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Schattenflucht
No one who enjoyed Richard Powers's remarkable breakthrough novel, Galatea 2.2, will be surprised that he has returned to the richly promising realm of cyber-invention, one of our age's few remaining frontiers and a siren call to restless intellects. In Plowing the Dark, an old friend recruits a disillusioned New York artist named Adie Klarpol to work on "the Cavern." TeraSys, a Seattle-based company, is building this virtual environment at great expense in the hope that it will lower its enormous tax liability as well as, in the long run, provide the template for all such virtual playrooms. "Millions of dollars of funding," Adie's friend Steve tells her when she arrives on the job, "and nobody around this dump can draw worth squat." Suitably impressed by the Cavern's programming, and slowly absorbing its dazzling capacity to project vivid and convincing illusions, she sets herself the task of creating a faithful 3-D version of Rousseau's Dream. Her painstaking efforts in the Realization Lab are aided by a host of supporting characters, one of whom, Spider Lim, proves so sensitive that he gets a bruise from bumping into one of Adie's virtual tree branches. And when the central female figure appears among the foliage, Lim is irresistibly drawn in, marveling that
their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this--this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the Limaçon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate.Powers's lush language corresponds to Adie's vision of Rousseau's jungle, and in turn to Rousseau's own ecstatic vision. Yet there is also something elegiac in the author's lavish descriptions of the Cavern's miracles, as if he were offering a late, last flowering of words before the cultural ascendancy of the image. Great, quotable chunks weight every page. Even readers fond of extravagant prose may find Powers's verbal persistence wearying, though it argues that there are still contradictions and subtleties of mind that no image can track. --Regina Marler
543 pages, Paperback
First published June 2, 2000
138 people are currently reading
1282 people want to read
About the author
Richard Powers
93 books6,742 followersRichard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
November 14, 2019
Another absorbing and thought provoking novel, but perhaps not Powers at his absolute best.
This one has two main strands which come together rather tenuously at the end. In one, a group of people come together in late 80s Seattle to work for a software giant on a ground-breaking virtual reality project. In the other an American hostage is held captive for many years in Beirut.
There is plenty of recent history thrown into the mix, and as so often with Powers there are musical reference points too.
This one has two main strands which come together rather tenuously at the end. In one, a group of people come together in late 80s Seattle to work for a software giant on a ground-breaking virtual reality project. In the other an American hostage is held captive for many years in Beirut.
There is plenty of recent history thrown into the mix, and as so often with Powers there are musical reference points too.
June 19, 2019
The next book in my challenge to read all the novels of Richard Powers this year was a challenge!
He uses two parallel stories to investigate how we perceive and navigate reality, imagination, confinement, freedom and, as always, modern society.
One of his stories is set on Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of Washington State. A collection of math geeks, coders and an artist are combining their talents in the late 1990s to create early, cutting edge virtual reality rooms. Funded by some deep pocket billionaires, this little band of imaginative pioneers barely set foot outside the lab.
I have virtually no reality on virtual reality. I don't exactly know what coding involves except that it is based on higher math. I have never engaged in VR games though I am aware of them, have seen movies about them and read a few books. The concept of worlds that seem to be there but are not is a hard one for me to grasp. I could sort of picture what was going on in the lab but truthfully, my head spun.
Luckily the characters were real, talented, troubled and intrepid individuals even if they lived on junk food and hardly slept.
The secondary story on the other hand was almost too real. An American English teacher of Middle Eastern descent has been taken hostage by terrorists who hope to send a message to Western powers. The September 11, 2001 attacks have not yet happened, but its antecedents are simmering in this war-torn Mediterranean city.
The young hostage's suffering and imprisonment are gruesome but are a counterpoint of daily reality to the VR in that lab in Washington. The man uses his imagination and memory to create for himself a reality in which he can survive.
The novel is as dense and wordy and exciting and philosophical as any other Powers's novels I have read so far. Struggle though I did to comprehend much of it, I reached the end once again transformed, once again pondering life in new ways.
An Esquire reviewer, Sven Birkerts, is quoted on the back cover of Plowing the Dark as saying, "Mention Richard Powers's name and see writers get that far-away look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence." Well, I get the same look in my eyes and in my own private virtual reality when I read and later ponder his influence on me.
He uses two parallel stories to investigate how we perceive and navigate reality, imagination, confinement, freedom and, as always, modern society.
One of his stories is set on Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of Washington State. A collection of math geeks, coders and an artist are combining their talents in the late 1990s to create early, cutting edge virtual reality rooms. Funded by some deep pocket billionaires, this little band of imaginative pioneers barely set foot outside the lab.
I have virtually no reality on virtual reality. I don't exactly know what coding involves except that it is based on higher math. I have never engaged in VR games though I am aware of them, have seen movies about them and read a few books. The concept of worlds that seem to be there but are not is a hard one for me to grasp. I could sort of picture what was going on in the lab but truthfully, my head spun.
Luckily the characters were real, talented, troubled and intrepid individuals even if they lived on junk food and hardly slept.
The secondary story on the other hand was almost too real. An American English teacher of Middle Eastern descent has been taken hostage by terrorists who hope to send a message to Western powers. The September 11, 2001 attacks have not yet happened, but its antecedents are simmering in this war-torn Mediterranean city.
The young hostage's suffering and imprisonment are gruesome but are a counterpoint of daily reality to the VR in that lab in Washington. The man uses his imagination and memory to create for himself a reality in which he can survive.
The novel is as dense and wordy and exciting and philosophical as any other Powers's novels I have read so far. Struggle though I did to comprehend much of it, I reached the end once again transformed, once again pondering life in new ways.
An Esquire reviewer, Sven Birkerts, is quoted on the back cover of Plowing the Dark as saying, "Mention Richard Powers's name and see writers get that far-away look in their eyes: They are calculating the eventual reach of his influence." Well, I get the same look in my eyes and in my own private virtual reality when I read and later ponder his influence on me.
May 5, 2019
“What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls daeza. Pairi meant anything that surrounds. See? Pairi daeza. You have a wall running all the way around you. That, my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.”
Number 7 in my project to re-read, one per month, all of Powers’ novels, but this time in publication order.
A couple of quick comments. Re-reading these books is proving to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding reading experiences I have had. I know I am biased because I clearly respond well to Powers’ writing, but I am finding a second (or third, in some cases) run through the books completely fascinating. And reading them in publication order is adding a new dimension beyond what I envisaged when I set out on this journey towards the end of last year.
Plowing the Dark is not a simple book to read. But then, which Powers’ books are? Well, the book he published immediately prior to this one (Gain) was a departure from his normal style and was easily accessible. Here, in Plowing the Dark, he returns to what some see as overblown or overwritten (I can understand this criticism) but which for others is often a thing of beauty. I fall more into the beauty camp, although I would be the first to acknowledge that there are passages here that left me wondering what I had just read and whether it was really necessary (if I had understood it, I might have understood its necessity, of course!).
That said, I think this book stands as my favourite of Powers’ first seven. It is immense in its scope.
A word of warning. I read the Kindle version and it is packed with typos (most often b’s become h’s, so “but” becomes “hut”, for example). My favourite is when “slash and burn” becomes “slash and bum”, but I realise that is childish of me. Also, the Kindle drops you in at Page 1, but there is an introduction on the page before that you will miss unless you know it is there. It is, in fact, a rather confusing introduction, but you should probably read it as I guess Powers would not have written it if he didn’t want anyone to see it.
There are two stories told and they never actually meet. In one, a group of people work together to create a virtual reality room known as “the Chamber”. Adie Klarpol, our main character in this story, is drawn to the Chamber after a phone call from Steve Spiegel whom she used to know when they were students. Much of what Powers explores here will be re-visited in The Overstory (published 18 years later) where we follow a computer wizard called Neelay. The aim of the Chamber is to create a room that is indistinguishable from reality (this feels like an extension of ideas Powers explored in Galatea 2.2 where he had a man called Richard Powers try to teach a computer literary criticism). As you read this section, Powers forces you to think about the technological and philosophical difficulties implicit in the ideas of the Chamber. As the team work together to make the Chamber more and more real, the actual real world around them seems to be falling apart. The story takes place in 1989-90 and we watch with them the events of Tiananmen Square, the Baltic human chain and the destruction of the Berlin wall. The Soviet Union disintegrates. Klarpol gradually comes to suspect that the work they are doing is being funded for darker purposes, namely the military.
Interleaved with the Klarpol/Spiegel story, we read the story of Taimur Martin, a teacher of English as a foreign language (TEFL) who is kidnapped and held hostage in an empty room. Martin’s parts of the narrative are told in the second person. Often I find that this doesn’t work for me in books, but here it becomes a very intense and intimate way to tell the story making Martin’s claustrophobic imprisonment somehow feel even more enclosing and dark.
What is Powers doing by juxtaposing these two seemingly unconnected stories? Writing in the Boston Review, Tom Bissell says that the novel is one of huge, vaulting themes–in this case, the purpose of art. Art (specifically painting and poetry, but also architecture) is key to the story. Adie models the Chamber firstly on a Rousseau painting and then a Van Gogh. When her ex makes an appearance (Ted Zimmerman, a composer now losing a battle with MS), she switches to Byzantium as a model, aiming to build something that can comfort Zimmerman, and Powers makes liberal use of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” (That is no country for old men…). Publishersweekly.com says Powers …takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art. I would add to this Powers' musings on the positive and negative power of the human imagination: with a purpose in view, the human mind can create and build amazing things; left to run free with no purpose, no outlet, the human mind can turn self-destructive.
Even having now read this twice, I can’t claim to have fully grasped what Powers is doing here. I do however know that I have been exposed to some big ideas, some deep thinking. Because of that, I am not overly concerned about the bits I couldn’t quite get to grips with: I am just grateful to have been able to go along for the mind-expanding ride!
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
One of the reasons I like Richard Powers' novels so much is that while I have one on the go, and normally for a while after I finish it, I find that if I am not actually reading it then I am thinking about it. Plowing The Dark is no exception.
I have read reviews that complain about the lack of linkage between the two stories. For me, no direct link is necessary. The stories in the novel explore two extremes and, by doing this, they ask you, the reader, to think about what lies between those extremes, where your experience might sit etc.. I found that last year’s A Little Life did the same kind of thing, not with parallel stories but with extremes of abuse and friendship that made you stop and think about where you and your experience stood on the spectrum.
Imagine two white rooms. One you can enter and leave at will and, when you are in it, there is no limit to the mental stimulation you can receive from external sources. The room can become anything and anywhere. The other is a prison cell in which you are trapped and the only stimulation your brain can get is what it can generate itself through memory and imagination. Or, maybe a book, if you can persuade your captors to provide one.
These are the two extremes Powers presents in this novel. It is a novel that makes you think about the virtual reality of cyberspace compared with the virtual reality of the human brain. It is a novel that challenges you to think about the extremes of over-stimulation and under-stimulation.
It is not an easy book to read. The language is relatively complex and some sentences take a couple of readings. Some sentences are just stunningly beautiful and simply deserve multiple readings rather than requiring them.
I found this a very thought-provoking book. Another stunner from Mr Powers (I have now read nine of his eleven novels and can’t wait to read the final two, except for the fact that when I’ve done that I will have no more of them to read!).
Number 7 in my project to re-read, one per month, all of Powers’ novels, but this time in publication order.
A couple of quick comments. Re-reading these books is proving to be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding reading experiences I have had. I know I am biased because I clearly respond well to Powers’ writing, but I am finding a second (or third, in some cases) run through the books completely fascinating. And reading them in publication order is adding a new dimension beyond what I envisaged when I set out on this journey towards the end of last year.
Plowing the Dark is not a simple book to read. But then, which Powers’ books are? Well, the book he published immediately prior to this one (Gain) was a departure from his normal style and was easily accessible. Here, in Plowing the Dark, he returns to what some see as overblown or overwritten (I can understand this criticism) but which for others is often a thing of beauty. I fall more into the beauty camp, although I would be the first to acknowledge that there are passages here that left me wondering what I had just read and whether it was really necessary (if I had understood it, I might have understood its necessity, of course!).
That said, I think this book stands as my favourite of Powers’ first seven. It is immense in its scope.
A word of warning. I read the Kindle version and it is packed with typos (most often b’s become h’s, so “but” becomes “hut”, for example). My favourite is when “slash and burn” becomes “slash and bum”, but I realise that is childish of me. Also, the Kindle drops you in at Page 1, but there is an introduction on the page before that you will miss unless you know it is there. It is, in fact, a rather confusing introduction, but you should probably read it as I guess Powers would not have written it if he didn’t want anyone to see it.
There are two stories told and they never actually meet. In one, a group of people work together to create a virtual reality room known as “the Chamber”. Adie Klarpol, our main character in this story, is drawn to the Chamber after a phone call from Steve Spiegel whom she used to know when they were students. Much of what Powers explores here will be re-visited in The Overstory (published 18 years later) where we follow a computer wizard called Neelay. The aim of the Chamber is to create a room that is indistinguishable from reality (this feels like an extension of ideas Powers explored in Galatea 2.2 where he had a man called Richard Powers try to teach a computer literary criticism). As you read this section, Powers forces you to think about the technological and philosophical difficulties implicit in the ideas of the Chamber. As the team work together to make the Chamber more and more real, the actual real world around them seems to be falling apart. The story takes place in 1989-90 and we watch with them the events of Tiananmen Square, the Baltic human chain and the destruction of the Berlin wall. The Soviet Union disintegrates. Klarpol gradually comes to suspect that the work they are doing is being funded for darker purposes, namely the military.
Interleaved with the Klarpol/Spiegel story, we read the story of Taimur Martin, a teacher of English as a foreign language (TEFL) who is kidnapped and held hostage in an empty room. Martin’s parts of the narrative are told in the second person. Often I find that this doesn’t work for me in books, but here it becomes a very intense and intimate way to tell the story making Martin’s claustrophobic imprisonment somehow feel even more enclosing and dark.
What is Powers doing by juxtaposing these two seemingly unconnected stories? Writing in the Boston Review, Tom Bissell says that the novel is one of huge, vaulting themes–in this case, the purpose of art. Art (specifically painting and poetry, but also architecture) is key to the story. Adie models the Chamber firstly on a Rousseau painting and then a Van Gogh. When her ex makes an appearance (Ted Zimmerman, a composer now losing a battle with MS), she switches to Byzantium as a model, aiming to build something that can comfort Zimmerman, and Powers makes liberal use of Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” (That is no country for old men…). Publishersweekly.com says Powers …takes on virtual reality, global migration, prolonged heartbreak, the end of the Cold War and the nature and purpose of art. I would add to this Powers' musings on the positive and negative power of the human imagination: with a purpose in view, the human mind can create and build amazing things; left to run free with no purpose, no outlet, the human mind can turn self-destructive.
Even having now read this twice, I can’t claim to have fully grasped what Powers is doing here. I do however know that I have been exposed to some big ideas, some deep thinking. Because of that, I am not overly concerned about the bits I couldn’t quite get to grips with: I am just grateful to have been able to go along for the mind-expanding ride!
---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
One of the reasons I like Richard Powers' novels so much is that while I have one on the go, and normally for a while after I finish it, I find that if I am not actually reading it then I am thinking about it. Plowing The Dark is no exception.
I have read reviews that complain about the lack of linkage between the two stories. For me, no direct link is necessary. The stories in the novel explore two extremes and, by doing this, they ask you, the reader, to think about what lies between those extremes, where your experience might sit etc.. I found that last year’s A Little Life did the same kind of thing, not with parallel stories but with extremes of abuse and friendship that made you stop and think about where you and your experience stood on the spectrum.
Imagine two white rooms. One you can enter and leave at will and, when you are in it, there is no limit to the mental stimulation you can receive from external sources. The room can become anything and anywhere. The other is a prison cell in which you are trapped and the only stimulation your brain can get is what it can generate itself through memory and imagination. Or, maybe a book, if you can persuade your captors to provide one.
These are the two extremes Powers presents in this novel. It is a novel that makes you think about the virtual reality of cyberspace compared with the virtual reality of the human brain. It is a novel that challenges you to think about the extremes of over-stimulation and under-stimulation.
It is not an easy book to read. The language is relatively complex and some sentences take a couple of readings. Some sentences are just stunningly beautiful and simply deserve multiple readings rather than requiring them.
I found this a very thought-provoking book. Another stunner from Mr Powers (I have now read nine of his eleven novels and can’t wait to read the final two, except for the fact that when I’ve done that I will have no more of them to read!).
Read
May 6, 2017a) I've only read one Powers previously, The Gold Bug Variations. Which is better than the Hofstadter in some ways, others ways less so.
b) I read The Gold Bug because it's in that photo I made of that list Moore made. The BIG one. The Encyclopedic one.
c) I swore to Completionize every damn author in that photo (except Powers).
d) Why? Well, because I just didn't think that Powers had that literary umph that all the others had. That rather radical orientation to questions and matters literary and formal.
e) This second Powers of my reading confirms that. Judgement.
f) Not that there's anything wrong with Powers.
g) Just that he's much more about his stuff than his how.
h) But let me be clear :: his how is just fine, his sentences and prose and stuff are just fine. His structuring is fine.
i) Just to be clear. Powers is a damn fine novelist.
j) He just doesn't quite go over the top like I like my over=topping novelists to go.
k) At any rate, why did I read this then? Just to confirm my middling opinion? (because you know me I ain't no hate reader)
l) No I'm turning back to Powers and likely deciding to read through all of his MASSive work because folks like LeClair totally think he's just about the best we've got.
m) And he probably deserves a seat in the trinity of his generation :: DFW, WTV, R(?)P.
n) This particular Powers I picked up because I wanted to read Taylor's Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don Delillo and this is the Powers he discusses.
o) So, yes, I read a novel largely (not solely!) so that I might read a book about it.
p) Next question is how to pick my next Powers.
q) I might/could start at the beginning, a very good place to start.
r) I could of course read whatever falls next into my hands or looks appealing or whatever.
s) But I do think I need to skip the pb's for Powers and go hardcore into 1st/1st territory. It's only fair.
t) The claim we are entertaining, btw, is the possibility that Powers may be the smartest most genius novelist we have working today (after McElroy and Pynchon and Gass and a few other Geezers of course but that goes without saying).
u) I mean, he is very likely our very best Science Fiction writer. If the relation of science to fiction is correctly understood.
v) But one should add, Powers is full on in his grasp of art.
w) In fact, Taylor's book is about the intersection of science/technology, art, and religion. So far I'm digging Taylor's book. It's linked just about.
x) The first chapter of Letzler's book The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention is called "The Dictionary Novel" so I'm using an alphabetic structure here for no clear purpose.
y) The use of this structure is total cruft.
z) At any rate, if you would like to engage in the higher issues of our times via novel=readings, you could do a lot worse than with Powers.
b) I read The Gold Bug because it's in that photo I made of that list Moore made. The BIG one. The Encyclopedic one.
c) I swore to Completionize every damn author in that photo (except Powers).
d) Why? Well, because I just didn't think that Powers had that literary umph that all the others had. That rather radical orientation to questions and matters literary and formal.
e) This second Powers of my reading confirms that. Judgement.
f) Not that there's anything wrong with Powers.
g) Just that he's much more about his stuff than his how.
h) But let me be clear :: his how is just fine, his sentences and prose and stuff are just fine. His structuring is fine.
i) Just to be clear. Powers is a damn fine novelist.
j) He just doesn't quite go over the top like I like my over=topping novelists to go.
k) At any rate, why did I read this then? Just to confirm my middling opinion? (because you know me I ain't no hate reader)
l) No I'm turning back to Powers and likely deciding to read through all of his MASSive work because folks like LeClair totally think he's just about the best we've got.
m) And he probably deserves a seat in the trinity of his generation :: DFW, WTV, R(?)P.
n) This particular Powers I picked up because I wanted to read Taylor's Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don Delillo and this is the Powers he discusses.
o) So, yes, I read a novel largely (not solely!) so that I might read a book about it.
p) Next question is how to pick my next Powers.
q) I might/could start at the beginning, a very good place to start.
r) I could of course read whatever falls next into my hands or looks appealing or whatever.
s) But I do think I need to skip the pb's for Powers and go hardcore into 1st/1st territory. It's only fair.
t) The claim we are entertaining, btw, is the possibility that Powers may be the smartest most genius novelist we have working today (after McElroy and Pynchon and Gass and a few other Geezers of course but that goes without saying).
u) I mean, he is very likely our very best Science Fiction writer. If the relation of science to fiction is correctly understood.
v) But one should add, Powers is full on in his grasp of art.
w) In fact, Taylor's book is about the intersection of science/technology, art, and religion. So far I'm digging Taylor's book. It's linked just about.
x) The first chapter of Letzler's book The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention is called "The Dictionary Novel" so I'm using an alphabetic structure here for no clear purpose.
y) The use of this structure is total cruft.
z) At any rate, if you would like to engage in the higher issues of our times via novel=readings, you could do a lot worse than with Powers.
December 11, 2015
The third Richard Powers novel I've read this year. Not as great as Galatea 2.2 or Orfeo. I liked it despite some obvious faults. The two separate story strands don't quite gel, though each was good alone. And his metaphors are still remarkable and leftfield, but to someone a little less enamoured of the author's style, they might look overblown. They are little worlds unto themselves, part of that mindfulness his sentences have, often near-aphoristic, each like a moment one is inside: which I think is because he dictates his books, slowly (to well-trained software) rather than typing them.
Like his other work, Plowing has the rare combination of the highly technical and academic alongside the empathic & emotional. As I've said before - but the reviews of Plowing remind me - some readers seem not to notice both, and the same book is criticised by some people for being academically cold and detached, by others for being schmaltzy. Not something you see often. (And I guess the latter aren't the sort of commenters to link it to 'the new sincerity', DFW etc.) I like the way Powers' main characters feel deeply yet don't go entirely off the rails - typically they throw themselves into their work, and get a lot out of it.
The work here (in one of the two barely interlocking stories) is on virtual reality. I'm not sure how realistic it is that the lead character Adie, an artist previously unfamiliar with computers, is involved - she was at university with Steve, one of the programmers, who advised hiring her - but it adds to the multiple worlds of knowledge and outlooks in the novel, and she picks things up well: Powers is the last person to stereotype an unbridgeable arts / science divide. For some reason, technologies are 5-10 years ahead of where they were in the real world, at some points passing into SF, it being set c.1990 - but the characters and their group dynamics reminded me a lot of an old favourite, Microserfs - just somewhat darker and cleverer and more complicated. They likewise see themselves as pioneers at the dawn of a new age: read as optimistic retro-futurism it rivals space travel stories of the 50s and 60s. Steve says: "Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe." And there's the same mutual acceptance of weirdness I remember from 90s geeks at university - a different place from the combative, polarised discussion that gets called geek culture c.2015. Would parts of the book be tedious or difficult for readers who'd never done any programming? Possibly. And in any case it occasionally gets into more specialised areas: there's only so far I can stretch what I know from old rudimentary Java and BASIC, and it's a long time since I hung out with people who'd grok the terminology for coding economic modelling on one of the labs a side-projects, people who'd be able to say exactly where the science becomes fiction, before the magic realism is apparent to the general reader.
The main project, though, prompts the question of why virtual reality became something of a dead end. I daresay there are essays. Why is everything simply on screens? I can't stand the idea of Google Glass, but I'd absolutely love a gadget (glasses? headset?) that gave the full 360 degree effect of going for a walk or drive anywhere in the world in Street View.
The other strand of Plowing the Dark is about an American TEFL teacher taken hostage in Beirut in 1986. In this novel published in 2000, Powers is already alive to the potential discomfort increasing numbers of present-day readers might have with this as a fictional scenario, on racial grounds: the teacher, Taimur, is half Persian, and alongside the captors, another oppressive force in the story is the memory of his WASP ex-girlfriend, with whom he had a fraught and stressful relationship. Neither is Powers someone who'd conveniently ignore the realities of history, so other hostages with whom Taimur makes contact are Europeans. Skilful handling of a tricky subject.
The chapters about Taimur take up about a third of the book and the reader gets long breaks from their cluastrophobic environment in the Seattle IT lab. (He's one of those authors who seems to understand that things can get too much, and who can structure a difficult story so as not to overload the reader - he did that in Orfeo too. In this book that understanding of fear and trauma was also reflected in his idea of using the virtual reality environment as a way to treat phobias - building up through artificial, safe exposure, in a way methodologically similar to EMDR but employing vivid visuals instead.)
The hostage chapters are told in second person. It's an unpopular form and there are plenty of posts elsewhere on GR by readers who dislike it. Reading this, I think I figured out one of the reasons why: it can be excessively intimate and invasive. I don't always find it so - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia used it brilliantly to turn the material of a serious news feature into detailed understanding and empathy - but If On A Winter's Night A Traveller annoyed me when re-attempting it a couple of years ago; as I felt then, I'd have gladly thrown the copy at Calvino and told him to bugger off and get out of my space. Taimur's story inevitably has a lot of references to body positions, pain and emotions of just the sort that get under the skin. I wonder if I'd have wanted to read this if it had been by most (by all but a handful of) writers. At any rate I would have experienced or endured it differently. I've read dozens of interviews with Powers, and I realised whilst reading this novel that I sort of trusted him, in a way one rarely would a person not spoken to directly, so I was comfortable opening up to the character's experience, rather than partially shutting it out. It also made a difference that he's not the sort of person whom you'd assume had a sadistic twinkle in their eye whilst writing a scenario like this and imagining the reader's experience. (I think I would sometimes in that situation, even if conscience might make me re-write, so I'm not out to damn anyone.)
What attracted me to this particular novel out of all his work was, unusually, its circumstances of writing: Powers spent the best part of a year in solitude, other than short trips to buy essentials. The Seattle tech sections were much more social, contained far fewer scenes of solitude than I expected. And there's a drawback: the way it was created - I understand he did all his research first, and then just wrote, alone - is probably responsible for the shortage of pop-culture references: the noise of the outside world wasn't there to prompt the inclusion of culture outside his own taste. As with the low number of humorous scenes, it's not something that bothers me whilst reading Powers. I just notice later; when she surfaced again to quote from the first line. But a bunch of programmers aged 20-40: I'm sure some of them will be big fans of various contemporary bands / TV shows / films as well as the old text adventures which are part of several scenes; instead we're in too much of a bubble, and there's only the odd mention of staples like Star Wars & Trek, and one character listening to Wagner in his flat. Again, re. Taimur's scenes, if a guy of about 30 is stuck on his own for years, some of what he things about would probably be films, TV, popular music - he tries to reconstruct books in his head, why not films too?
[Gawd, this review is getting long. I meant to stop writing them at this length as it's pretty time consuming. For me and for you lot.]
Articles and interviews about the writer say that each of his novels springs from minor themes in the previous one. There's so much of Orfeo in here though, especially in Ted, a university friend of Adie and Steve, a brilliant unsung composer - but a womaniser unlike the near hermit of the recent novel: it's as if Orfeo zoomed in on Ted and split him into two characters: the introvert composer and his madcap impresario quondam-best-friend. (Rather like Hunter Thompson split himself in The Rum Diary.) And as in both Orfeo and Galatea there's a minor character with an acquired disability affecting the nervous system - I appreciate so much that someone as brilliant as Powers also has time and attention for the experience of people who lose abilities, without any hint of snobbery. These characters are always their own people, very interesting people importantly, but they are realistically isolated (even if they are middle class and not in the most dire circumstances): he respects them but doesn't try to prettify their situation.
I can see why others might not rate this book so highly - the occasional flashes of magic realism jar at times, and it wouldn't be the best introduction to the author - but I for one found plenty to like about it. An intense experience, as his novels tend to be.
[Incidentally, Taimur Martin's names are basically anagrams of one another, if you allow for rotating one letter. 'Adie Klarpol' (or Adia Klarpol) looks strange, like it should also be an anagram or similar, but I can't see one. Have I missed anything?]
May 2015
Like his other work, Plowing has the rare combination of the highly technical and academic alongside the empathic & emotional. As I've said before - but the reviews of Plowing remind me - some readers seem not to notice both, and the same book is criticised by some people for being academically cold and detached, by others for being schmaltzy. Not something you see often. (And I guess the latter aren't the sort of commenters to link it to 'the new sincerity', DFW etc.) I like the way Powers' main characters feel deeply yet don't go entirely off the rails - typically they throw themselves into their work, and get a lot out of it.
The work here (in one of the two barely interlocking stories) is on virtual reality. I'm not sure how realistic it is that the lead character Adie, an artist previously unfamiliar with computers, is involved - she was at university with Steve, one of the programmers, who advised hiring her - but it adds to the multiple worlds of knowledge and outlooks in the novel, and she picks things up well: Powers is the last person to stereotype an unbridgeable arts / science divide. For some reason, technologies are 5-10 years ahead of where they were in the real world, at some points passing into SF, it being set c.1990 - but the characters and their group dynamics reminded me a lot of an old favourite, Microserfs - just somewhat darker and cleverer and more complicated. They likewise see themselves as pioneers at the dawn of a new age: read as optimistic retro-futurism it rivals space travel stories of the 50s and 60s. Steve says: "Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe." And there's the same mutual acceptance of weirdness I remember from 90s geeks at university - a different place from the combative, polarised discussion that gets called geek culture c.2015. Would parts of the book be tedious or difficult for readers who'd never done any programming? Possibly. And in any case it occasionally gets into more specialised areas: there's only so far I can stretch what I know from old rudimentary Java and BASIC, and it's a long time since I hung out with people who'd grok the terminology for coding economic modelling on one of the labs a side-projects, people who'd be able to say exactly where the science becomes fiction, before the magic realism is apparent to the general reader.
The main project, though, prompts the question of why virtual reality became something of a dead end. I daresay there are essays. Why is everything simply on screens? I can't stand the idea of Google Glass, but I'd absolutely love a gadget (glasses? headset?) that gave the full 360 degree effect of going for a walk or drive anywhere in the world in Street View.
The other strand of Plowing the Dark is about an American TEFL teacher taken hostage in Beirut in 1986. In this novel published in 2000, Powers is already alive to the potential discomfort increasing numbers of present-day readers might have with this as a fictional scenario, on racial grounds: the teacher, Taimur, is half Persian, and alongside the captors, another oppressive force in the story is the memory of his WASP ex-girlfriend, with whom he had a fraught and stressful relationship. Neither is Powers someone who'd conveniently ignore the realities of history, so other hostages with whom Taimur makes contact are Europeans. Skilful handling of a tricky subject.
The chapters about Taimur take up about a third of the book and the reader gets long breaks from their cluastrophobic environment in the Seattle IT lab. (He's one of those authors who seems to understand that things can get too much, and who can structure a difficult story so as not to overload the reader - he did that in Orfeo too. In this book that understanding of fear and trauma was also reflected in his idea of using the virtual reality environment as a way to treat phobias - building up through artificial, safe exposure, in a way methodologically similar to EMDR but employing vivid visuals instead.)
The hostage chapters are told in second person. It's an unpopular form and there are plenty of posts elsewhere on GR by readers who dislike it. Reading this, I think I figured out one of the reasons why: it can be excessively intimate and invasive. I don't always find it so - How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia used it brilliantly to turn the material of a serious news feature into detailed understanding and empathy - but If On A Winter's Night A Traveller annoyed me when re-attempting it a couple of years ago; as I felt then, I'd have gladly thrown the copy at Calvino and told him to bugger off and get out of my space. Taimur's story inevitably has a lot of references to body positions, pain and emotions of just the sort that get under the skin. I wonder if I'd have wanted to read this if it had been by most (by all but a handful of) writers. At any rate I would have experienced or endured it differently. I've read dozens of interviews with Powers, and I realised whilst reading this novel that I sort of trusted him, in a way one rarely would a person not spoken to directly, so I was comfortable opening up to the character's experience, rather than partially shutting it out. It also made a difference that he's not the sort of person whom you'd assume had a sadistic twinkle in their eye whilst writing a scenario like this and imagining the reader's experience. (I think I would sometimes in that situation, even if conscience might make me re-write, so I'm not out to damn anyone.)
What attracted me to this particular novel out of all his work was, unusually, its circumstances of writing: Powers spent the best part of a year in solitude, other than short trips to buy essentials. The Seattle tech sections were much more social, contained far fewer scenes of solitude than I expected. And there's a drawback: the way it was created - I understand he did all his research first, and then just wrote, alone - is probably responsible for the shortage of pop-culture references: the noise of the outside world wasn't there to prompt the inclusion of culture outside his own taste. As with the low number of humorous scenes, it's not something that bothers me whilst reading Powers. I just notice later; when she surfaced again to quote from the first line. But a bunch of programmers aged 20-40: I'm sure some of them will be big fans of various contemporary bands / TV shows / films as well as the old text adventures which are part of several scenes; instead we're in too much of a bubble, and there's only the odd mention of staples like Star Wars & Trek, and one character listening to Wagner in his flat. Again, re. Taimur's scenes, if a guy of about 30 is stuck on his own for years, some of what he things about would probably be films, TV, popular music - he tries to reconstruct books in his head, why not films too?
[Gawd, this review is getting long. I meant to stop writing them at this length as it's pretty time consuming. For me and for you lot.]
Articles and interviews about the writer say that each of his novels springs from minor themes in the previous one. There's so much of Orfeo in here though, especially in Ted, a university friend of Adie and Steve, a brilliant unsung composer - but a womaniser unlike the near hermit of the recent novel: it's as if Orfeo zoomed in on Ted and split him into two characters: the introvert composer and his madcap impresario quondam-best-friend. (Rather like Hunter Thompson split himself in The Rum Diary.) And as in both Orfeo and Galatea there's a minor character with an acquired disability affecting the nervous system - I appreciate so much that someone as brilliant as Powers also has time and attention for the experience of people who lose abilities, without any hint of snobbery. These characters are always their own people, very interesting people importantly, but they are realistically isolated (even if they are middle class and not in the most dire circumstances): he respects them but doesn't try to prettify their situation.
I can see why others might not rate this book so highly - the occasional flashes of magic realism jar at times, and it wouldn't be the best introduction to the author - but I for one found plenty to like about it. An intense experience, as his novels tend to be.
[Incidentally, Taimur Martin's names are basically anagrams of one another, if you allow for rotating one letter. 'Adie Klarpol' (or Adia Klarpol) looks strange, like it should also be an anagram or similar, but I can't see one. Have I missed anything?]
May 2015
May 25, 2020
If you are interested in virtual reality and the rigors of prolonged captivity (of an isolated kidnap victim) this is the perfect book for you. If it's just one or the other this book will likely suffice. Powers is not my kind of writers, the book has litle humor in it, is ultimately predictable (or to me it was), but it would be rude to deny his powers of insight and description. He's an excellent writer who I intend to read again.
December 4, 2013
There's something about Powers' "Plowing the Dark" that is both richly compelling and emotionally distant. Like geniuses of all eras, Powers can't help but keep his patrons at arm's length, if for no other reason than because his sumptuous prose lacks enough inlets for interpretation. This is, without a doubt, a brilliant book. But is it good?
It could be argued that I'm simply not smart enough to get how good it really is, and I wouldn't debate that. I will say I'm smart enough to see what a luxuriant virtuoso the man is. The story interweaves via rich, vertiginous artistry the plight of a group of virtual reality engineers in Seattle with the much more serious plight of an American hostage in the war-torn Middle East. Powers' writing is uncannily lustrous, lending even the most innocuous of subjects (crayons or potted plants) a drenching layer of curious import, and making out of the truly menacing (beatings, kidnappings, ambiguous political upheavals) something clean and transient.
Although I liked "Plowing the Dark," I'll readily admit I didn't fully get the whole thing, either. For the first time since my heady college days I found myself re-reading and re-reading entire passages in a book, simply because the meaning was too tightly sown to penetrate. I could see Powers' forest just fine (it's hard not to), but I never got a clear picture of some of its trees. There's really not much to the heart of the book, and Powers understandably spends only a few (slightly sentimental) moments dissecting that heart. The real interest here is in the rest of the story's body, the fibrous nerves, the semi-solids of its life force, the ingrown hairs, crooked scars, and open pores of every character and nuance surrounding its steadily beating core.
As such, much of the book feels a bit repetitive, and even unnecessary. "Ah, but when has art ever been necessary?" asks Powers, over and over again. And each time, it seems like he has a different answer. Since over half of the book concerns an artist (Adie Klarpol) who is working with some nerdy technoids on the VR room, the book has a lot to say on the function of art, but the truest (most potent) answer comes at the conclusion of the work, the final moments of the hostage's story, the novel's denoument a depiction of one of the simplest and most profound kinds of art.
In spite of Powers' elegance and the book's beauty, the whole thing is a bit long-winded. And although I applaud his effort to spin together the two contrasting storylines, I also have to say it doesn't really work. At its most crucial moment, when Adie Klarpol and the hostage find their life lines intersecting, Powers becomes his most obtuse. Perhaps he was simply worried that the almost magical realism of the moment might not jive with either the digitally fabricated realism of the one story or the painfully true realism of the other. In any case, the moment doesn't work, and its failure is as evident in the nuts and bolts of the plot as it is in the breezy and incomprehensible writing used to describe it.
Even with this kind of error soiling the story, the book is still an amazing read, a tribute to the time-tested struggle of imagination versus concrete experience. Just as Adie and company string their ones and zeros into an approximation of man's ugliest worlds and most gorgeous fantasies, so does Powers string together hopes and despairs into something that is amazing to read, even if it's not nearly as easy to understand.
It could be argued that I'm simply not smart enough to get how good it really is, and I wouldn't debate that. I will say I'm smart enough to see what a luxuriant virtuoso the man is. The story interweaves via rich, vertiginous artistry the plight of a group of virtual reality engineers in Seattle with the much more serious plight of an American hostage in the war-torn Middle East. Powers' writing is uncannily lustrous, lending even the most innocuous of subjects (crayons or potted plants) a drenching layer of curious import, and making out of the truly menacing (beatings, kidnappings, ambiguous political upheavals) something clean and transient.
Although I liked "Plowing the Dark," I'll readily admit I didn't fully get the whole thing, either. For the first time since my heady college days I found myself re-reading and re-reading entire passages in a book, simply because the meaning was too tightly sown to penetrate. I could see Powers' forest just fine (it's hard not to), but I never got a clear picture of some of its trees. There's really not much to the heart of the book, and Powers understandably spends only a few (slightly sentimental) moments dissecting that heart. The real interest here is in the rest of the story's body, the fibrous nerves, the semi-solids of its life force, the ingrown hairs, crooked scars, and open pores of every character and nuance surrounding its steadily beating core.
As such, much of the book feels a bit repetitive, and even unnecessary. "Ah, but when has art ever been necessary?" asks Powers, over and over again. And each time, it seems like he has a different answer. Since over half of the book concerns an artist (Adie Klarpol) who is working with some nerdy technoids on the VR room, the book has a lot to say on the function of art, but the truest (most potent) answer comes at the conclusion of the work, the final moments of the hostage's story, the novel's denoument a depiction of one of the simplest and most profound kinds of art.
In spite of Powers' elegance and the book's beauty, the whole thing is a bit long-winded. And although I applaud his effort to spin together the two contrasting storylines, I also have to say it doesn't really work. At its most crucial moment, when Adie Klarpol and the hostage find their life lines intersecting, Powers becomes his most obtuse. Perhaps he was simply worried that the almost magical realism of the moment might not jive with either the digitally fabricated realism of the one story or the painfully true realism of the other. In any case, the moment doesn't work, and its failure is as evident in the nuts and bolts of the plot as it is in the breezy and incomprehensible writing used to describe it.
Even with this kind of error soiling the story, the book is still an amazing read, a tribute to the time-tested struggle of imagination versus concrete experience. Just as Adie and company string their ones and zeros into an approximation of man's ugliest worlds and most gorgeous fantasies, so does Powers string together hopes and despairs into something that is amazing to read, even if it's not nearly as easy to understand.
July 26, 2014
Plowing the Dark is a pair of novels set in the late 80s/early 90s- one about the creation of a virtual reality room, the other about a terrorist hostage held for years in a room.
The two stories are intertwined but barely related, except for in a very heavy handed thematic way, and then in a pointless and unreal way at the end. For me this was one of the biggest flaws of the book. I kept hoping for some actual intertwining, but none came.
My desire for the two plot lines to mix came from the difference in quality/engagement. The majority of the story is about the virtual reality space. But that was also the least interesting part. While the characters were appropriately nerdy, and sometimes charming or interesting, this section was bloated with over-blown technobabble, and a meandering plot that didn't really go anywhere. Powers used to be a developer, and so his nerdery isn't completely off-base, but it's not very interesting either. The actual scenario described is dated and not that realistic. But that isn't really the problem with this section.
By contrast, the hostage/terrorism storyline was well-written, gripping and lacked most of the stylistic and structural flaws of the nerdy part. I was constantly hoping for more of this story, especially at the end of the book when the follow up chapters would have been fascinating. When he wants to be he is a master of language and story.
Powers is a good writer (as evidenced by the terrorism part) and I really enjoyed Galatea 2.2. However, I think he let him self experiment or wander way too far from literary solid ground as he explored the virtual world.
Definitely not recommended. Read some other Powers stuff.
The two stories are intertwined but barely related, except for in a very heavy handed thematic way, and then in a pointless and unreal way at the end. For me this was one of the biggest flaws of the book. I kept hoping for some actual intertwining, but none came.
My desire for the two plot lines to mix came from the difference in quality/engagement. The majority of the story is about the virtual reality space. But that was also the least interesting part. While the characters were appropriately nerdy, and sometimes charming or interesting, this section was bloated with over-blown technobabble, and a meandering plot that didn't really go anywhere. Powers used to be a developer, and so his nerdery isn't completely off-base, but it's not very interesting either. The actual scenario described is dated and not that realistic. But that isn't really the problem with this section.
By contrast, the hostage/terrorism storyline was well-written, gripping and lacked most of the stylistic and structural flaws of the nerdy part. I was constantly hoping for more of this story, especially at the end of the book when the follow up chapters would have been fascinating. When he wants to be he is a master of language and story.
Powers is a good writer (as evidenced by the terrorism part) and I really enjoyed Galatea 2.2. However, I think he let him self experiment or wander way too far from literary solid ground as he explored the virtual world.
Definitely not recommended. Read some other Powers stuff.
March 2, 2020
A handful of nerds get together to create an immersive world of pure imagination that feels absolutely real. That may describe your last role-playing game experience with your friends, or the disparate group that is trying to create virtual reality technology more "real" than anyone has managed so far. The only problem? There are probably only two markets for something like this. One is the, er, adult industry (which never comes up, oddly enough) and the other is one you'll have to read the book to find out.
When I was a kid, the term "virtual reality" sounded like what your parents might have thought about when hearing about colonies on the moon or flying cars . . . its arrival finally meant that we were in The Future, that nebulous place just around the corner where science would solve all our problems and robot maids would do all the housework. Nowadays we probably associate the term more with video games and senior citizens in commercials oohing and aahing like children while wearing while wearing contraptions over their faces that definitely say "I am going to walk into something if I try to move from this spot" but in the nineties it was cutting edge stuff, with the promise of visiting faraway places without leaving your living room (or lab), or offering people a truly transformative storytelling experience.
Published in 2000, Powers' novel depicts the efforts of a small group of researchers to create a VR device called "The Cavern" while working at the "Realization Laboratory", which sounds like one of those places you eventually discover has an underground base populated by Cobra Command or something. In practice, it’s a big white room that while sadly lacking in Eric Clapton solos has the potential to create environments that feel totally real. In real life, Powers seems to be mirroring the research of another group of researchers at the University of Illinois who in 1992 created a device called "CAVE", or cave automatic virtual environment (or whatever evil acronym you can imagine it actually stands for) that sounds a lot like what Powers is describing here, although his version seems several steps beyond what they did.
The term CAVE is also a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave from "The Republic", which in part describes how people chained in a cave staring at a blank wall will come to assume the shadows flickering from a fire are their reality. This seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that philosophers are inherently pretty awesome in how they perceive the nature of reality, which is probably an understandable extrapolation from someone who was a philosopher, but the more important here is the idea of how our perceptions limit our conception of the true world around us. Toga-laden backslapping aside, the idea that being freed from the confinement of our perceptions would expose us to a world completely beyond our comprehension is not just stoner talk but a fundamental question as to what "reality" is, what we see and feel or something further beyond our senses?
Needless to say, this was probably up Powers' alley and in case the whole "confined to a cave staring at a blank wall" concept seemed a bit too abstract for your puny mind to contemplate, he gives us a second narrative featuring a person chained inside a blank room for years, forced to amuse himself through the power of imagination. Do these parallel narratives about creating new worlds from scratch possible connect? Well, it wouldn't be too much to ask.
For the most part the researchers' side of the tale is the pooling of their talents to improve the Cavern beyond it being just a fancy projection display. To that end Stevie Spiegel recruits his old friend Adie Klarpol, who used to be a decent artist before she gave up original art entirely and decided to stick to purely commercial work. She joins the little community of people who seem to spend most of their time eating, sleeping and you-know-whatting the Cavern, with her insights into art helping them bring new dimensions to its realities, adding sounds and textures that make the environment even more immersive.
Meanwhile, Taimur Martin is having a less than great time in Lebanon. A teacher, a stray joke he makes about his reasons for being in Lebanon end up with his getting kidnaped by members of one of the armed militias and taken hostage. They keep him chained to a radiator in a room with the windows sealed shut, forcing him to wonder if this is better or worse than being home and having his girlfriend yell at him all the time (given the evidence the book presents it seems to be a tossup, but we'll get to that). The heart of his story is survival, as he tries to keep from falling apart mentally and engaging in constant bargains with his captors for so much basic things as decent food and some exercise. As time drags on, this gets both easier and harder.
I feel like the big draw to a novel like this was a literary writer tackling something as inherently science-fictional as virtual reality, which probably sounded exotic in those vaguely optimistic days surrounding the year 2000. Twenty years on, with VR commonplace enough that some of the novelty has worn off slightly, the novel can feel a bit dated with everyone spending a fiendish amount of time in what turns out to be a giant arcade version of the nineties PC game "Myst". It might have helped if Powers had spent more time delving into the characters' personalities and how the tensions resulting from their differences were able to be harnessed to produce groundbreaking technology but that's not quite where his head is at. Instead, the characters are kept at a bit of a cold remove without much digging into them to see how much blood can be brought up. For a good chunk of the novel we're given basic descriptions of the characters, mostly through Adie's perception of them, and then treated to scene after scene of everyone trying to work through the problems that come with trying to make a cave that makes you think you're in an actual jungle instead of someone's social media collage. Each of the researchers seems to have his own fetish/focus with the device . . . Adie's trying to rediscover her love for art, some other guy is trying to model the future, one guy is just nerding out and so on . . . its all interesting but after a while you start to hope someone is going to conjure some VR monster to stalk everyone just to liven things up.
The rest of the book is devoted to our local hostage on the street trying to cope with being held captive, which means he goes through elaborate mental exercises, most of which have him recreating his life and people he knows. You can see metaphorically what it has to do with what the researchers are doing but for the most part it’s a guy trapped in a room going over his not real interesting life and trying to not go crazy in the process. He spends an inordinate amount of time fixating on a girlfriend he doesn't even seem that fond of (though I suppose that fall into "any port in a storm" territory) and who didn't seem that fond of him when they were together. You get enough of a sense of the guy that you'd like to see him get out of this alive (unless you're an awful person) but for the most part it’s a waiting game while you puzzle out just how Powers is going to link these two narratives.
And really that mental Sudoku seems to be what Powers hopes will make you stick around. The stakes for the researchers aren't much beyond "Will they get the Cavern done in time for the random date the CEO picked it to demo?" sounds like a problem out of a "Dilbert" strip, which even Powers seems to realize as late in the book he starts piling on more pathos with the characters' backstories. He details more of the shared past between Stevie and Adie (including a friend suffering from a chronic illness) but he makes no one else turn into people you want to hang out with. One guy neglects his relationship overseas (which also seems to involve a woman yelling at someone constantly, which is a weird theme), another has a lost love that vaguely looks like Adie, another gets catfished mainly as a way to pare down the cast . . . nobody is especially pleasant or even that fascinating so much like speed-dating you almost wish there was a reset button where you could go back to knowing less about them.
The biggest drama comes toward the end when Adie is presented with an "Ender's Game"-esque moral quandary that connects it with the current events of when it was set but it won't go as far as that book did (in all fairness, no one ever seems to want to). It does give Powers an excuse to wrap things up and finally show us the connection between the researchers and the hostage that he'd been tacitly teasing the entire book . . . maybe for some people its some kind of staggering emotional crescendo but it mostly fell flat for me and the mystery it supposes of the "how" isn't interesting enough to make the crater in my brain it clearly wants to make, serving more like someone describing how they got out of a locked room by drawing a door in the wall and leaving. Oh, was it that easy the whole time?
I don't know what I was expecting, maybe a more technological version of Le Guin's "Lathe of Heaven" but without any kind of emotional connection to the proceedings it doesn't feel like a dispatch from the latest electronics expo as much as sitting in a coffee shop while sleep deprived people the next table over discuss the expo, or at least what they remember of it. The philosophy behind is interesting and maybe if the story focused more on the hostage trying to make the world he used to live in real enough to give him an escape instead of trying to be clever and play "One of these things is just like the other" it would have been more effective. Instead it winds up being about a bunch of people who ultimately wind up wishing they were somewhere else, which I can relate to but probably not in the way the book wants me to.
When I was a kid, the term "virtual reality" sounded like what your parents might have thought about when hearing about colonies on the moon or flying cars . . . its arrival finally meant that we were in The Future, that nebulous place just around the corner where science would solve all our problems and robot maids would do all the housework. Nowadays we probably associate the term more with video games and senior citizens in commercials oohing and aahing like children while wearing while wearing contraptions over their faces that definitely say "I am going to walk into something if I try to move from this spot" but in the nineties it was cutting edge stuff, with the promise of visiting faraway places without leaving your living room (or lab), or offering people a truly transformative storytelling experience.
Published in 2000, Powers' novel depicts the efforts of a small group of researchers to create a VR device called "The Cavern" while working at the "Realization Laboratory", which sounds like one of those places you eventually discover has an underground base populated by Cobra Command or something. In practice, it’s a big white room that while sadly lacking in Eric Clapton solos has the potential to create environments that feel totally real. In real life, Powers seems to be mirroring the research of another group of researchers at the University of Illinois who in 1992 created a device called "CAVE", or cave automatic virtual environment (or whatever evil acronym you can imagine it actually stands for) that sounds a lot like what Powers is describing here, although his version seems several steps beyond what they did.
The term CAVE is also a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave from "The Republic", which in part describes how people chained in a cave staring at a blank wall will come to assume the shadows flickering from a fire are their reality. This seems to lead to the inevitable conclusion that philosophers are inherently pretty awesome in how they perceive the nature of reality, which is probably an understandable extrapolation from someone who was a philosopher, but the more important here is the idea of how our perceptions limit our conception of the true world around us. Toga-laden backslapping aside, the idea that being freed from the confinement of our perceptions would expose us to a world completely beyond our comprehension is not just stoner talk but a fundamental question as to what "reality" is, what we see and feel or something further beyond our senses?
Needless to say, this was probably up Powers' alley and in case the whole "confined to a cave staring at a blank wall" concept seemed a bit too abstract for your puny mind to contemplate, he gives us a second narrative featuring a person chained inside a blank room for years, forced to amuse himself through the power of imagination. Do these parallel narratives about creating new worlds from scratch possible connect? Well, it wouldn't be too much to ask.
For the most part the researchers' side of the tale is the pooling of their talents to improve the Cavern beyond it being just a fancy projection display. To that end Stevie Spiegel recruits his old friend Adie Klarpol, who used to be a decent artist before she gave up original art entirely and decided to stick to purely commercial work. She joins the little community of people who seem to spend most of their time eating, sleeping and you-know-whatting the Cavern, with her insights into art helping them bring new dimensions to its realities, adding sounds and textures that make the environment even more immersive.
Meanwhile, Taimur Martin is having a less than great time in Lebanon. A teacher, a stray joke he makes about his reasons for being in Lebanon end up with his getting kidnaped by members of one of the armed militias and taken hostage. They keep him chained to a radiator in a room with the windows sealed shut, forcing him to wonder if this is better or worse than being home and having his girlfriend yell at him all the time (given the evidence the book presents it seems to be a tossup, but we'll get to that). The heart of his story is survival, as he tries to keep from falling apart mentally and engaging in constant bargains with his captors for so much basic things as decent food and some exercise. As time drags on, this gets both easier and harder.
I feel like the big draw to a novel like this was a literary writer tackling something as inherently science-fictional as virtual reality, which probably sounded exotic in those vaguely optimistic days surrounding the year 2000. Twenty years on, with VR commonplace enough that some of the novelty has worn off slightly, the novel can feel a bit dated with everyone spending a fiendish amount of time in what turns out to be a giant arcade version of the nineties PC game "Myst". It might have helped if Powers had spent more time delving into the characters' personalities and how the tensions resulting from their differences were able to be harnessed to produce groundbreaking technology but that's not quite where his head is at. Instead, the characters are kept at a bit of a cold remove without much digging into them to see how much blood can be brought up. For a good chunk of the novel we're given basic descriptions of the characters, mostly through Adie's perception of them, and then treated to scene after scene of everyone trying to work through the problems that come with trying to make a cave that makes you think you're in an actual jungle instead of someone's social media collage. Each of the researchers seems to have his own fetish/focus with the device . . . Adie's trying to rediscover her love for art, some other guy is trying to model the future, one guy is just nerding out and so on . . . its all interesting but after a while you start to hope someone is going to conjure some VR monster to stalk everyone just to liven things up.
The rest of the book is devoted to our local hostage on the street trying to cope with being held captive, which means he goes through elaborate mental exercises, most of which have him recreating his life and people he knows. You can see metaphorically what it has to do with what the researchers are doing but for the most part it’s a guy trapped in a room going over his not real interesting life and trying to not go crazy in the process. He spends an inordinate amount of time fixating on a girlfriend he doesn't even seem that fond of (though I suppose that fall into "any port in a storm" territory) and who didn't seem that fond of him when they were together. You get enough of a sense of the guy that you'd like to see him get out of this alive (unless you're an awful person) but for the most part it’s a waiting game while you puzzle out just how Powers is going to link these two narratives.
And really that mental Sudoku seems to be what Powers hopes will make you stick around. The stakes for the researchers aren't much beyond "Will they get the Cavern done in time for the random date the CEO picked it to demo?" sounds like a problem out of a "Dilbert" strip, which even Powers seems to realize as late in the book he starts piling on more pathos with the characters' backstories. He details more of the shared past between Stevie and Adie (including a friend suffering from a chronic illness) but he makes no one else turn into people you want to hang out with. One guy neglects his relationship overseas (which also seems to involve a woman yelling at someone constantly, which is a weird theme), another has a lost love that vaguely looks like Adie, another gets catfished mainly as a way to pare down the cast . . . nobody is especially pleasant or even that fascinating so much like speed-dating you almost wish there was a reset button where you could go back to knowing less about them.
The biggest drama comes toward the end when Adie is presented with an "Ender's Game"-esque moral quandary that connects it with the current events of when it was set but it won't go as far as that book did (in all fairness, no one ever seems to want to). It does give Powers an excuse to wrap things up and finally show us the connection between the researchers and the hostage that he'd been tacitly teasing the entire book . . . maybe for some people its some kind of staggering emotional crescendo but it mostly fell flat for me and the mystery it supposes of the "how" isn't interesting enough to make the crater in my brain it clearly wants to make, serving more like someone describing how they got out of a locked room by drawing a door in the wall and leaving. Oh, was it that easy the whole time?
I don't know what I was expecting, maybe a more technological version of Le Guin's "Lathe of Heaven" but without any kind of emotional connection to the proceedings it doesn't feel like a dispatch from the latest electronics expo as much as sitting in a coffee shop while sleep deprived people the next table over discuss the expo, or at least what they remember of it. The philosophy behind is interesting and maybe if the story focused more on the hostage trying to make the world he used to live in real enough to give him an escape instead of trying to be clever and play "One of these things is just like the other" it would have been more effective. Instead it winds up being about a bunch of people who ultimately wind up wishing they were somewhere else, which I can relate to but probably not in the way the book wants me to.
July 4, 2024
I was quite excited when I found a copy of Richard Powers’ PLOWING THE DARK at my library’s book sale. I consider myself a fan of the author – I’d read six of his other books before PTD – and I was especially intrigued by the book when I realized that it’s about virtual reality. I recently got a MetaQuest 3 VR headset for my birthday and had been somewhat obsessive about it, so the topic seemed right in my wheelhouse. And yet… and yet, I began reading the book on May 13 and did not finish it until June 26. Instead of being drawn to the book as I’d expected, I instead found myself… I don’t know, not especially eager to read it. In fact, if I hadn’t recently been selected for jury duty, which involves a lot of down-time waiting to be called into the courtroom, I probably would not have finished the book as “quickly” as I did. Honestly, though, I take my strange disconnection with PTD as a personal failure rather than a commentary on the quality of the book. I can’t really explain why I found it so difficult to read, but it definitely started to feel by the end like an obstacle to be overcome rather than something to savor. I hate that I felt that way.
In fairness to myself, I’ve expressed some of this feeling before. Although I do like Powers generally, in my review for THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE I wrote: “I think of Powers as a favorite author but in truth some of his work hasn’t, er… worked… for me fully. That is to say that although I’ve thought well of each of the books I’ve ready by him, not all of them have left me truly excited.” Although Powers’ writing is frequently filled with humor, wordplay, and poetic philosophy, I’ve also compared his writing to a dense chocolate cake—decadent, but hard to eat quickly.
I think I felt that way a lot during the “VR” parts of the book. PTD is split into two different narratives: one is about a group of computer nerds and one artist creating a futuristic virtual reality space they call “The Cavern”; the other is about a man kidnapped and held hostage in some undisclosed Middle Eastern country, blindfolded and chained in a small, dank basement for years. Already you can see how this is a poetic device, surely. The contrast between the limitlessness of “The Cavern”, which can become anything anywhere, and the sharp limits of the basement. Adding to this, the computer programmers all reminisce about the early days of computer gaming when they played text-based dungeon crawlers. You are in a forest. In front of you is a house with a locked door. The sense of possibility these games created ignited the imaginations of the men (almost entirely men) who are now working on this secretive VR project. Meanwhile, the chapters about the kidnapped character are written in the second-person: You struggle to breathe when your captors tie you up in plastic and ferret you away in the false bottom of a getaway car. I believe this all comes together when the kidnap victim, an American teacher we learn is named Taimur Martin, begs for reading material to prevent himself (yourself) from slipping into madness. That is, I think the “message” of the two narratives is something about the power of language to create reality. In the VR story, there’s occasional talk about the fact that the images produced by the program are the result of written instructions, for instance. Although the takeaway here is not terribly original I suppose—a love letter to letters!—there’s at least a motive to it, if that makes sense, and that’s something I can get behind.
What I meant about the “VR” parts of the book, though, is that I found those on the whole less compelling than the parts focused on Martin. It involved a lot of dialogue between the characters, most of whom I had no good concept of—that is, their names largely meant nothing to me, I could not distinguish them aside from protagonist Adie Klarpol, the aforementioned (female!) artist. Furthermore, Powers’ dialogue is often… well, his characters speak in a high-falutin’ way that is not terribly realistic. They speak in metaphors, in partial sentences, and incorporating concepts from their specialized fields of study. Oftentimes, these dialogue exchanges fly over my head. Slowing down and spending time to parse them more might have helped me better appreciate what was going on in this part of the narrative, but I already felt that I was taking too long to read the book and, moreover, I did not feel inclined to put the effort in because I didn’t care much for the characters. I think the VR setting is a cool idea, though I do sort of feel that it did not go as deeply into the wonder that virtual reality affords as might have been possible. And I do think the “twist” ending of this narrative (Powers loves a twist ending) was successful and was not what I had anticipated. So there are things here that I enjoyed. And there are bits of Powers’ potent poetics throughout the book, of course. I didn’t save a whole lot, but a couple that I did write down were an early quote about Adie’s life in New York (“Car alarms down to the Battery sounded the predawn call to prayer”), a reference to those text-based computer games (“You are inside a building. You are inside a book. Inside a story that knows you’re in there, a tale ready to advance in any direction you send it.”), and a description of Martin’s memory of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend (“You lower your length, fulcrumed along hers, a shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day”).
Ultimately, though, I preferred Martin’s portion of the story far more than Klarpol’s, though it was the smaller portion of the book. I didn’t feel like I was really following the VR story or that anything was really happening in it. It’s not that it was overly technical, as was the issue I experienced with the first Powers book I read, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, but that the characters’ speech and actions were hard for me to wrap my head around. I didn’t follow the increasing capacity of The Cavern to create variations on reality as well as I did the increasing capacity of “Helen” in GALATEA 2.2; when it came time for the program to be unveiled to investors near the end, it felt all too sudden and inexplicable because I hadn’t really gotten a good sense about how the program had improved.
I’d still say that I enjoyed the book, all in all, and I can definitely see how it is in keeping with Powers’ style and themes as a whole. I wish I had connected with this one more than I did, but oh well. It's not such a stumble that it will prevent me from finishing the author’s catalog. I’m still on-board for the rest of the ride.
In fairness to myself, I’ve expressed some of this feeling before. Although I do like Powers generally, in my review for THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE I wrote: “I think of Powers as a favorite author but in truth some of his work hasn’t, er… worked… for me fully. That is to say that although I’ve thought well of each of the books I’ve ready by him, not all of them have left me truly excited.” Although Powers’ writing is frequently filled with humor, wordplay, and poetic philosophy, I’ve also compared his writing to a dense chocolate cake—decadent, but hard to eat quickly.
I think I felt that way a lot during the “VR” parts of the book. PTD is split into two different narratives: one is about a group of computer nerds and one artist creating a futuristic virtual reality space they call “The Cavern”; the other is about a man kidnapped and held hostage in some undisclosed Middle Eastern country, blindfolded and chained in a small, dank basement for years. Already you can see how this is a poetic device, surely. The contrast between the limitlessness of “The Cavern”, which can become anything anywhere, and the sharp limits of the basement. Adding to this, the computer programmers all reminisce about the early days of computer gaming when they played text-based dungeon crawlers. You are in a forest. In front of you is a house with a locked door. The sense of possibility these games created ignited the imaginations of the men (almost entirely men) who are now working on this secretive VR project. Meanwhile, the chapters about the kidnapped character are written in the second-person: You struggle to breathe when your captors tie you up in plastic and ferret you away in the false bottom of a getaway car. I believe this all comes together when the kidnap victim, an American teacher we learn is named Taimur Martin, begs for reading material to prevent himself (yourself) from slipping into madness. That is, I think the “message” of the two narratives is something about the power of language to create reality. In the VR story, there’s occasional talk about the fact that the images produced by the program are the result of written instructions, for instance. Although the takeaway here is not terribly original I suppose—a love letter to letters!—there’s at least a motive to it, if that makes sense, and that’s something I can get behind.
What I meant about the “VR” parts of the book, though, is that I found those on the whole less compelling than the parts focused on Martin. It involved a lot of dialogue between the characters, most of whom I had no good concept of—that is, their names largely meant nothing to me, I could not distinguish them aside from protagonist Adie Klarpol, the aforementioned (female!) artist. Furthermore, Powers’ dialogue is often… well, his characters speak in a high-falutin’ way that is not terribly realistic. They speak in metaphors, in partial sentences, and incorporating concepts from their specialized fields of study. Oftentimes, these dialogue exchanges fly over my head. Slowing down and spending time to parse them more might have helped me better appreciate what was going on in this part of the narrative, but I already felt that I was taking too long to read the book and, moreover, I did not feel inclined to put the effort in because I didn’t care much for the characters. I think the VR setting is a cool idea, though I do sort of feel that it did not go as deeply into the wonder that virtual reality affords as might have been possible. And I do think the “twist” ending of this narrative (Powers loves a twist ending) was successful and was not what I had anticipated. So there are things here that I enjoyed. And there are bits of Powers’ potent poetics throughout the book, of course. I didn’t save a whole lot, but a couple that I did write down were an early quote about Adie’s life in New York (“Car alarms down to the Battery sounded the predawn call to prayer”), a reference to those text-based computer games (“You are inside a building. You are inside a book. Inside a story that knows you’re in there, a tale ready to advance in any direction you send it.”), and a description of Martin’s memory of sleeping with his ex-girlfriend (“You lower your length, fulcrumed along hers, a shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day”).
Ultimately, though, I preferred Martin’s portion of the story far more than Klarpol’s, though it was the smaller portion of the book. I didn’t feel like I was really following the VR story or that anything was really happening in it. It’s not that it was overly technical, as was the issue I experienced with the first Powers book I read, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, but that the characters’ speech and actions were hard for me to wrap my head around. I didn’t follow the increasing capacity of The Cavern to create variations on reality as well as I did the increasing capacity of “Helen” in GALATEA 2.2; when it came time for the program to be unveiled to investors near the end, it felt all too sudden and inexplicable because I hadn’t really gotten a good sense about how the program had improved.
I’d still say that I enjoyed the book, all in all, and I can definitely see how it is in keeping with Powers’ style and themes as a whole. I wish I had connected with this one more than I did, but oh well. It's not such a stumble that it will prevent me from finishing the author’s catalog. I’m still on-board for the rest of the ride.
May 2, 2020
For me, Richard Powers is an "opus author." By that I mean a contemporary author, who has published four or more books, all of which I've read, and many of which are among my favorites. Once hooked on such an author, I anxiously await his/her next book, buy it in hard cover, and read it very soon after it's published. I also tend to think of this author's work as a total -- each new book shedding light on the ones that have come before.
His books often contain at least two intertwining stories -- separated by time and/or space but yet in some way influencing one another (Farmers, Goldbug, Gain, Plowing) . Often, one of these stories revolves around scientific discovery (Goldbug -- the genetic code, Galatea -- modeling the human brain with neural networks, Gain -- curing cancer, Plowing -- perfecting 3D virtual reality). And sometimes the bizarre causality by which one story affects the other is the key to the story's resolution and total impact.
In Plowing the Dark, one thread of narrative focuses on a development team in Seattle working on 3D virtual reality; and the other follows an individual kidnapped and held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon. The time-lines of the two stories overlap -- late 1980s to early 1990s. But the people in the different stories do not know one another, do not know anyone who knows one another, and never communicate with one another using real-world technology. But on some other plain of being, the imaginative experiences of Adie Karpol, an artist who becomes immersed in a 3D world she has helped to build -- a detailed computer model of the Hagia Sophia cathedral/mosque in Constantinople/Istanbul -- and Taimur Martin, who struggles to maintain his sanity and survive in conditions of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, intersect -- with Adie inspiring Taimur at a critical moment and Taimur's influence leading to a sudden change in Adie's life.
The intersection and its interpretation occur in the final pages of the book, in scenes that defy scientific explanation, but that are presented so delicately and yet powerfully and with such convincing psychology that you willingly suspend your disbelief and enjoy the emotional impact. In the final few pages, where you at last are shown the critical moment from the perspective of Taimur, give you a feeling of emotional closure and completeness, and leave you with a sense that there might, in fact, be another realm of reality.
"At the first interrogation, they go easy. But already they ask you: How is it you can still be here, after the years of where you've been?
"You do not tell them now, though in time you'll have to. They won't be able to make out what you have to say. How you gave in to the final abyss, how you dropped into the darkness beneath your permanent blindfold. How in the moment that you broke and fell, you never hit. How you saw, projected in a flash upon that dropping darkness, a scene lasting no longer than one held breath. A vision that endured a year and longer. One that made no sense. That kept you sane. A glimpse of the transfer-house of hostage. Of the peace that the world cannot give.
"You'll have to say, someday: how the walls of your cell dissolved. How you soft-landed in a measureless room, one so detailed that you must have visited it once. But just as clearly a hallucination, the dementia of four years of solitary. A mosque more mongrel than your own split life, where all your memorized Qur'an and Bible verses ran jumbled together. A temple on the mind's Green Line, its decoration seeping up from awful subterranean streams inside you, too detailed to be wholly yours."
The "Cavern", which was the research facility, becomes Plato's cave; and the other reality is not some high-tech fifth dimension but rather is "a truth only solitude reveals," a truth that in some sense is God.
"For God's sake, call it God. That's what we've called it forever, and it's so cheap, so self-promoting to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late date. The place where you've been unfolds inside you."
And Taimur, finally a free man, returns to his family like a dead man returning to the world of the living.
"For a little while, you are that angel. Ephemeral saintliness hangs on you. It will not last. Already, irritations seep into your fingertips. You feel yourself slipping bakc to the conditions of living. But for a time, briefer than your captivity, and only because of it, you are burned pure, by everything you look upon."
His books often contain at least two intertwining stories -- separated by time and/or space but yet in some way influencing one another (Farmers, Goldbug, Gain, Plowing) . Often, one of these stories revolves around scientific discovery (Goldbug -- the genetic code, Galatea -- modeling the human brain with neural networks, Gain -- curing cancer, Plowing -- perfecting 3D virtual reality). And sometimes the bizarre causality by which one story affects the other is the key to the story's resolution and total impact.
In Plowing the Dark, one thread of narrative focuses on a development team in Seattle working on 3D virtual reality; and the other follows an individual kidnapped and held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon. The time-lines of the two stories overlap -- late 1980s to early 1990s. But the people in the different stories do not know one another, do not know anyone who knows one another, and never communicate with one another using real-world technology. But on some other plain of being, the imaginative experiences of Adie Karpol, an artist who becomes immersed in a 3D world she has helped to build -- a detailed computer model of the Hagia Sophia cathedral/mosque in Constantinople/Istanbul -- and Taimur Martin, who struggles to maintain his sanity and survive in conditions of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, intersect -- with Adie inspiring Taimur at a critical moment and Taimur's influence leading to a sudden change in Adie's life.
The intersection and its interpretation occur in the final pages of the book, in scenes that defy scientific explanation, but that are presented so delicately and yet powerfully and with such convincing psychology that you willingly suspend your disbelief and enjoy the emotional impact. In the final few pages, where you at last are shown the critical moment from the perspective of Taimur, give you a feeling of emotional closure and completeness, and leave you with a sense that there might, in fact, be another realm of reality.
"At the first interrogation, they go easy. But already they ask you: How is it you can still be here, after the years of where you've been?
"You do not tell them now, though in time you'll have to. They won't be able to make out what you have to say. How you gave in to the final abyss, how you dropped into the darkness beneath your permanent blindfold. How in the moment that you broke and fell, you never hit. How you saw, projected in a flash upon that dropping darkness, a scene lasting no longer than one held breath. A vision that endured a year and longer. One that made no sense. That kept you sane. A glimpse of the transfer-house of hostage. Of the peace that the world cannot give.
"You'll have to say, someday: how the walls of your cell dissolved. How you soft-landed in a measureless room, one so detailed that you must have visited it once. But just as clearly a hallucination, the dementia of four years of solitary. A mosque more mongrel than your own split life, where all your memorized Qur'an and Bible verses ran jumbled together. A temple on the mind's Green Line, its decoration seeping up from awful subterranean streams inside you, too detailed to be wholly yours."
The "Cavern", which was the research facility, becomes Plato's cave; and the other reality is not some high-tech fifth dimension but rather is "a truth only solitude reveals," a truth that in some sense is God.
"For God's sake, call it God. That's what we've called it forever, and it's so cheap, so self-promoting to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late date. The place where you've been unfolds inside you."
And Taimur, finally a free man, returns to his family like a dead man returning to the world of the living.
"For a little while, you are that angel. Ephemeral saintliness hangs on you. It will not last. Already, irritations seep into your fingertips. You feel yourself slipping bakc to the conditions of living. But for a time, briefer than your captivity, and only because of it, you are burned pure, by everything you look upon."
January 4, 2024
I met a traveller from an antique land.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"
Oh what is not a dream by day?
- Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream"
We have fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
- William Butler Yeats, "The Stare's Nest by My Window"
Now that I've read over half a dozen Richard Powers novels in the past months, I'm starting to enter the Richard Powers interconnected universe, much like I did with Dean Koontz.
Related works: Bewilderment by Richard Powers, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Based on the Richard Powers novels I've read, I currently rank Plowing the Dark just above Generosity: An Enhancement and just below Gain : A Novel.
Favorite Passages:
This room is never anything o'clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.
This room lingers on the perpetual pitch of here.
_______
Surprised? he asked.
About . . .?
About where we've landed?
Nobody lands, she said.
_______
Sometimes you gotta wonder.
_______
But this ebony spooked her: the black of elaborate plans.
________
Images built and broke inside her. For the first time in as long as she cared to remember, the future held more pictures than the past.
_______
The wand you use to wend through this wilderness has a knob for leaving breadcrumbs. But as in all such worlds, the crumbs attract a murder of crayon crows that devour your trail markers the moment you lay them down. All your wax signs will not guide you for more than a virtual minute. The path is past preserving, and the canyon adventure knows no goal except itself. The Crayon World is just a broad-stroked test. The test of how to enter it, and walk back out intact.
_______
You mean, like a big View-Master? That's what you're saying? I'm going to live the next several years of my life inside a giant View-Master?
That depends. What exactly is a View-Master?
_______
Women who tell their husbands, live on camera, that they have lesbian lovers, as brought to you by the Family Ties video salesmen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. I'm afraid I must ask you: who invents all this?
Ah well, Rajan, my son. The Creator's ways are mysterious.
. . . .
Come on, my friend. Don't quit now. This is even more entertaining than violent revelations of deep incestuous secrets as brought to you by the Mormons.
. . . .
You and you and me. The celebrity police blotter. The Latter-Day Lesbian Saints.
_______
Not exactly the state he cared to be found in. Not the ghost he cared to be found by, in any state. But that was how ghosts chose their moments. Disruption: the only gift that memory had to give.
_______
There in the land of spruce and cedar, fast Fourier transforms and the draftswoman's fine Italian hand unleashed a profusion of banana leaves, slit and droopy, indecent in their greens. Klarpol's magic gamboge grew, riddled through with movement. Banana leaves played like children in the undergrowth. Dreamlike bananas floated up to tickle the insouciant moon.
_______
"Why are your fingers all green?"
She brought them up to her eyes. "It's not green. It's mostly chartreuse."
_______
Stevie. You must have had a very peculiar idea of what poetry was supposed to be.
No different than any person who ever wrote it. I was going to get inside of reality and extract its essence, write down on paper the magic metrical words that, read aloud, would do their open sesame.
_______
He had gone out on the market for a few years' running and had come close to landing a post in Utah. But the Mormons had not bought his cultural analysis of Das Lied von der Erde.
_______
It promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.
_______
Spider, these things are all dead. Killed by bigger, faster, better. Cartons of milk past the stamped expiration date. Tickets for last night's concert.
_______
Progress is destruction with a compass.
_______
Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity. A woman lay sprawled on the pavement, her mechanism smashed. Pressed up against the floor of the world, clutching it, as if sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. All she lacked was a chalk outline around her now-obsolete body.
_______
We know what we paint. And everything we paint comes into the world somehow. That's why God put the kibosh on graven images, you know. He didn't want the minor leagues fooling around with something they couldn't control.
_______
"We have a saying. Everything in life is imagination. But in fact it is reality. Whoever knows this will need nothing else."
_______
Every person has something she's supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That's the beauty: you think you're lost. You stumble around forever without knowing which way is forward. But you turn a corner one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon.
_______
You have no idea how horrible it is. To give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it's not about beauty at all. It's about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.
_______
We live between our next heartbeat and forever.
_______
The stories keep coming, flooding their banks, reverting. Your brain is a used bookstore that buys more than it sells. Its shelves will not hold. All things happen even to the shortest life. We all live forever. That simple discovery will break you.
_______
Persistent little suckers, them they. And more than a little conflicted.
_______
We're playing with the ultimate fire here. Teh one true prohibition. It's like God knew that if we ever got started drawing . . . she trailed off, conscience-stricken, in the face of the hi-res evidence.
That?
Taht we'd keep at it until the picture was done.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"
Oh what is not a dream by day?
- Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream"
We have fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
- William Butler Yeats, "The Stare's Nest by My Window"
Now that I've read over half a dozen Richard Powers novels in the past months, I'm starting to enter the Richard Powers interconnected universe, much like I did with Dean Koontz.
Related works: Bewilderment by Richard Powers, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Based on the Richard Powers novels I've read, I currently rank Plowing the Dark just above Generosity: An Enhancement and just below Gain : A Novel.
Favorite Passages:
This room is never anything o'clock.
Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.
This room lingers on the perpetual pitch of here.
_______
Surprised? he asked.
About . . .?
About where we've landed?
Nobody lands, she said.
_______
Sometimes you gotta wonder.
_______
But this ebony spooked her: the black of elaborate plans.
________
Images built and broke inside her. For the first time in as long as she cared to remember, the future held more pictures than the past.
_______
The wand you use to wend through this wilderness has a knob for leaving breadcrumbs. But as in all such worlds, the crumbs attract a murder of crayon crows that devour your trail markers the moment you lay them down. All your wax signs will not guide you for more than a virtual minute. The path is past preserving, and the canyon adventure knows no goal except itself. The Crayon World is just a broad-stroked test. The test of how to enter it, and walk back out intact.
_______
You mean, like a big View-Master? That's what you're saying? I'm going to live the next several years of my life inside a giant View-Master?
That depends. What exactly is a View-Master?
_______
Women who tell their husbands, live on camera, that they have lesbian lovers, as brought to you by the Family Ties video salesmen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints. I'm afraid I must ask you: who invents all this?
Ah well, Rajan, my son. The Creator's ways are mysterious.
. . . .
Come on, my friend. Don't quit now. This is even more entertaining than violent revelations of deep incestuous secrets as brought to you by the Mormons.
. . . .
You and you and me. The celebrity police blotter. The Latter-Day Lesbian Saints.
_______
Not exactly the state he cared to be found in. Not the ghost he cared to be found by, in any state. But that was how ghosts chose their moments. Disruption: the only gift that memory had to give.
_______
There in the land of spruce and cedar, fast Fourier transforms and the draftswoman's fine Italian hand unleashed a profusion of banana leaves, slit and droopy, indecent in their greens. Klarpol's magic gamboge grew, riddled through with movement. Banana leaves played like children in the undergrowth. Dreamlike bananas floated up to tickle the insouciant moon.
_______
"Why are your fingers all green?"
She brought them up to her eyes. "It's not green. It's mostly chartreuse."
_______
Stevie. You must have had a very peculiar idea of what poetry was supposed to be.
No different than any person who ever wrote it. I was going to get inside of reality and extract its essence, write down on paper the magic metrical words that, read aloud, would do their open sesame.
_______
He had gone out on the market for a few years' running and had come close to landing a post in Utah. But the Mormons had not bought his cultural analysis of Das Lied von der Erde.
_______
It promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.
_______
Spider, these things are all dead. Killed by bigger, faster, better. Cartons of milk past the stamped expiration date. Tickets for last night's concert.
_______
Progress is destruction with a compass.
_______
Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity. A woman lay sprawled on the pavement, her mechanism smashed. Pressed up against the floor of the world, clutching it, as if sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. All she lacked was a chalk outline around her now-obsolete body.
_______
We know what we paint. And everything we paint comes into the world somehow. That's why God put the kibosh on graven images, you know. He didn't want the minor leagues fooling around with something they couldn't control.
_______
"We have a saying. Everything in life is imagination. But in fact it is reality. Whoever knows this will need nothing else."
_______
Every person has something she's supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That's the beauty: you think you're lost. You stumble around forever without knowing which way is forward. But you turn a corner one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon.
_______
You have no idea how horrible it is. To give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it's not about beauty at all. It's about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.
_______
We live between our next heartbeat and forever.
_______
The stories keep coming, flooding their banks, reverting. Your brain is a used bookstore that buys more than it sells. Its shelves will not hold. All things happen even to the shortest life. We all live forever. That simple discovery will break you.
_______
Persistent little suckers, them they. And more than a little conflicted.
_______
We're playing with the ultimate fire here. Teh one true prohibition. It's like God knew that if we ever got started drawing . . . she trailed off, conscience-stricken, in the face of the hi-res evidence.
That?
Taht we'd keep at it until the picture was done.
July 26, 2013
Full of beautifully written aphorisms about the digital era's connection with humanity via the story of a virtual reality design team working in the late 1980s. It's cleverly juxtaposed with a Beirut hostage's own inner flights of imagination to while away the horror of his captivity.
However, this is a novel I admired but couldn't wholly enjoy. The two stories come together right at the end in a rather deus ex machina, magical realism way, which felt rather unearned for me. Plus I was bemused by how a bunch of cutting-edge computer programmers in 1990 can have photos of Mr Spock and Yoda on their office wall yet there's not a single reference to the Next Generation TV series's Holodeck, which had a high profile in geek culture from January 1988 onwards (rather sad that I looked this up...)
Mr Powers is also one of those writers who likes ideas more than characters. I'm fine when this is applied to short stories, but in a 400 page novel I feel the reader deserves a little more variety in characterisation. Instead, everyone speaks in a Richard Powers-y way, and the dialogue sometimes just reads like a stream of interchangeable philosophising quotes - pure sock puppets for the author. As a result, this novel about reality often didn't feel real enough. But the events were certainly believable - particularly the disturbing Beirut narrative.
However, this is a novel I admired but couldn't wholly enjoy. The two stories come together right at the end in a rather deus ex machina, magical realism way, which felt rather unearned for me. Plus I was bemused by how a bunch of cutting-edge computer programmers in 1990 can have photos of Mr Spock and Yoda on their office wall yet there's not a single reference to the Next Generation TV series's Holodeck, which had a high profile in geek culture from January 1988 onwards (rather sad that I looked this up...)
Mr Powers is also one of those writers who likes ideas more than characters. I'm fine when this is applied to short stories, but in a 400 page novel I feel the reader deserves a little more variety in characterisation. Instead, everyone speaks in a Richard Powers-y way, and the dialogue sometimes just reads like a stream of interchangeable philosophising quotes - pure sock puppets for the author. As a result, this novel about reality often didn't feel real enough. But the events were certainly believable - particularly the disturbing Beirut narrative.
September 29, 2013
This has a seriously cool idea. That's part of why I'm being so harsh on the rating- I had such high expectations and it reached nearly none of them. So first- I didn't particularly like the writing. I found it for the most part dry and uninteresting. And I'm usually pretty open minded when it comes to writing techniques, but how hard would it have been to put in some quotation marks? And the characters: I just didn't care about Adie. Or Stevie. Or Tai whatever his name was. This book had the entire realms of art and technology to meander through, but it just didn't. Maybe I'm being so harsh because I read it soon after rereading The Veldt by Ray Bradbury (which also has the idea of a digital room with changing surroundings) and because that short story is particularly brilliant, but whatever the problem was, I remained unimpressed.
May 15, 2019
I am presently in a read along of Richard Powers novels in publication order and what has most struck me is how complementary the works are. The more Powers I read the more fulfilled I feel, and the more I appreciate the author's work. This one has the usual dual plotlines with the first about a cast of characters engaged in developing a virtual reality experience based on the C.A.V.E. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The second is fictional kidnapping in Beirut that has very loose similarities to that of Terry Waite.
The stories conjoin in a theme of imagination that Powers' develops with skill.
The second is fictional kidnapping in Beirut that has very loose similarities to that of Terry Waite.
The stories conjoin in a theme of imagination that Powers' develops with skill.
August 15, 2022
Richard Powers has written some exceptional books but I just never could get into this one. It's about two very different stories that, sort of, converge at the end. The main story is about a group of programmers and an artist who are developing a room into a virtual reality and the other story is about a teacher in Lebanon who is being held captive by terrorists. Of the two narratives, the one about the teacher being held hostage was much more interesting, while the main story about the programmers seemed to go into very long philosophical discussions that became tiresome. It's a good read but not nearly as good as the other Powers books I've read.
February 2, 2023
Probably the weakest Powers I’ve read so far, but still very good. I’d give it 3.5 stars if that was an option, but I’ll round up since it’s not.
One thing that stands out to me - it’s a credit to Powers’s scientific knowledge that a book written over 20 years ago heavily featuring VR technology doesn’t feel dated in 2023. He enters some pretty speculative territory when it comes to the limits of tech, and it turns out that he’s essentially spot on with his predictions.
One thing that stands out to me - it’s a credit to Powers’s scientific knowledge that a book written over 20 years ago heavily featuring VR technology doesn’t feel dated in 2023. He enters some pretty speculative territory when it comes to the limits of tech, and it turns out that he’s essentially spot on with his predictions.
January 26, 2025
I have loved 7 of Power's books before reading this one. This one made my head spin to the point that I would get queasy and need a rest at some of the VR scenes. His descriptions blew my mind. I think Power's intellect is so far beyond average that it made this one a tough read. I am in awe of Powers.
March 18, 2025
This book is more interesting in theory than in practice. I really enjoyed a couple of his previous books, but this one I skimmed through after the first quarter. The story of the kidnapped teacher was well narrated, and the parallels of the rooms in his mind and the Cavern AI room being created in the other storyline was unique, but I couldn’t read the computer jargon or the constant questions in the AI storyline.
August 27, 2025
Alternating storylines that sounded promising, but one of them bored me to absolute tears (the VR developers) and the other was completely riveting (the hostage situation). This book was probably too smart for its own good.
April 8, 2018
Wat hebben de protesten op Tienanmenplein, de dood van Khomeini, Poolse verkiezingen en de val van Berlijn met elkaar te maken? Ze vonden alle plaats in 1989 (hoewel de Nederlandse versie van Wikipedia de dood van Khomeini zo onbelangrijk vindt, dat deze niet genoemd wordt in het overzicht van dat jaar). Het is ook het jaar dat Adie Klarpol door Steve Spiegel wordt gevraagd om bij TeraSys te komen werken. Adie kent Steve nog van haar universiteitsjaren en hij krijgt haar zover dat ze in ieder geval langs komt om kennis te maken met onder andere de Crayon (= krijt) Room: een Virtual Realityprogramma dat draait in The Cavern: een witte kamer in het lab van TeraSys waar diverse VR-programma's ontwikkeld worden door allerlei knappe koppen. Adie wordt gegrepen door de mogelijkheden van VR en pakt de kans om met haar (schilder)kunst een bijdrage te leveren aan het verbeteren daarvan. Het eerste project wordt De droom van Rousseau, daarna wordt er aan De slaapkamer van Van Gogh gewerkt en uiteindelijk wordt zelfs de Aya Sofia (Istanboel) na'gebouwd'.
Behalve het verhaal van Adie en al haar automatiseringscollega's is er ook nog het verhaal van Taimur Martin. Hij wordt in 1986 in Beiroet ontvoerd door Islamitische fundamentalisten, die hem te zijner tijd willen gebruiken om te ruilen voor collega's van hen die elders gevangen zitten. Ook Taimur bevindt zich dus, weliswaar niet vrijwillig, vastgeklonken aan een radiator, in een soort Cavern. Zijn (virtual) reality is niet afhankelijk van de hard- en software van computers, maar van zijn eigen lijf.
Net als in Time of our Singing, weet Richard Powers ook nu weer de gebeurtenissen in de wereld en hun effect op de (hoofd)personen in het verhaal prachtig neer te zetten. Al die computermensen die 'stiekem' in een apart venstertje op het scherm de gebeurtenissen in China, Teheran en Berlijn volgen; de val van de muur wordt zelfs in de Cavern 'uitgezonden'.
Van al die gebeurtenissen is Taimur Martin natuurlijk niet op de hoogte. Als hij uiteindelijk via uitwisselingen met behulp van klopsignalen van een (later gevangen) mede-gijzelaar, die tijdelijk in een kamer naast hem wordt vastgehouden, daarvan op de hoogte wordt gesteld, gelooft hij het eigenlijk ook niet. Het oostblok verdwenen.. dat kan niet.
Hoe de twee verhalen uiteindelijk samenkomen.. of de twee verhalen sowieso samenkomen en wat operatie Desert Storm met dit alles te maken heeft, ga ik natuurlijk aan Richard Powers zelf overlaten.
Ik heb maar één kleine kanttekening bij dit boek. Omdat ik zelf werkzaam ben in de ICT, had ik geen moeite met de terminologie die wordt gebruikt bij de beschrijvingen van de werkzaamheden aan de diverse projecten in het TeraSys-lab. Of het ook allemaal te volgen is voor de gewone huis-tuin-en-keuken computergebruiker, weet ik niet. Het helpt in ieder geval, als je een beetje kennis hebt van de mogelijkheden die teken-/fotoshopprogramma's je bieden bij het manipuleren van plaatjes. Uiteindelijk is het niet zo belangrijk. Het gaat om de mensen, om wie ze zijn, waarom ze zo zijn en hun verwachtingen, hun dromen.
Behalve het verhaal van Adie en al haar automatiseringscollega's is er ook nog het verhaal van Taimur Martin. Hij wordt in 1986 in Beiroet ontvoerd door Islamitische fundamentalisten, die hem te zijner tijd willen gebruiken om te ruilen voor collega's van hen die elders gevangen zitten. Ook Taimur bevindt zich dus, weliswaar niet vrijwillig, vastgeklonken aan een radiator, in een soort Cavern. Zijn (virtual) reality is niet afhankelijk van de hard- en software van computers, maar van zijn eigen lijf.
Net als in Time of our Singing, weet Richard Powers ook nu weer de gebeurtenissen in de wereld en hun effect op de (hoofd)personen in het verhaal prachtig neer te zetten. Al die computermensen die 'stiekem' in een apart venstertje op het scherm de gebeurtenissen in China, Teheran en Berlijn volgen; de val van de muur wordt zelfs in de Cavern 'uitgezonden'.
Van al die gebeurtenissen is Taimur Martin natuurlijk niet op de hoogte. Als hij uiteindelijk via uitwisselingen met behulp van klopsignalen van een (later gevangen) mede-gijzelaar, die tijdelijk in een kamer naast hem wordt vastgehouden, daarvan op de hoogte wordt gesteld, gelooft hij het eigenlijk ook niet. Het oostblok verdwenen.. dat kan niet.
Hoe de twee verhalen uiteindelijk samenkomen.. of de twee verhalen sowieso samenkomen en wat operatie Desert Storm met dit alles te maken heeft, ga ik natuurlijk aan Richard Powers zelf overlaten.
Ik heb maar één kleine kanttekening bij dit boek. Omdat ik zelf werkzaam ben in de ICT, had ik geen moeite met de terminologie die wordt gebruikt bij de beschrijvingen van de werkzaamheden aan de diverse projecten in het TeraSys-lab. Of het ook allemaal te volgen is voor de gewone huis-tuin-en-keuken computergebruiker, weet ik niet. Het helpt in ieder geval, als je een beetje kennis hebt van de mogelijkheden die teken-/fotoshopprogramma's je bieden bij het manipuleren van plaatjes. Uiteindelijk is het niet zo belangrijk. Het gaat om de mensen, om wie ze zijn, waarom ze zo zijn en hun verwachtingen, hun dromen.
January 23, 2026
There's a universe full of material in Plowing the Dark, maybe too much for a single novel. I've reached the halfway point in my re-reading of his magnificent work and, even more than on my first readings, I've come to appreciate his ability to weave together multiple plot strands in a way that resolves (or doesn't quite resolve) in ways that leave me emotionally and intellectually satisified. With that in mind, I never quite got a beat on the underlying rhythms of Plowing in the Dark. The hostage thread is compelling, maybe the darkest thread in any of Powers' work; the excavation of the early days of Virtual Reality--it's stunning how much of what he foresaw has come to pass--fascinating; you can trace the history of computers from Goldbug Variations, Galatea 2.2., and Plowing forward into Playground. What I hadn't remembered clearly about Plowing, though, was just how much of its time it is and just how distant that time has come to seem. Tianamenen Square, the Berlin Wall, the first of America's Gulf Wars . . . and much more. It' hard not to recoil in something like despair when you realized just how much of what seemed almost unthinkable then has embedded itself so deeply in our everydayness that it's difficult to summon the strength of response.
And on top of all of that, Powers clearly revels in the history of the visual arts and creates characters who breath with earned life.
So...clearly, Plowing in the Dark is serious work of the highest order. But the pieces never came into either consonance or a clearly designed dissonance for me. That's not really criticism; it's asking far too much to expect a novel to answer questions reality declines. Anyway, the three stars is simply to differentiate my recommendation for Plowing from the plethora of my four and five star reviews elsewhere. I've always been clear that the star system is kind of silly (and I really wish Goodreads allowed half stars if we're going to have them at all) but I do appreciate receiving guidance from other reviewers and take that part of the challenge seriously.
And on top of all of that, Powers clearly revels in the history of the visual arts and creates characters who breath with earned life.
So...clearly, Plowing in the Dark is serious work of the highest order. But the pieces never came into either consonance or a clearly designed dissonance for me. That's not really criticism; it's asking far too much to expect a novel to answer questions reality declines. Anyway, the three stars is simply to differentiate my recommendation for Plowing from the plethora of my four and five star reviews elsewhere. I've always been clear that the star system is kind of silly (and I really wish Goodreads allowed half stars if we're going to have them at all) but I do appreciate receiving guidance from other reviewers and take that part of the challenge seriously.
March 26, 2012
Here's a solid attempt at putting religion and technological capacity on even footing (not unlike Snow Crash). By religion I mean a general spirituality, though not general in the generic sense or in a way to mean a lesser sort of activity, but in the profound concurrence of humanity and those spiritual questions. The key to Plowing the Dark I suppose comes from equating the search for profound art or the mimicry thereof with the strength of human thought (an idea I approve). We're each of us in constant communication with the past--and in some ways the future, though the past is more readily identified, as it creeps in through image (graven, sacred, sculpted, painted, or sketched), building, and (more recently) sight, sound. Through this conversation, on-going though not eternal, we compare our depths, our almost fathomed and nearly completed, none of which is ever quite the level we hope to reach. It is in us not our stars and all of that. Rich Powers excavates the human through two intertwined stories: that of a team working in virtual reality, building simulacrums of original art alongside sensations of depth, movement, and sound; and a second story of a man held captive by terrorists, and his memory's revolt into the long-forgotten, half-remembered, or almost-quite moments, voices, and experiences of which most of us don't think because of near-constant external stimuli. In Powers' view it is up to the artist to exceed those mundane sensations and trip us into new ways of thinking. Though it takes the stability of civilization to attempt fantasy (an imprisoned mind has only itself), it is nevertheless the artist's job to forever question power and privilege and to work against the unearned forms of each. Religion, then, may be the all-encompassing comfort of attempt and assignation, those worried moments of 'what might we be' within which each of us becomes more aware of how and what we are, and through that awareness comprehend more than all.
May 26, 2021
Powers is one of my favorite authors. His skill at blending science and fiction is unmatched. I can tell there are ideas here which he perfects in The Echo Maker, Orfeo, and The Overstory. I have professional experience with some of the technology he writes about and I found myself enjoying the accuracy of a team working for a company and all its quirks. These characters are relatable and their flaws are real and quirky. The pursuit of art and technology is something I continue to mull over. Reading the book in 2021, I started to really enjoy the way he captures what we thought in 1999 and 2000. The time before Google. Powers captures the ATTEMPTS at utopian hope of change for good in 1999 and 2000. We know now how some of history works out and we still haven’t figured out the right balance. I am both horrified and intrigued, duplicate feelings I am used to holding together with technology. I really appreciate how he brought the story to a close.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 24, 2009
At the turn of the tide – the late 80's and early 90's – as History may end, the world is on the verge of being changed, new fights begin and ancient wars remain. In the western Puget Sound, the Cavern–-a room that can become anything, is built by Virtual Reality researchers and disillisioned artists converted to the wonders of computer science; meanwhile in Beirut, an English teacher is held hostage. Two narrative threads that mirror one another until the distance vanishes and they merge in pure poetry.
Only four stars because, despite a few brilliant bits in the first third of the novel, I struggled(I kept telling myself "Yes I can!")and possibly resisted the book until page 238. From there on it was absolute surrender to Richard Powers' genius and general awe of his way with words.
Perhaps Powers' most platonicien book...of course there's much more in this book than a mere "cover" of Plato's famous allegory.
Only four stars because, despite a few brilliant bits in the first third of the novel, I struggled(I kept telling myself "Yes I can!")and possibly resisted the book until page 238. From there on it was absolute surrender to Richard Powers' genius and general awe of his way with words.
Perhaps Powers' most platonicien book...of course there's much more in this book than a mere "cover" of Plato's famous allegory.
Read
May 26, 2025A troubling novel, quite up to Powers' usual capacity for combining science and art, exciting wonder, and alluding to a multitude of precursors. I find the 'captive in Beirut' sequences ever harder to read, but I'm also ever more aware that the AI team in Seattle is equally captivated by the virtual world they are creating. Not all prisons are violent dungeons. The "magic realism" of the moment in which the otherwise separate (though thematically-linked) narratives overlap each other continues to make me wonder whether or not it quite works. [In this at least 7th reading I felt much more content with the overlap, thinking in terms of a somatic impetus towards examining and freeing the power of the imagination.] I have similar qualms about the apparent time-travelling in RP's next novel, The Time of Their Singing. Still, the guy makes me both think and feel in a way few novelists do.
March 8, 2011
Oh my GAWD I have been reading this book forever. It is fine. Better than fine -- I *think* it is good. The sections about the hostage were more compelling than those about the virtual reality chamber, mainly, I think, because the technologies of hostage-taking have changed so little in the 20 years since this book came out, and those of virtual reality have changed enormously. But the experience of reading this novel was like slowly wasting away in a shallow pit of quicksand. Plowing the Dark, indeed.
May 6, 2019
My favorite of Powers' novels. Very powerful, and the two stories work well, especially in their contrasts.
August 11, 2019
i tried to give this book a chance to develop, to move past being so fucking oblique and opaque and obstinate, but it just never happened for me... i disliked the science, not because it was hard to understand (it was), but because it was too right-now for me... i''l explain: in 2019 we have managed to give over (or have taken, depending on how much agency you want, or are willing to be responsible for) or have taken away (not as much taken away as let slide, since so many people are slaves to commerce and "likes" and distractions from a life spiraling away from them in a sea of not-actually-choices choices) most of our dignity for a digital existence... think about this: if the internet disappeared, what would you do? what could you make? what would you eat? how would you know who you friends are? how would you learn? yeah, strangely, all these things were possible BEFORE the digital world took over... sure, everything is easier, and faster, and "better", but what do you do now with all your ease and comfort and time? stare at your fucking screen all fucking day and look for more things to buy, or like, or share, or rant against... we aren't really living anymore, just watching our lives pass, in full HD and 4GLTE... OK, i'm not going on with this... anyway... i hoped the "captive part" of the book would overcome the "geek part" of the book, but it never amounted to anything but topes... tropes bandied about by alt-righters and white supremacists and Trump supporters about what a terrorist is, what terrorism is, who is good, who is bad, etc.... kinda sad... since i am just getting more annoyed the more i think about this book, i am ending this review
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