Playground
Markus Krötzsch recommend me a novel, Playground, by Richard Powers. I have to admit I rarely read novels, and this one was a good one to make an exception.
- "There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven. The maker of the world whispered that secret to me, and it changed everything."
I really enjoyed the language. It was just a pleasant read, and you can feel that the author mastered the craft of building sentences, paragraphs, and stories.
- "If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play."
I was very confused throughout the first hundred pages or so, until I figured out what the main story threads were. I have to admit, that I than re-skimmed these pages again, and it all made sense and fit together, but at first it felt like so many different things were going on that I wasn't sure what was going on. But because of the well-wrought language, I didn't mind, and I merrily joined the ride.
- "What you call the ocean is nothing but the coast."
The book retells the story of four characters, who, at their best, are fascinating and brilliant, and at their worst, are failing so bad it makes me angry, and are, at all times, deeply relatable. It follows a story of games, computers, the birth of the Web with Mosaic, and a very thinly veiled fictional version of Cyc, and a fictional Website, Playground, which has a fascinating premise, somewhere between Facebook and Reddit, and then going to machine learning and AI. It also tells the story of an oceanographer, of the changing oceans, of dementia, of loss, guilt, and
- "It was embarrassing. She didn't want to tell the god that she didn't believe in him and that he really shouldn't be there."
At several points, the line between fiction and truth becomes very fragile, dreamlike, which is part of the appeal.
- "He left me everything."
- "I see."
- '‘What in the world am I supposed to do with it?"‘
In the end, I was literally gasping when the author resolved a part of the story I wasn't even expecting, although it was built towards it the whole time. It made me mad and angry, and then it made me think of why I was so mad and angry. In the end, the story gets a beautiful resolution, one that me lose a tear or two, and that made me question,
- "We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we're desolate when that's what they become."
Richard Powers, Playground. ISBN 978-1-324-08603-1
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