From the description, this book seemed like a cool piece of ecology fiction. It wasn’t. The eco part was an obsession with the ocean which didn’t really matter other than as a way of justifying the desire to build floating (libertarian) cities. Apart from being reasonably dull, this book was rough around the edges. The reader is meant to feel sympathy for a billionaire with a degenerative illness, who basically invented a more libertarian version of Reddit and then went full AI-bro. There’s some race stuff that plays on stereotypes and the worst part, in my opinion, is the white author writing the Polynesian characters literally voting for their own colonization. I definitely won’t be reading any more from this author.
Playground
- Author: Richard Powers
- ISBN: 9781324086048
- Format: ebook
- Start: 2026-02-03
- Finish: 2026-02-09