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I really enjoyed this book and am surprised it wasn't shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize! Lets just award Powers my shadow Booker prize for the year! 🏆
Taking us from French Polynesia to Chicago in the winter, this is a heartfelt novel that focuses on the awe ocean inspires, mixed with the potential impact of AI, and powered by the potential of storytelling. I am impressed!
To know someone was to have power over them

Through various different characters, ranging from tech billionaire to a poet and a mayor, we are offered a panoramic vision of the world, or rather the ocean. Playground is very clever and well constructed, while offering stunning vistas into ocean life.
I was initially hesitant to pick up the book, with Richard Powers' 2021 Booker shortlisted book Bewilderment being quite a deception for me, but this is in my top 2 of books that were longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize.

In 50+ short chapters we move between the budding friendship in Chicago between Todd Keane and Rafi Young, both brilliant, during the internet revolution, a referendum on the French Polynesian island of Makatea, home to 82 inhabitants and finally the life of Evie Beaulieu, one of the first users of the aqualung, whose stories about the wonders of the ocean touch millions.

I found the sections focusing on Todd and Rafi, who not only have divergent views of the world but also vie for attention of artist Ina Aroita well done, reminding me a bit of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow with the focus on nascent internet revolution and difficult triangular relationships. Rafi in particular has many demons from his past, while navigating his ascend into the privileged milieus of Chicago, while Todd has a privileged, yet cold, childhood and a health condition that leads him to look back. Games, initially chess and then Go and Eurogames, drive the two on to perform and build out their friendship, but here the difference between a finite and an infinite game which is life comes to haunt them. Todd builds Playground, a kind of Wikipedia and forum that is gamified and monetised, at the forefront of the AI revolution by mining preferences of users (in a way similar to what happened to the island of Makatea), but this success does not bring happiness. It is interesting to me how the AlphaGo episode, the moment that an AI beat the best players in this game thought to be impossible to master by an AI, comes back here as well as in The Maniac of Benjamín Labatut. It is definitely incorporated more elegantly by Powers in this novel, but anyone truly interested I would recommend to watch this documentary:

The depiction of Makatea, an island reduced from 3.000 inhabitants at the height of ecological harmful phosphor mining to a sleepy home for less than 100 souls was well done as well. This island was one of the major source of phosphorus, one of the key ingredients to the agricultural revolution, but also a prime example of boom and bust cycles, leaving the island pockmarked while helping to feed much of the world. Here major economical opportunities by unknown benefactors who want to make seasteading a reality. Seasteading, a bit suspect as a libertarian fantasy to escape taxes, itself is not really the focus of the novel, as we discover later on. This all leads to a referendum (powered by an AI chatbot, very interesting, which in the end doesn't change much: But facts do little to alter a person’s temperament ) where everyone on the island needs to choose between progress and conservation. How the balance will end up remains exciting to the very end.

Evie her story probably touched me least, it made me sometimes even feel of Great Circle with how she, through sheer passion and helped by a father who performed aqualung testing on her as a teenager, makes her way in a male dominated world. It reminded me how Jacques Cousteau was a vibe in the past and now we just laugh at imploding billionaires.
Her love for the oceans is maybe hard to translate to a book and would probably be more impactful in a screen adaption.

The twist near the end of the book makes clear that more than just disparate storylines is at play, but that Powers is also commenting on the edges of what AI will lead to, what hallucinations are, and how storytelling could change (and what it means to be a person and know a person). Very well executed in my view, and elevating the whole book to supremely thought-provoking. Also the creation myths, recited at the start of the novel, make a lot more sense.

A book that has the potential to be a modern classic, while also offering a panoramic view of the world, or rather the ocean.

Quotes:
It was a kind of reciprocal auto-erotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients

It’s okay, you’re awake.
She couldn’t see how the one fact followed from the other.

People and their emotions puzzled me. They were stupidly complex and there was no way to break them apart and see what was inside.

Preaching the gospel of the oceans

Is a thing still garbage once life starts using it?

But my father had once told me that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people are willing to let them lose.

Just remember, impossible decisions are really the easy decisions

It came to her that this was why she had always shied away from human love, to give it was always to incur a growing obligation

Done with machine intelligence and human ignorance

2024 Booker prize personal ranking, shortlisted books in bold:
1. Held (4.5*) - Review: /review/show...
2. Playground (4.5*) - Review: /review/show...
3. James (4*) - Review: /review/show...
4. Wandering Stars (4*) - Review: /review/show...
5. Headshot (3.5*) - Review: /review/show...
6. The Safekeep (3.5*) - Review: /review/show...
7. My Friends (3.5*) - Review: /review/show...
8. Stone Yard Devotional (3.5*) - Review: /review/show...
9. This Strange and Eventful History (3*) - Review: /review/show...
10. Creation Lake (3*) - Review: /review/show...
11. Enlightenment (3*) - Review: /review/show...
12. Orbital (2.5*) - Review: /review/show...
13. Wild Houses (2.5*) - Review: /review/show...