Richard Powers

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

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BY ELIJAH WOLFSON
SEPTEMBER 23, 2021 7:00 AM EDT

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.

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?

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

 

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola

OCTOBER 15, 2020 7:54 AM EDT

In 1954, the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, uniquely synthesizing the Yoruba culture he was born into with that of the British and Christian colonialism under which he matured into adulthood. The book, Tutuola’s second, tells the story of a west African child who is forced for 24 years to navigate an incomprehensible wilderness filled with fantastical beings, most of whom are, as the title suggests, some form of ghost. It’s a striking work of syncretism, recontextualizing previously unrecorded west African mythology by imbuing it with symbols of what was at the time a new global modernity. Consider, for example, one of the key figures of the novel: the “television-handed ghostess,” who convinces the narrator to follow the sorcerers’ advice and lick his open wound—by opening her hands and revealing TV screens on her palms showing footage of the narrator’s family and home village. Tutuola would go on to inspire Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and superproducer Brian Eno to record a 1981 album by the same title as this book; it’s a testament to his impact, as arguably the first international artist to form a new language by sampling the folk traditions of the global south and the modern imagery of the industrialized West.

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / The Palma-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

 

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

OCTOBER 15, 2020 7:54 AM EDT

I

n 1950, Amos Tutuola, a 30-year-old Nigerian, read a magazine and decided he could write too. He drafted what would become The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and sent it as a response to a “manuscripts wanted” ad put out by Lutheran World Press, a Christian publisher. A year later, Faber & Faber, one of the preeminent publishers of English literature, sent him a letter inquiring about publishing it. Soon after, it appeared in print across the U.K. and the U.S. At the time, it was unlike anything English-language readers had ever seen; even today, it’s bracingly original in its voice and ideas. The story’s protagonist and narrator is an alcoholic with God-like thirst and resilience: He drinks 225 kegs of palm wine a day, and that is all he does. The inciting incident of the novel is that his “tapster” dies, and there is no longer anyone to get him all the palm wine he desires. So, the narrator sets off to seek the Deads’ Town, where he believes he can find his tapster, now in his post-life form, and bring him back to his village so he can return to his life of drinking transcendent amounts of booze. Along the way is a sort of picaresque of the grotesque, where the narrator encounters monsters, (mostly malicious) magical beings and all sorts of incarnations of death and destruction. Tutuola, writing at a moment when the Yoruba culture he was born into was colliding with that of British Colonialism and Christian proselytism, weaves in aspects of the new West African modernity with Yoruba myth and oral storytelling so seamlessly you could blink and miss it. And the language, too, feels unique to the moment: Tutuola uses the Colonial British he learned in Anglican school to create a more propulsive and energetic version of English to tell the stories of Western Africa. 

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME

The 100 best fantasy books of all time / The Arabian Nights

 

The Arabian Nights

Nearly everyone is familiar with this collection of folktales, also known as One Thousand and One Nights, and its infamous framing device: Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, is set to be married and then killed by the king; she forestalls this destiny by convincing the king to hear a story, which she then draws out for 1,001 nights by ending each evening on a cliffhanger. (In other words, Scheherazade invented narrative television.) It’s hard to ignore that, from the start, this book of short stories is deeply misogynistic; the problematic gender dynamics of its time are pervasive and often stomach churning. And it’s rife with racism toward dark-skinned Africans and casual discrimination of Jews. It’s also impossible to ignore the tremendous influence on storytelling these tales have had, far beyond the Islamic Golden Age in which they were initially compiled—the earliest known printed page dates back to the 9th century. There are stories within stories (within stories, sometimes); there are unreliable narrators; there is foreshadowing; there are plot twists. There are tales of horror, crime, sci-fi and, of course, fantasy. (There is not, as pop culture has led us to believe, a tale of Aladdin, nor of Ali Baba and the thieves.) Without The Arabian Nights—and its genies, sea monsters, automata with life breathed into them, demons commingling with humans and more—it’s hard to imagine certain elements of works by H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, Jorge Louis Borges, A.S. Byatt, Edgar Allan Poe and the entire comic book industry, just to name a few. While there have been many editions and translations of The Arabian Nights, Mushin Mahdi’s 1984 Arabic-language edition and Husain Haddawy’s corresponding 1990 English translation are among the most celebrated. 

—Elijah Wolfson

TIME