Sublime

And then people will do what four billion years have shaped them to do: stop and see just what it is they’re seeing.

There’s a thing in programming called branching. And that’s what Neelay Mehta does. He will reincarnate himself, live again as people of all races, genders, colors, and creeds. He’ll

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

That’s the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be. Some days it feels like he and the rest of the Valley of Heart’s Delight didn’t invent online life, but just cut a clearing into it.

He’d be nothing. He wouldn’t even be 571. The real authorities could turn him into anything at all.

The achievement of The Overstory is to make these revelations meaningful at human scale, building the connections between us and the trees around us. Powers uses the scale of arboreal life – its extent in time, as well as its size – to tell a new kind of epic story: multi-generational, planetary-scale and ecological, in the sense of deeply

They’ll do what the genes of their ancestors shaped them to do, what all their forebears have ever done themselves. They’ll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they’ll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.

The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant.