Neelay and the Seeds of Genius
I’ve marveled before at the parallels Powers draws between nature and the expansion of technology in the vast, sweeping narrative of The Overstory.
Tree metaphors are there from the beginning of Neelay Mehta’s story. Growing up in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, his engineer father has fascinated him with two years’ worth of stories about his adventures working “at a firm rewriting the world.”
Neelay is seven the night he brings home a computer kit and presents it as a project they can build together.
While over the moon with excitement, Neelay is unimpressed at his first sight of a microprocessor. He is dubious at his father’s promise that “Someday, it may hold all the plans we have.”
“This little thing?”
Assured that it is true,
“His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees.” (Richard Powers)
