No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth’s main stage.

Title: Playground
Author: Richard Powers
Pages: 400
Release: September 24, 2024

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A love letter to the ocean and its hidden depths. Much like The Overstory, Powers employs astounding reverence for one of our most complex and abundant natural resources.

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Speculative fiction can hold up a mirror to our current moment — extrapolating, distorting, and ultimately exploring the ripple effects of what our future could hold. Playground succeeds in doing just that as the plot converges and collides with the dawn of the AI age in surprising ways. On those marks alone, it’s a winner. It’s elegantly crafted and consistently engaging, but it never fully won me over.

The narrative ebbs and flows between characters and timelines, with each thread carefully fleshed out and fully realized. My hope that these individual strands would tightly weave back together in the end was not to be. Instead, the ending left me puzzled. I had to consult with other readers and do a careful re-read of the final portion of the book to understand just what transpired. And still, I’m not sure. This may be an issue of comprehension on my end, so I look forward to seeing what others think upon the book’s release. That said, I genuinely enjoyed reading Playground, and I believe many others will find it just as captivating.

★★★★

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.