We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article."Playground" (W.W.Norton), the latest novel by Richard Powers (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Overstory"), explores artificial intelligence and the race to save the oceans.
Its multi-track story concerns a computer genius looking back at his life; an oceanographer recounting her love for sea creatures; and the residents of a tiny South Pacific island who've been offered a fortune by a shadowy group of tech billionaires.Read an excerpt below. "Playground" by Richard Powers $25 at Amazon Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.Try Audible for free I'm suffering from what we computer folks call latency.
Retreating into the past, like my mother did in her last years.This curse doesn't always run in families, but sometimes it does.
Who knows? Maybe my mother had it, too.Maybe the undiagnosed disease lay behind the accident that killed her.
As more recent months and years grow fuzzy, the bedrock events of my childhood solidify.Closing my eyes, I can see my first bedroom high up in the crow's nest of our Evanston Castle in more detail than memory should permit: the student desk cluttered with plastic sharks and rays.
The shelf of deep-sea books.The globe of a fishbowl filled with guppies and swordtails.
The closet piled high with masks and snorkels and dried sea fans and chunks of coral and fish fossils from the Devonian Period, bought at the Shedd Aquarium gift shop.On the wall above my bed hung a framed article from the Trib dated January 1, 1970: "First in Line for the New Decade." I must have read that thing a thousand times, growing up.
The black-and-white picture showed me, newborn Todd Keane, delivered in Saint Francis Hospital, Evanston, in the barest fraction of a second after midnight, staring at the camera with infant bafflement, trying to focus on the great m...