Richard Powers on His Latest Book, Bewilderment —And Why Children Are the Ones to Call Out Climate Change Evasion

Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory, which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, followed decades of the MacArthur Fellow’s work investigating the intersections of culture, the environment, science and technology. His most recent book, Bewilderment, released Tuesday, again delves into the impact of science on human life. Bewilderment by Richard Powers In Bewilderment, something of a contemporary take on the Flowers for Algernon story, Powers writes of a neurodivergent, middle-school-aged child named Robin who undergoes an experiment involving decoded neurofeedback (a cutting-edge neuroscience technique in real life). The experiment improves Robin’s emotional quotient—at least at first. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Powers spoke to TIME ahead of the book’s release. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. TIME: Bewilderment clearly has a lot to say about current and ongoing events. Was it your intention to have readers not just get swept away in a narrative but to force them to consider the real world moment? Richard Powers: I was thinking a little bit along the lines of the form that science fiction writers like to call the “near-term future,” where the story treats a world that’s a lot like ours, but set in some undesignated time in the future, in a way that allows the writer to speculate about the potential of the present to unfold in different ways. I guess it’s what Br...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Books climate change Source Type: news