‘I no longer have to save the world’: Novelist Richard Powers on fiction and the climate crisis

Richard Powers was around 10 years old when his sister Peggy gave him what he now describes as a very unusual birthday present “for a kid in the northern suburbs of a midwestern city”: a book on coral reefs. But it was a revelatory choice, sparking in the novelist an explosion of curiosity and joy that has come to creative fruition over half a century later in his 14th novel, Playground. “I just thought, the world is actually huge and mysterious and ancient and out there, and I can’t get to it,” he tells me from his home in the Smoky Mountains, where he is surrounded by forest in every direction as far as the eye can see.

In the event, he didn’t have to wait that long to access the ocean for real – the following year, the family followed his father’s job as a school principal from Chicago to Bangkok, and Powers found himself scuba diving and snorkelling in the coral reefs of the South China Sea. Until the family moved back to the States six years later, Powers was convinced he would become, like one of Playground’s central characters, an oceanographer. That ambition gave way to physics and computer programming before, in 1985, he published his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. But the persistence of his many enthusiasms is evident in his fiction, from the mixture of music and DNA in 1991’s The Gold Bug Variations to the Pygmalion-inflected story of artificial intelligence in 1995’s Galatea 2.2 to the ecological and environmental concerns of his most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment.

His new novel is dedicated to his sister, who died in 2022. In common with the acclaimed and Pulitzer prize-winning The Overstory, which related several characters’ stories in the context of trees, their habitats and their precarious future, Playground plunges us into the complex and frequently unfamiliar world of the ocean with a radical purpose: forest and ocean are not merely backdrop but a way of decentring the human, of insisting that if fiction limits itself to an anthropocentric universe, it severely limits its potential.

I ask him first how the loss of his sister affected the process of writing Playground, which despite its immense intellectual heft, has a strikingly emotional, elegiac tone. Did the book feel very personal to him? “It did. And to set the story up through a narrator who’s losing his cognitive abilities, who’s losing his ability to speak and to remember” – another of his main characters is involved in the highest levels of AI technology, and has also recently been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia – “I think infuses the book with that sense of the vanishing past, which of course is a kind of microcosmic metaphor for the vanishing past that we’re all living in.”

He pauses, and considers for a moment. “It’s a very interesting question, and I hate to do psychoanalysis in front of you in real time. But you know, not only is there a sad element in so far as it was driven by remembering Peg, but there is a weird, hopeful or playful element that comes from my remembering her too, because she was the most playful of people, and thinking about the experimental, ­open-ended, very joyful way in which she approached life made me remember various obsessions that I’d had at different times in my life.”

One of those obsessions is play itself. He recalls being “absolutely shocked” as a 21-year-old reading Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s influential 1938 book Homo Ludens, which argued that play is older than civilisation. “And I thought, how could that possibly be? And then, of course, it became obvious: animals play, so it’s hundreds of millions of years older than civilisation, and it is the engine of evolution. Everything that we have done as human being beings has been predicated on this base of being able to create an imaginary magic circle, as Huizinga calls it, and playing out reality as a kind of projective, imaginative game. And that’s why this book has such a strange dual character to it. It’s a lament, but it’s also a kind of paean – a celebration of everything that we’ve come up with, and everything that life has come up with. And the game is not over yet.”

To talk in detail to Powers – and it’s hard to envisage any conversation with him that wouldn’t be detailed – is to feel oneself beckoned into a thicket of ideas with a generous, warm and endlessly patient guide. As we talk about the sea, and his choice to set much of his novel on the tiny island of Makatea in French Polynesia, under threat of development from “seasteading”, in which the world’s wealthiest seek to colonise the ocean with floating cities, I admit to him that I’ve always been slightly afraid of sea creatures.

“Right! Because there are kinds of life there that are absolutely Martian. How can something have fivefold symmetry, and how can something have eyes distributed all across its skin? How can something see with its skin?” His fictional marine biologist, Evie Beaulieu, is based in part on the real-life Sylvia Earle, now 89 and referred to in sea-circles as “Her Deepness”: “I loved trying to create this woman who could see the landscape of the undersea and love it in a way that the rest of us can’t. And try to make her a way of saying: even if we can’t go down there, we can’t live down there, even if it creeps us out, even if we can’t see more than 10 feet, it is the fastest track to astonishment, of awe and wonder that we should have every day of our lives.”

Early in the novel, the nonagenarian Evie encounters a giant manta ray while she is diving in the South Pacific, and reflects on having released herself from “the prohibition against anthropomorphism” – she has spent too many decades observing non-human species to give it much credence. For Powers, this is a key point, and he describes the way that the determination in the field of life sciences not to draw comparisons between human and non-human had the disastrous effect of “actually abetting human exceptionalism, this mindset that was convinced that somehow we were completely discontinuous with the rest of creation, that we were something that obeyed entirely different rules, and that had no correspondences with the living world beyond us”.

As Powers talks about the current political landscape, the threat of unhindered environmental disaster and the challenges that technological advances in the form of AI will pose to human consciousness, he expands his point: “We’re about to be hemmed in by both sides, from very, very old evolution and very, very new evolution. So [I wanted] to tell a story that’s basically saying, let’s go back to this place that was 4bn years old before life even came up on to land, let’s go back to this place that makes up 99% of the Earth’s biosphere, and let’s see if we can justify saying it’s a story about us.”

He calls to mind Donald Trump’s recent interview with Elon Musk, in which Trump brazenly advised against worrying about rising sea levels because they would simply provide more waterfront property. “In my head, the lightbulb was going on,” Powers remembers. “I have misunderstood the classic American political battle. Yes, it is a battle over patriarchy. Yes, it is a battle over white supremacy. But it is also, and maybe primarily, a battle over whether or not we human beings can call ourselves autonomous. The last gasp of Maga conservatism basically wants to say we should not be answerable to anything else, and we are not answerable to anything else. Do not worry about making a go of it in the world, we will press on with all our business and commerce and technology and make it work, and make the world answer to us.”

Given the bleakness of this, I probe him on whether and how fiction can make any difference. He puts the issue into the context of recent literary history, and his own commitment to a blend of social and political fiction with meta­physical inquiry – the question, explored by earlier writers such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, of our own place in the world. “Are we legitimate? Is what we want defensible, and can we make it happen?”

Powers believes firmly that, rather than coming up with “another novel about who gets to marry who”, certain parts of the literary world have continued to explore those issues, perhaps most evidently in science fiction. “It’s interesting that literary fiction ghettoised science fiction for those very reasons, because literary fiction, for a long time, put its allegiance entirely in this programme of saying ‘we are unique and unparalleled and absolutely outside of everything else’, and that commitment to understanding the human as sui generis, as something separate and apart, that became so central to the programme [that it] created those kinds of artificial standards of excellence that made other ways of telling stories seem second rate somehow.”