Richard Powers' new novel 'Playground' is filled with awe for the ocean

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

In Richard Powers' new novel Playground, technology and the environment meet on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia. The book weaves stories together from across decades, but revolves around core themes like awe for the vastness of our oceans and the centrality of play in the story of human survival. In today's episode, Powers talks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about some of the many inspirations behind Playground, including games, a book on coral reefs gifted to him by his sister, and Silicon Valley's obsession with seasteading.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The ocean freaks me out. Maybe it's because I only
0:08.8	learned to swim when I was well into adulthood, but how could the ocean not be scary? It's deep and dark
0:15.7	and filled with things unknown, and it's also the setting of the new Richard Powers novel
0:20.5	playground. Now, he doesn't
0:22.7	get the hebi-gibis when he thinks about the vast expanse of the ocean. Instead, in this interview
0:27.7	with MPR's Ari Shapiro, he talks about how so much of the ocean is inaccessible to us. We might
0:33.2	be able to visit some of these places, but we can't live there, we can't build there, we can't
0:37.5	survive there.
0:38.5	And to Powers, that's not scary.
0:40.5	That's consoling.
0:42.1	That's up ahead.
0:44.0	A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story.
0:48.3	But right now, you probably need more.
0:50.6	On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day
0:56.0	in under 15 minutes because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big,
1:02.2	crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR.
1:08.3	The novelist Richard Powers writes about awe.
1:11.6	He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Overstory, a book that helped people see trees
1:16.6	in a different way.
1:17.6	Well, his new novel Playground takes us underwater into the world's oceans, specifically
1:23.6	the reefs around an island in the South Pacific called Makatea and the people whose
1:28.6	lives intersect with it. Playground has made the long list for this year's prestigious Booker
	...

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