Navigating troubled waters: Posthumanist vulnerability and entanglement in Richard Powers's Playground (2024)

Abstract Richard Powers's most recent novels to date— The Overstory (2018), Bewilderment (2021), and Playground (2024)—engage with some of the environmental and technological threats that loom over our planet, such as deforestation, species loss, the degradation of the ocean bottom, and the risks associated with the development of generative AI. Nevertheless, these novels also articulate a perspective on how to be at home in a world marked by turmoil that goes beyond hope and anxiety and that resonates with recent research in the field of critical posthumanism. This work focuses mainly on Playground , a novel whose main subject is the wonders of the oceans—which despite sustaining life on Earth face unprecedented threats. Drawing from critical posthumanist thought, this paper explores how the novel builds on some of Powers's trademark themes and narrative conventions, while also opening up new creative and thematic possibilities. Ultimately, this paper argues that by highlighting entanglement, evoking awe and wonder toward oceanic creatures, drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems, and introducing a narrative twist at the end that shatters readers' expectations, the novel conveys a message on how to navigate unsteady times that both resonates with and extends that of the preceding novels.