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During a weekend visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, he saw a 1914 photograph of farm children in Germany and began to think about the birth of the machine age. Inspired by the figures in the photograph, he quit programming and began writing his first book in 1985:Three Farmers Going to DanceHe was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the first in a river of accolades, including a MacArthur “genius” grant and a National Book Award.
For much of his career, Powers has used fiction to explore humanity’s relationship to technology and how our creativity and ingenuity define and trap us. He has been labeled “our most outstanding novelist of ideas,” “our greatest living novelist,” and “The best novelist you’ve never heard of“In his books”Golden Bug Variations”“Galatea 2.2”“Riding the Darkness” and “orpheusHe has certainly written about molecular DNA, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gene editing, but more importantly, he seemed to question what makes us human and how transformative these qualities are.
In retrospect, Powers feels that all of his novels are built towards “The Overstory,” which he was inspired to write after seeing a redwood while hiking in Northern California. “When you’re standing in front of a creature as wide as a house and as tall as a football field and almost two thousand years old and it’s still working according to plan,” he said, “you’re starting to say, I just missed something obvious here.”
Before writing the novel, he said he “couldn’t distinguish between poplar and maple,” but he had read more than 120 books on trees and learned to identify dozens of species. After its publication and enthusiastic reception, Powers came to be seen not only as a literary star, but also as a soft-spoken eco-warrior and environmental prophet.
“For the first time in non-children’s literature, I could think of a tree, a character in the deepest and most complete sense,” said the environmentalist and author. Bill McKibben. “It is very rare that something we normally think of as inanimate can be brought to life in such a magnificent way.”
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