Read This: Richard Powers

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the Richard Powers novel Generosity had been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, an annual prize for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom. I was surprised, because although Powers has always had a strong science fictional strain in his work, he’s generally been placed in the literary camp. I hadn’t read Generosity yet, so I picked it up, and wound up writing a short essay for Tor.com about what makes it a science fiction novel. Then, because I was on a roll, I wrote a second post about Richard Powers, this time for Tor’s “Genre in the Mainstream” series, where I focused on an early novel, Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the 2006 National Book Award winner, The Echo Maker.

In an interview with The Believer, Powers said something I thought really spoke to the science fiction side of his writing:

“We often assume that novels of ideas and novels of character are mutually exclusive. My entire writing life, I’ve wanted to suggest that all novels are to some degree both and that some novels try to erase that artificial boundary in order to show the links between thinking and feeling. We’re all driven by hosts of urges, some chaotic and Dionysian, some formal and Apollonian. The need for knowledge is as passionate as any other human obsession. And the wildest of obsessions has its hidden structure. Our theories about the world are deeply emotional, to us. Voiced idea is character.”

This is something Powers has improved at exponentially over time—Prisoner’s Dilemma has some great ideas, for example, but its characters read like templates rather than people, while the emotional underpinnings of The Echo Maker and Generosity are just as strong as the intellectual underpinnings (although not everyone agrees with me; I can see where William Deresiewicz is coming from in that review, but I don’t agree with him on the later books). I also became intrigued, as I was doing the reading for these articles, how often Powers returns to the theme of a disillusioned writer, someone who begins to mistrust the fundamental nature of his art, grappling with the mysteries of consciousness; Galatea 2.2, Powers’ most explicitly SF novel, falls firmly into this category. Lately, I’ve come to see in Powers’ fiction a sort of parallel to the later work of Phliip K. Dick, especially the VALIS trilogy: thoughtful, and increasingly compelling, meditations on what it means to be human and, in the most recent work especially, how we experience that humanity.

6 May 2011 | read this |

NYPL Prez: Libraries Are Here to Stay

“I don’t have any patience for people who think libraries are going to become an anachronism any time soon,” New York Public Library president Paul LeClerc (right) said towards the end of a discussion with Bruno Racine of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale held at the NYPL’s Celeste Bartos Forum last week. “If there’s any sort of organization that’s deeply entrenched in American life, it’s libraries.” LeClerc had already spoken eloquently about libraries as “places that help build human capital” and emphasized the important role libraries can play in times of economic hardship: “A lot of our patrons can no longer afford to buy books. They don’t have wireless access at home.” The library was as much an anchor for the community, he noted, as a place for scholarly research.

But when it came to scholarly research, he was very enthusiastic about the impact of the Google Books program, to which the NYPL had contributed 300,000 scanned public domain volumes. “If your books are put online,” he said, “they will be used more often, and maybe more deeply, than they ever were before.” And he rejected the notion that putting these books online would cut into the publishing industry’s revenues. “Our purpose at the New York Public Library is to let people have access to our material,” he said forcefully. “Physically and, when we can, online. We drew—not a line, but a trench, in the sand, when it came to copyright, and we’ve never even approached the edge of that trench.”

One key issue moving forward, then, is making the library a more attractive place for scholars and writers to be at when as researching remotely online becomes easier. “My sense is that we should let everyone who’s going to be here with us for an extended amount of time… make their presence known,” LeClerc said, brainstorming scenarios where visiting researchers could use social media tools to see who else in their field was also around, forming impromptu communities online or at the library itself. It’s not the one thing that will either make or break any library’s future, but his ideas do point towards the welcome opportunities for any large library to become not just a repository for knowledge but an engine for generating new knowledge, too.

photo: Jori Klein

5 May 2011 | uncategorized |