An extract from Playground by Richard Powers
Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity
Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonise and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity
Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a 3,000-year-old board game. Elsewhere, 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 in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.
All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.
Playground was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
Richard Powers
About the Author
Richard Powers is a multi-award-winning American author. He lives in the Great Smoky MountainsRichard Powers on Playground
‘For much of my childhood, I was sure I was going to be an oceanographer. I lived in Bangkok, and I often spent my weekends and summer holidays snorkelling in the South China Sea. Fifty years later, following the death of my older sister, a chain of memories sent me back to those years. The reefs that we swam in then were mostly gone. Playground began as a meditation on what had happened to that 99% of the Earth’s habitable space, the ocean, in the short span of that half a century.’
Read the full interview here.
What the judges said
‘Economic motives quarrel with environmental ones and artificial intelligence poses threats as well as promises as the residents of a Polynesian island prepare to vote on a proposed seasteading project led by an unidentified American billionaire. This is a characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display.’
The Booker Prize 2024 judges with the longlist
©Tom PilstonPolynesian islanders prepare to vote on a billionaire’s seasteading project in an exhilarating novel that distils subjects as diverse as climate change and colonialism
— The 2024 judges on Playground
Other nominated books by Richard Powers
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. An astrobiologist thinks of a creative way to help his rare and troubled son in Richard Powers’ deeply moving and brilliantly original novel.
Richard Powers’ radical and remarkable novel. Nine strangers are each summoned in different ways by the natural world to save it from catastrophe.
With pitch perfect precision, Richard Powers tells the story of a musician journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present.
