Few pairings in literature can match the complex strangeness of the oceans and AI. And yet, in Playground, Powers binds them in a luminous duet – the book is both a love letter to the oceans and the billion lives that pulsate beneath, and a meandering through the history of AI. He evokes the ocean’s transience through shifting lenses: a woman who sculpts art from wreckage and junk, an oceanographer who longs for her bones to rest undersea among bleached corals and singing cuttlefish, a tech mogul who once breathed underwater, and his dearest friend seemingly living out his days in an atoll in French Polynesia. 

Makatea – the atoll – is as much a character as the other ocean-wanderers are. It is an island that breathes and remembers the wounds of its history. Where once rose magnificent reefs now stand cliffs scarred by phosphate mines. The book unfolds at first as a slow, sweeping reckoning of its future and that of its inhabitants – islanders who must decide the future of the ocean. And then, quite suddenly, the story becomes so much more. 

By the time it draws to its stunning revelation, Powers leaves me blindsided, so much so that in the end, I am left to grapple with what the book has been all along: a meditation on our collective stewardship – of memory, of intelligence, of oceans – and of the futures that may rise from each of them.