Penguin Random House SA has shared an extract from Playground by Richard Powers!
Longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, this powerful novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Powers (author of The Overstory, Bewilderment) follows Rafi and Todd, polar opposites who bond over a board game at an elite school.
Their lives diverge—Rafi pursues literature, while Todd’s AI breakthrough reshapes humanity’s future. Meanwhile, Evie and Ina’s paths converge on the island of Makatea, where a plan to create floating cities sparks deep questions about technology, the environment, and human destiny.
Set in the world’s largest ocean, Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.
Read an excerpt:
~~~
Before the earth,
before the moon,
before the stars,
before the sun,
before the sky,
even before the sea,
there was only time and Ta’aroa.
Ta’aroa made Ta’aroa. Then he made an egg that could house him.
He set the egg spinning in the void. Inside the spinning egg, suspended in that endless vacuum, Ta’aroa huddled, waiting.
With all that endless time and all that eternal waiting, Ta’aroa grew weary inside his egg. So he shook his body and cracked the shell and slid out of his self-made prison.
Outside, everything was muted and still. And Ta’aroa saw that he was alone.
Ta’aroa was an artist, so he played with what he had. His first medium was eggshell. He crunched the shell into countless pieces and let them fall. The pieces of eggshell drifted down to make the foundations of the Earth.
His second medium was tears. He cried in his boredom and his loneliness, and his tears filled up the Earth’s oceans and its lakes and all the world’s rivers.
His third medium was bone. He used his spine to make islands. Mountain chains appeared wherever his vertebrae rose above his pooled tears.
Creation became a game. From his fingernails and toenails, he made the scales of fish and the shells of turtles. He plucked out his own feathers and turned them into trees and bushes, which he filled with birds. With his own blood, he spread a rainbow across the sky.
Ta’aroa summoned all the other artists. The artists came forward with their baskets full of materials— sand and pebbles, corals and shells, grass and palm fronds and threads spun from the fibers of many plants. And together with Ta’aroa, the artists shaped and sculpted Tāne, the god of forests and peace and beauty and all crafted things.
Then the artists brought the other gods into being— scores of them. Kind ones and cruel ones, lovers and engineers and tricksters. And these gods filled in the rest of the unfolding world with color and line and creatures of all kinds—land, air, and sea.
Tāne decided to decorate the sky. He toyed with the possibilities, dotting the blackness with points of light that spun around the center of the night in great pinwheels. He made the sun and moon, which split time into day and night.
Now that there were days and months, now that the world was sparked with branching and unfolding life, now that the sky was itself a work of art, it was time for Ta’aroa to finish his game. He fashioned and split the world into seven layers, and in the bottom- most layer he put people— someone to play with at last.
He watched the people puzzle things out, and it delighted him. The people multiplied and filled the lowest layer like fish fill up a reef. The people found plants and trees and animals and shells and rocks, and with all their discoveries they made new things, just as Ta’aroa had made the world.
Growing in number, human beings felt hemmed in. So when they discovered the portal that led up to the level of the world above theirs— the doorway that Ta’aroa had hidden just for them— they pried it open, passed through, and started spreading out again, one layer higher.
And so people kept on filling and
climbing, filling and climbing.
But each new layer still
belonged to Ta’aroa,
who set all things
moving from
inside his
spinning
egg.
It took a disease eating my brain to help me remember.
The three of us were walking home from campus one night in December, almost forty years ago. The year that Ina first set foot on a continent. We had seen a student production of The Tempest and she’d sobbed through the whole last act. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.
Rafi and I escorted her back to her boardinghouse, a dozen blocks from the Quad. Ina wasn’t used to square blocks. They disoriented her. She kept getting turned around. Everything distracted her and stopped her in her tracks. A crow. A gray squirrel. The December moon.
We tried to warm her, Rafi and I, one on each side, each almost twice her height. Her first- ever winter. The cold was homicidal. She kept saying, “How can people live in this? How do the animals survive? It’s insanity! Pure madness!”
Then she stopped in place on the sidewalk and yanked us both by the elbows. Her red face was round with awe. “Oh, God. Look at that. Look at that!” Neither of us could tell what in the world she was seeing.
Little pellets were dropping through the air and landing on the grass with a faint click. They stuck to the ends of the frozen blades like white, wet flowers. I hadn’t even noticed. Nor had Rafi. Chicago boys, raised on the lake effect.
Ina had never seen anything like it. She was watching bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth.
She stood there on the iron sidewalk, freezing to death, cursing us in joy. “Would you look at that? Look at that! You stupid shits! Why didn’t you tell me about snow?”
Ina Aroita went down to the beach on a Saturday morning to look for pretty materials. She took her seven-year-old Hariti with her. They left Afa and Rafi at the house, playing on the floor with toy transforming robots. The beach was only a short walk down from their bungalow near the hamlet of Moumu, on the shallow rise between the cliffs and the sea on the eastern coast of the island of Makatea, in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia, as far from any continent as habitable land could get— a speck of green confetti, as the French called these atolls, lost on an endless field of blue.
Born in Honolulu to a Hawaiian petty officer fi rst class and a Tahitian flight attendant, raised on naval bases in Guam and Samoa, educated at a gigantic university in the American Midwest, Ina Aroita had worked for years as a maid for a luxury hotel chain in Papeete, Tahiti, before boating 150 miles over to Makatea to garden and fish and weave and knit a little and raise two children and try to remember why she was alive.
