subordinate stories, then what's happening now is gonna be the great holy terror for humanity. We won't be able to tell that story anymore. If we maintain the capacity to make meaning, all we have to do is say we're not the only ones who can do this. Then the world goes from being a terrifying thing to being almost insanely interesting, right?”

Right. For Powers, this terror is not only environmental but also technological. The singularity, the day when technological advancement outpaces human knowledge, underpins every page of Playground (sometimes for more literal, plot-twist-related reasons). Powers spent the first part of his career as a programmer. Much like Playground’s main narrator, he inhaled the early internet program available at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He knew how to code before most people knew how to work a VCR.

But how does one re-code the victory conditions for the human game? How does one reach what Powers understands as the ‘play’ mindset? “It’s the great question,” said Powers, “The reality is we can do that when we accept our own mortality. In the long run, we’re all dead. If you step to the side, observe and attend, everything opens up to you. Everything has a kind of richness that it's deeply meaningful simply to be aware of.”

And another gem to tell your grandchildren, as handed to me one Monday over Zoom: “We are colonized by this diseased culture of commodity, capitalist meaning; we think we can win if we get enough shiny. Go down to Stanford, go down to the Valley, and there are still people who are saying, hold on just a little longer. The singularity is coming. You know, we can defeat the design flow of death. You set that aside, and everything becomes infinitely dearer.”

Powers is not a hippie; he’s just calm. And you can’t exactly call a man who calls Silicon Valley “the Valley” or quotes John Maynard Keynes “woo-woo.” Though, I don’t think you would want to. In some inconceivable way, he has managed to balance his vast knowledge of the digital age with a New Age sense of smallness and a coming-of-age sense of conviction. 

“We have to give up the finite game of human exceptionalism and embrace the game of long, unfolding, unconstrained exploration,” he continued, “And play, you know? Keep on playing.”

Richard Powers lives in awe, and I briefly got to join him there, but he’s also nice enough to write books about it, so you can visit him anytime.


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An excerpt from Richard Powers' Playground, which ran in Issue 194, Close Encounters. The novel is out now via W.W. Norton.

I wrote to Rafi when I got to San Jose. I wanted him to know where I was. I wanted to make sure he always had a channel where he could reach me. I wrote as if nothing had happened. I told him how well Playground was doing. I wrote him again when we hit half a million users and when the smart tracking ads gave us our first substantial revenues. I told him how I now had more money than I knew what to do with. 

I worried that my messages to his student email address would one day be returned: No such user in the system. But they kept going through. Through mutual acquaintances, I learned that he'd submitted his thesis at last: "The 'Design of Darkness' in Plath, Bishop, and Reed." It got top honors. He stayed on in Urbana, this time to get a doctorate in education. He was writing about how underprivileged children learned how to read. 

I got a copy of his master's thesis by not entirely legitimate means, and I read it twice. I understood very little, but along the way, Rafi managed to mention both Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, while spinning several metaphors comparing the writing of poetry to the game of Go.

They felt like bread crumbs left there for me alone. But every one of the emails I sent him went unanswered.

I had done something unforgivable that I didn't fully understand, and I was dead to him. But all the dead would live again, as in that curious book he had shown me, lifetimes ago, in a castle by the shore of a lake that I once knew how to walk under. His sister would rise from her landing spot at the base of his apartment stairs. My father would uncrumple from the ruins of his 450.

His mother's heart would unburst. I would bring them all back— and Rafi, too. I just had to work, harder and longer hours. I just needed more posts, from another million users. I just needed techniques for keeping people logged in and telling us the stories of their lives. I just needed a machine that could read and explain those stories to me and tell me everything they meant. Put a pebble on the board. Then another. Watch the unfold-ing. I threw myself into Playground. It became my life. Every success was vindication and revenge. My virtual country evolved. Its code grew smarter. My employees became expert at creating a home more exciting than the one where most people lived. My algorithms learned to read and understand our users, and the hundreds of millions of dollars that my venture made I plowed back into further recreations until here you are, the child of my games, able to absorb and play with and regenerate and realize all stories. And here we are, you and I, poised together on the threshold of raising all the dead.