In 2019, the professional Go player Lee Sedol announced that he’d given up the game. His decision to retire came in the aftermath of his much-publicized loss of a series of matches to AlphaGo, an AI-driven Go-playing algorithm. In his 2023 novel The Maniac, Benjamin Labatut characterizes AlphaGo’s ascent as, if not quite humanity’s death knell, then at least further evidence of our increasingly precarious status on this planet. Labatut writes that when Lee scrapped out just one win to AlphaGo’s four, the Go master framed it as humanity’s last stand against technology: “As time goes on, it’ll probably be very difficult to beat AI. But winning this one time … it felt like it was enough. One time was enough.” Labatut echoed the sentiment, suggesting that we have now arrived in here-be-dragons terrain: “Facing each other, Lee and the computer had managed to stray beyond the limits of Go, casting a new and terrible beauty, a logic more powerful than reason, that is sending ripples far and wide.”
Labatut’s two excellent novels (his first, When We Cease to Understand the World, was published in English in 2021) cast the notion of scientific progress in a skeptical light — the product of brilliant men crushed by the weight of their own thoughts, and not always “progress.” He’s an heir to Richard Powers, who has built his career on stories about scientific genius. His work tends to sparkle with optimism, though: In novels like The Overstory (2018), Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), and Galatea 2.2 (1995), technology and science provide the means to improve and deepen humanity. Braided narratives are his forte, and he’s typically braiding the science and the human as if they were spiraling ever-upward. Bad things happen, sure — climate change in The Echo Maker (2006), racism in The Time of Our Singing (2003), anti-science Trumpism in Bewilderment (2021), corporate exploitation in Gain (2008) — but his career has been a decades-long effort to insist that humanity can pull through. The fever of Trumpism will break; the cure for cancer will be found. His latest novel, Playground, addresses this in the context of oceanography and Go — in which, like Labatut, he sees a rich metaphor for mankind’s intellectual limits and perils. Which vision of science is more persuasive may depend on how you woke up this morning, or this past quarter century.
Like most Powers novels, Playground involves multiple plot threads, expertly and precisely loomed. One narrator, Todd, is a tech billionaire who ponders settling his accounts in the wake of a terminal diagnosis of Lewy body dementia. As a teenager and college student, he befriended (and later alienated) Rafi, an aspiring writer obsessed with Nikolai Fyodorov’s musings about mankind’s potential to resurrect the dead. Rafi lives on Makatea, a French Polynesian island that has been targeted for “seasteading” by a conglomerate looking to exploit its rare and valuable phosphorus deposits. The locals are anxious about this proposed effort, which will make them wealthy but likely at the expense of the island’s ecology. Among the ambivalent is Evie, an elderly, pioneering female oceanologist who laments how misunderstood the oceans are, to the extent they’re understood at all.
In Powers novels, scientists are heroes because they a) operate outside of our typical social norms and b) (not unrelatedly) possess a near-infinite capacity for wonderment. Of Evie’s love of diving, he writes: “She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.” This geeky, scientific obsessiveness is charming, though it also allows Powers to get away with a lot of clunky narrative approaches. Rafi, who is Black and grew up in Chicago, perpetually speaks in a blend of streetwise and nerd. (“Brace yourself, mofo. You ready to head through the wardrobe?” he asks Todd when introducing him to Go.) And when they discuss resurrection, the braiding of high and low devolves into exchanges that would be tin-eared even on the geekiest message boards:
“That’s what he calls the Common Task. The one thing that can unite all the people on Earth, whatever their histories: Working to learn everything there is to learn, so we can defeat death.”
“Well. Fuck me with a garden hose.”
Moreover, the tensions in Playground are overlaid with some obvious symbolism: Todd is black and Rafi is white, just as the stones used to play Go are black and white, just as the stones the Makatea islanders use to vote on their fate are black and white. And those are just the most obvious elements of the manichean world Playground operates in: life and death, nature and pollution, land and water. The yin and yang of it all is written deep into the novel’s DNA, and Powers does surprisingly little to question or complicate it. Todd has made his fortune through a gamified kind of Reddit that gets millions of users (good!), but humanity won’t be moved to look after its own best interests (bad!), and though technology can expose us to joys and wonders (good!) it can also make us selfish about our discoveries (bad!) and though you might be brilliant like Rafi and rise above your station (good!) your big academic break comes on the day your sister dies and your brainpower can never bring her back (bad!). Or as Rafi tells Todd: “You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game … in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty.” It’s a big, beautiful, binary world.
Powers is keeping it simple on various fronts because he’s determined to sell readers on the premise that the oceans can be as fascinating as any space opera. (Evie to herself: “Why would you use the sea to plan for space trips? This was the voyage.”) Our skepticism there is reasonable: Life underwater is the stuff of fusty Jules Verne novels or Jacques Cousteau documentaries; it’s fodder for horror (Jaws), comedy (Finding Nemo), or both (Sharknado). Powers attempts to freshen up the material — make it more earthbound — by framing Evie as a pioneering woman diver, persuading the boy’s club at UCSD of her bona fides, and writing a children’s book, Clearly It Is Ocean, that inspires Todd as a child. Powers wants to return us to that sense of childlike wonder, too. And he’s speaking simplistically because, in a way, he’s speaking desperately. The stakes for humanity are higher than they were when he began his career. The world is too much on fire for the postmodern gamesmanship of early, woolier novels like Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988).
If on the surface Powers’ approach can feel patronizing, at least in the ocean the sparkling feels earned. The finest parts of Playground revel in the surprising, magical life under water, just as the strongest parts of The Overstory were given to the trees. Here, Evie is awestruck by a giant ray, and the prose becomes sinuous and pleasurable:
“Impossible not to see him as a gigantic, oceangoing bird flying through the water. No wonder that the people of these islands had long considered these creatures sacred—the spirit guardians and promoters of grace, wisdom, and flow. From underneath, looking up into the filtered sun, she found the Loner’s pale belly surprisingly hard to make out—a ghost as diffuse as his black dorsal silhouette would appear to anyone looking down on him through the darkening waves. Countershading—Thayer’s law: a trick that fish had used for the last hundred and fifty million years to make themselves disappear both into and against the light.”
But as with The Overstory, Powers strains to determine what to do with this magic; admirers of The Overstory, and the graceful character sketches and closely observed dendrology that earned it a Pulitzer, have to reckon with the fuzzy romanticism of its closing chapters. Without giving too much away, Playground does find a clever way to close out its story, and it’s an affecting one for the Todd and Rafi storyline in particular. More important for Powers’ career-long project, it allows him to retain his optimism — we’re wrecking the oceans now, but perhaps a particular piece of technology will rescue us.
To go along with this argument, you’ll need to set aside some of your skepticism and believe in what a novel believes in most: storytelling. Humanity thrives, Powers means to say, when we can write a story that’s optimistic — a game like Todd’s, a resurrection narrative like Rafi’s, a children’s classic like Evie’s, a folk tale like the islanders’. And if we allow technology to help write the story — as if plugging the whole of society into ChatGPT — won’t we wind up in a better place, maybe?
Labatut would be doubtful. In a recent Harper’s essay, he encouraged us to avoid the uncertain promise of AI: “We can always rise and take a step back from the void toward which we have so hurriedly thrown ourselves, by lending an ear to the strange voices that arise from our imagination, that feral territory that will always remain a necessary refuge and counterpoint to rationality.”
But for Powers, AI is the feral territory, just as the oceans are feral territory, and our imaginations should be allowed to play in both. We might lose the bet. Todd thinks: “We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.” But Powers wants us to be optimistic because stories save us and the ocean offers a great unwritten story, if we’re willing to listen to it. Perhaps — an ocean, like a Go board, has millions of possible moods, countless uncertainties. But a novel focused on binaries can only capture so much of it.
[Published by W.W Norton on September 24, 2024, 400 pages, $29.99 hardcover]