Someone needs to read this book so I have a discussion partner. Please. I finished it at 11 last night and then spent the next 45 minutes looking at Reddit posts and various blogs trying to figure out the ending, which propelled me to go back and reread large swaths of the book—and yes, I do get the end, but it felt too much like one of those “and then I woke up and it was all a dream” endings that I tell my students to avoid because it’s annoying and disappointing and allowing for too many details that fall outside of believability.

That said, so much else in this novel is beautiful and captivating. Three stories are interwoven here (I know, yet another novel with multiple perspectives/narrators/storylines), not unlike Powers’ structure in his Pulitzer Prize winning The Overstory.

An aging and diseased Todd Keane opens the novel with a first person narrative speaking to an unnamed “you.” He has become a tech billionaire having invented Playground, an amalgamation of social media, gaming, and Twitter. Mining decades of data from his billion users, he trains his current project, a third gen AI machine. His ultimate goal: seasteading in French Polynesia, a real life libertarian concept (funded in part by Peter Thiel) in which autonomous communities in the middle of the ocean are free from government regulation. Through this storyline, we also learn of his deep friendship, in the 80s, with Rafi Young: from two distinctly different backgrounds and neighborhoods in Chicago, they become best friends at St. Ignatius High School—and later at U of I—where they read voraciously, delve into literary and philosophical discussions, and spend countless hours playing chess and GO, the oldest board game in history. This relationship forms a central part of the novel, and so much of their later lives hinges on their past.

A second storyline takes place in the near future on the Island of Makatea—a real atoll in French Polynesia once mined for phosphate—where Rafi and Ina live a simple life parenting, teaching kids, and making art—far away from the technologically developed world and their old friend, Todd. Until a group of California investors choose this island for their seasteading project.

The third and best storyline follows Evelyne Beauieu—diver, oceanographer, and underwater researcher since the 1950s—who prefers marine life underwater to family life above. Powers’ writing in these sections is exquisite as he describes Evie: “playing hide-and-seek with octopuses and tag with pygmy seahorses..surreal stripes of colonial anemones…peering into hideouts of  action-painted mandarin fish and elegant green eels” (112). And later, mantas that “rode each other piggyback and formed diamond dragnet patterns, hovering up all prey, feeling out fugitives with their sensitive cephalic fins” (294). I felt transported under the ocean, swimming next to her as she interacted and observed every living creature, from sea worms to coral to sharks and giant mantas. 

Like all multi plotline novels, we have to assume that the stories will converge—and these do, though not so much in a satisfying way as in a disorienting and disturbing way. More than anything, we get the convergence (and clashing) of environmentalism, climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics. But I prefer to remember this powerful and mind-bending book with Evie’s image of a dancing, giant cuttlefish, colors cycling across its skin like disco lights (325).