Playground
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS PRIZE
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure.
When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths.
Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go.
Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Powers (The Overstory) delivers an epic drama of AI, neocolonialism, and oceanography in this dazzling if somewhat disjointed novel set largely on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, where a mysterious American consortium plans to launch floating cities into the ocean. The story centers on three characters: Rafi Young, a former literature student from an abusive home in Chicago who has moved to Makatea with his wife; Rafi's onetime friend Todd Keane, the billionaire founder of a social media company and AI platform whose connection to the seasteading project is revealed later; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a Canadian marine biologist who has come to Makatea just as the island's residents must vote on whether to let the project proceed. For some Makateans, the seasteading initiative raises hopes of economic renewal; for others, it triggers fears of environmental destruction and a return to colonialist oppression. Powers's characters can be implausibly cerebral and pure of heart, and his narrative threads never fully cohere, but the elegance of his prose, the scope of his ambition, and the exacting reverence with which he writes about the imperiled natural world serve as reminders of why he ranks among America's foremost novelists. "The ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement," Powers writes of Evelyne, "into a place far larger than anything human." Readers will be awed.
