The Cuttlefish’s Play

On a long coastal walk to find a picnic spot, two children and their parents fill pillowcases with plastic trash: a bracelet charm, a bath duckie, a half-buried five-gallon jug. The family’s quest is twofold—cleaning their South Pacific island paradise in order to protect its wildlife, and collecting material for the mother Ina’s monumental objet trouvé sculptures. Ina picks up a colorful, barnacle-encrusted drink box from the rocks of a tide pool. After debate she puts it back, not wanting to kill the crustaceans. “Is a thing still garbage,” she asks, “once life starts using it?”

This is the kind of revaluation that readers have come to expect from Richard Powers. Playground, his fourteenth novel, does for oceans what The Overstory (2018) did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human. Powers plots our seduction by the natural world, the better to save us all.

Playground is also a meditation on play: an enigmatic, understudied behavior that we share with many animals. The novel’s central relationship develops between two men across a chessboard: a yearslong play-fight and bonding ritual. Diving scenes feature marine animals at play, from a cuttlefish’s solitary performance of breathtaking color washes to a giant manta ray circling back through the water to repeatedly tickle its belly with a diver’s expelled air bubbles.

As anyone who has been captivated by animal Instagram knows, there is easy dopamine—call it balmscrolling? calmscrolling?—in watching animals play. David Toomey’s recent book Kingdom of Play describes this activity as purposeless, provisional, and open-ended, like natural selection: “Life itself, in the most fundamental sense, is playful.”¹ But Playground posits a near future in which almost everything is play, in which gamification harnesses humanity’s instincts for fun, novelty, competition, and connection to build virtual worlds we never want to leave—and perhaps can’t.

One gets a sense, beginning a Richard Powers novel, of a long pair of arms stretching to embrace as much material as possible: history, ideas, images, artifacts, maps, jokes, allusions, and painstakingly developed characters that pursue all the lives that the author—as a (rumored) individual—cannot lead himself. Like many of his books, Playground opens with multiple narrative strands that eventually interweave.

The most enchanting of its central characters is nonhuman: Makatea, a tiny atoll within the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia whose natural history and habitats Powers movingly describes, along with the history of the island’s exploitation:

Makatea had reefs, soaring cliffs, and spectacular caves filled with underground springs. It teemed with insects, snails, fish, and birds, including species that existed nowhere else in the world. Fresh water abounded, a rare thing in the Pacific. Its virgin forest crawled with coconut crabs, the largest land invertebrates in the world and a delicacy on par with lobster. But the swath of phosphate running diagonally across the island trumped those other gifts and doomed them all.

In the early 1900s, Europeans made a deal with the islanders to mine the phosphate, a potent fertilizer that “fed millions” in faraway places:

To Makateans, land—fenua—is sacred, the soul’s house. But the land of Makatea ended up all over the Pacific Rim, boosting crop yields in several distant countries. Boosted yields meant rising population, and rising population powered all the breakthroughs, inventions, and miraculous discoveries of the next twelve accelerating decades.

When the mines closed in 1966, they left behind “a moonscape of jagged rock pitted with cavities several feet wide and a hundred feet deep,” but now, about sixty years later, some island habitats are on the verge of recovery. Over the course of the novel, the island’s eighty-odd inhabitants—most of them poor—must decide whether to vote for a massive American seasteading project to be built on Makatea: one of several refuges for billionaires, “floating fortresses of self-realization,” situated in international waters so that the founders can skirt legal constraints and oversight.

Todd Keane recounts his story—he is also the novel’s narrator—in a state of anxiety. In late middle age, famous but solitary, he has been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. He can no longer play complex games, like those that inspired his visionary work as a programmer; soon he will begin to hallucinate, drift into fugue states, and lose his memory. Doctors cannot say when. Readers are given so much detail of his life and work—and those of others, and of Makatea—that the oddness of Todd’s omniscience slides past us until we begin to question, near the end, the mind behind this exuberant narration.

As the privileged only child of a Chicago trader who made board games their shared language, Todd developed a steely competitive instinct. His father offered few pointers on their way up from Chutes and Ladders to backgammon and beyond: “Leaving me to flounder was his idea of the perfect education.” In time, the boy began to perceive patterns—the underlying mathematics of the games. “The best moves of all,” he recalled, “were the ones that made my father’s chances worse.”

This portrait of a tech baron in the making is softened by the boy’s sensitivity to the marine and riverine, his sense of belonging elsewhere. When his parents fight, Todd pictures himself walking into Lake Michigan and across the bottom: a wonder to the fish as they watch him effortlessly inhaling their element. Later, on the brink of losing a crucial game to his father, Todd again imagines slipping into the murky lake, where the fish feed him one masterly move after another. For a while, he pledges himself to the ocean, “that wilderness that made the land seem an afterthought.” He pores over a young adult science book called Clearly It Is Ocean, whose fetching, red-haired author—a pioneering female diver pictured throughout in her wet suit—is his first crush:

Every page animated the incalculably large and inexplicably bizarre universe beneath the ocean’s surface. Each sentence was a blue-black mystery populated by creatures more fantastic than any role-playing dungeon crawl.

But his compulsion to win and his fascination with computer programming pull him firmly onto land.

An early hint that Playground may be something other than a realistic novel is Todd’s subtle second-person address. Who is the listener that seems to counter his fundamental isolation? “I’ve never told anyone but you,” he says. “When I was young, I could breathe underwater.”

The author of Clearly It Is Ocean is Evelyne (Evie) Beaulieu, the Montreal-born daughter of an engineer who worked with Jacques Cousteau on the first Aqua-Lung. Concerned about his gangly daughter’s diffidence, he decided to involve Evie in the testing for a new Aqua-Lung prototype. It was 1947; she was twelve. At first, she panicked in the test pool, the heavy equipment sinking her. Then she inhaled and realized she could breathe. The shock of this miracle eases at once into a confirmation:

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.

She never wanted to surface. Among the first generation of researchers to engage public interest in the oceans, Evie is a transitional figure, but a lodestar for Todd.

Todd’s closest friend and rival is Rafi Young, who caught his attention at their Jesuit high school because of the nonrequired reading tucked under Rafi’s arm, books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Todd secretly consumes whatever he spots Rafi reading. (“I got a fifth of my education that year from a guy I didn’t even know.”) While Todd commutes from wealthy, white Evanston, Rafi is a South Side kid from rough streets—and a rougher home—close to school. From early childhood, his father, a Chicago firefighter, had drilled him in reading: “A black man’s gotta read twice as good as any white, just to get half the recognition. Four times better and you’ll beat them.”

Rafi’s quiet revenge for those hours of drilling is to achieve not just mastery but an overpowering love for literature. His parents lose him to books, to worlds like Narnia that are “endless, open, and free, belonging to no man.” At school, Rafi fits neither of the two black cliques on campus and holds himself aloof until, in their sophomore year, Todd asks him if he can play chess.

Prickly and suspicious, Rafi speaks little during their matches but soon becomes a skilled adversary. He asks why chess is so addictive. It’s the logic, Todd replies. “Every board state is like a computer program.” But Rafi, steeped in classic literature, sees drama and story—even epic poetry—in the game. Each piece is a character with a history; each move reveals “new power relations…each one, relative to all the others.” Neither boy mentions competition, though they are fiercely driven to dominate the other, locked together in their own evolving power relation.

Recalling his adolescence, Todd remarks that only his love for Rafi “still needs replaying, before the game is done”—no other bond has sustained (or wounded) him so deeply. The friends grow closer at college until, in their senior year, they both fall in love with Ina, an art student from the Pacific Islands, who becomes Rafi’s girlfriend. Todd silently cedes the field. But after countless hours at his internship feeding data into CRIK, an automated encyclopedia for the “comprehensive representation of implicit knowledge” housed at his university’s supercomputing center, a big idea comes to him. After graduation, he forms a start-up and works in secret for over two years:

I now had the tools to create a way of playing in this life that human beings had always wanted. I fell asleep at night barely glimpsing what that place would look like. I woke up in the morning with multidimensional arrays dancing in my head. I couldn’t wait to get coding, sometimes cranking out scores of lines of sub-routine before breakfast.

He would call it Playground: a rudimentary knowledge-sharing site that grows, over decades, into a monolith, a social media platform so vast it is “a full-fledged country, complete with its own resources and economy—a marketplace for building reputation and cultivating net worth.” Soon after sharing his plans with Rafi—who gives him a crucial idea for the project—a clumsy betrayal on Todd’s part puts an end to their closeness: he violates Rafi’s sacrosanct privacy by sharing details with Ina of Rafi’s tragic childhood. His friend vanishes. Checkmate.

Powers’s novels combine fiction with long, engrossing factual accounts of art history, music, science history, natural history, technology, and whatever else has engaged his voracious interest. He has said that he read 120 books on trees while researching The Overstory. “It’s instruct and delight, right?” he told one interviewer. “You gotta give them both.”

His debut, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), could function as a pocket history of twentieth-century art movements, societal shifts, and wars. The Gold Bug Variations (1991) provides more than a primer on molecular genetics, along with the story of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Galatea 2.2 (1995) explores the nascent technologies of artificial intelligence; in this reworking of the Pygmalion myth, a heartbroken university humanist-in-residence, “Richard Powers,” is persuaded to help teach a neural network named Helen to understand great works of literature on a graduate level. Gain (1998) devotes almost half its length to a bildungsroman of a fictional chemical conglomerate, drawn from similar real-life corporate histories. These torrents of information—especially combined with the relentless wordplay of his earlier books—can make you feel you are trapped in the back of a bus with the most garrulous kid in the gifted program.

Yet the nonfiction within his fiction exerts its own peculiar power—certainly it aims to fascinate—and it is hard to imagine Powers’s work without this hybrid quality. The science in particular is not a painted backdrop but integral to the plot and themes. Similarly, the metafictional aspects of some of the novels cannot be teased apart from the other elements: in Playground, a distinct slap to complacent readers near the end forces a reconsideration of the whole book.²

Since Gain, his style has evolved toward greater clarity and accessibility—perhaps, in part, a response to his increasing sense of urgency about the planet. Bewilderment (2021), the short novel just before Playground, could be regarded as entry-level Richard Powers, broaching topics that include astrobiology, neurodivergence, ecological grief, and the recent rise of American authoritarianism without overwhelming the ongoing father-son narrative. Powers has described his first sight of the giant redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains, near Stanford, as a conversion experience: a rediscovery of “a system of meaning that doesn’t begin and end with humans.” He began writing The Overstory and soon after moved to the Tennessee foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a long hike from some of the best-preserved old-growth forest in America.

But his sensitivity to nature is apparent much earlier. The Echo Maker (2006), which won the National Book Award, opens with a mesmerizing two-page description of thousands of migrating sandhill cranes, stopping midway in the Nebraska wetlands “as they have for eons” and fighting for space “in the packed staging ground on those few miles of water still clear and wide enough to pass as safe.” Powers had seen these cranes himself, by chance, and felt struck by “the animal intelligence that brings these hundreds of thousands of birds to these places like clockwork, and also that weird feeling that…they were familiar and yet the most foreign thing I’d ever seen.”

Powers was born in 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, the fourth of five children. His mother was a homemaker and his father a junior high school principal. The family lived in the Chicago suburb of Lincolnwood until Powers was eleven, when his father accepted a job at the International School in Bangkok. They stayed five years, traveling widely throughout Asia and discovering the ocean:

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.³

After finishing high school in Illinois, Powers entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a physics major but soon realized that a career in science would require ever more narrow specialization—intolerable to his free-range curiosity. He transferred to English/rhetoric after a pivotal freshman honors survey in literature and an immersive reading of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: “I felt literature was the place for the grand synthetic aerial view I was in danger of losing if I stayed with physics.”

Faced again with the demand for specialization, Powers left school after his master’s and moved to Boston in 1980, working as a programmer and data processor until a chance encounter with an August Sander photograph, Young Farmers (1914), at the Museum of Fine Arts. “I had this palpable sense of recognition,” Powers told The Paris Review, “this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze.” Within a couple of days, he had quit his job to write Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Playground chronicles the rise of personal computing, breakthroughs in computer gaming, and the digital gift culture that briefly flourished in the 1970s and 1980s—the free sharing of code and ideas—along with the mad rush toward profit that followed. This is a world Powers knows well from his undergraduate days at Illinois, where he taught himself programming. For years, he worked on the PLATO system on campus, a precursor to the Internet and remote learning.⁴ The philosophical and cultural implications of machine learning (and artificial intelligence in general) have absorbed him since at least the mid-1990s, when he published Galatea 2.2.

As in Galatea 2.2, some of the technologies described in Playground lie slightly in the future, but the basic premises of monetizing user data and predicting/directing social and political trends are with us now. The platform Playground seems like a combination of Reddit and Facebook: members post and vote on comments and earn digital and social credit of various kinds. It proves addictive, as designed. Even in its infancy, “creative users were amassing small fortunes in Playbucks and putting them to ingenious uses in secondary markets not officially recognized by the platform.” Eventually it became “a complete economy…a free market in human resources” in which human agency shrinks with every update.

Powers notes the cavalier attitude of AI proponents toward those who will lose their jobs, but he seems more concerned about digital ubiquity—how easily and completely we have accepted these parallel lives we maintain and the data and control we surrender with each click or like. Todd’s profit motive and his rage at his estranged friend for cutting him off drive him further into darkness: “It made perfect sense to me that the machines that would doom us cut their teeth by watching humans play.”

The seasteaders send a new AI tool to Makatea to help influence the islanders’ decision. Surprisingly, Profunda appears to be programmed for accuracy, not persuasion. When asked, the machine replies that the factories and floating cities are likely to damage the natural environment—a cost that must be weighed against the benefits of a new health clinic and high school. Rafi and Ina now live on the island, so they and their children participate in the debate. One strength of the novel is that the argument to bring in the “techno-utopians” and their much-needed cash is no straw man, and we are kept in suspense until the final vote.

In childhood, Powers felt sure he would become an oceanographer. Evie Beaulieu serves capably as a surrogate in this novel: unwavering and to some degree selfish in her determination to get back under the water, family and children be damned. (In his acknowledgments, he writes that Evie’s story relies much on the biography of the marine explorer Sylvia Earle, who also turned to ocean advocacy in her later years.⁵)

Although Evie’s professional struggles in the masculine world of ocean exploration in the 1960s and 1970s hold some interest, Powers lavishes his most sumptuous prose on the marine life she encounters: nacreous layers of detail that build, sentence on sentence, to ravishing effect. When a cuttlefish, showing no awareness of her presence, begins not only to flush with color but to dance, she watches with wonder as he cycles “through postures that biologists claimed were only used for competition or display”:

His entire body blanched as white as Antarctica, and he knotted himself into a wild warrior pose. Spiky goose bumps erupted all over his skin, which then burst into flame. The arms turned into swords, a saber dance for no one. He thrust his blades out everywhere, the spitting image of Kali, the goddess of time, change, destruction and creation.

The cuttlefish was putting on a play.

Recently, Powers has mentioned that he has a “low-grade but chronic and decades-long obsession” with Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction classic Solaris (1961; first English translation, 1970):

That book seems to me as profound and mysterious as fiction gets. And while I doubt that this genealogy will make sense to anyone else, I feel as if I have been trying to rewrite that story for a long time.

Solaris is an ocean tale, though the immense, unknowable ocean of Solaris—the planet’s singular life-form—resembles nothing on Earth. When the book opens, the few remaining scientists of the isolated Solaris outpost are suffering from phenomena that they can barely describe to one another, let alone admit to their colleagues back home: the ocean, known for generating towering temporary sculptures from its gelatinous depths, has now begun to manifest “living,” responsive simulacra of painfully significant figures—dead lovers, children—from the scientists’ pasts. These terrifying materialized projections wreak havoc on the station and ultimately force the scientists to confront their own hubris in contacting other planets. “From time to time we think about how magnificent we are,” one says in a famous passage.

We’re humanitarian and noble, we’ve no intention of subjugating other races, we only want to impart our values to them and in return, to appropriate their heritage.

Lem devotes pages to the failures of science. For generations, researchers have struggled to explain the stunning sculptures (dubbed “mimoids”) that the ocean constructs and then, just as mysteriously, allows to dissolve into dust—structures that Lem describes with the clarity and eeriness of a Dalí:

A malleable skin, almost completely separate from the base and swelling out like a cauliflower, is projected upwards; simultaneously it grows pale, and in a few minutes it offers a perfect imitation of [a] puffy cloud.

How do mimoids form? What is their purpose? No theory has survived testing; no test results are repeatable. Solaris confronts the limits of human cognition in the face of alien intelligence—of profound otherness.

Powers argues that this otherness is real and may be unbreachable, but that we are nevertheless interconnected and dependent on th Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.e life-forms surrounding us on Earth: “See them up close and personal,” he wrote after The Overstory.

See them from far away across great distances. Notice all the million complex beautiful behaviors and forms that have always slipped right past you. Simply see, and the rest will begin to follow. Every other act of preservation depends on that first step.