Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.
Leaps across the circuits that enable large language models and delivers a mind-blowing reflection on what it means to live on a dying planet reconceived by artificial intelligence ... Any disorientation will eventually melt into wonderment ... Compelling ... He writes without a drop of mawkishness about guilt and grief and the sorrow endemic to caring about the natural world ... Even with faith that its parts would at some point cohere, I wasn’t prepared for the astonishing resolution that Powers delivers.
Confident ... Told in two ways that feel by turns overlong and undercooked—until they add up to something unexpected and genuinely fascinating ... If this all sounds like fantasy fiction for rich white people, that’s because it is. I’m not being a crank here, whining again about how Powers falls short of the great American masters of marine-life metaphors. I’m pointing, in fact, to a revelation near the very end of the novel, which discloses its stunning conceit ... Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground.
An enchanting entry point to his work that swings open easily with just a few creaks ... We have thankfully emerged from the season of the so-called beach read. But Playground, whose interpersonal drama is a little soapy, actually would make a great one. What we consider to be the ocean, that we so blithely treat as our swimming pool, is after all just the continental shelf — the tip of the melting iceberg.
