Limitless Possibility in ‘The Overstory’
Neelay is a computer prodigy as a child and grows up to be a world-changing visionary. If you had asked me before I read this book how technology would be integrated into a book about trees I probably would have shrugged.
But Richard Powers creates an organic connection between the two worlds that I could not have predicted. The complexity of nature inspires Neelay to create worlds that aspire to the same intricacy, and millions of people immerse themselves in those worlds and long for more.
Neelay’s vision of a tree at a pivotal moment in his childhood:
“A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see.”
