Destruction and Creation

The novel uses Todd Keane’s and Evie Beaulieu’s contrasting storylines to explore the ways in which creation leads to destruction and destruction leads to creation.

In Todd’s portions of the novel, Todd devotes his life to computer science and programming. Throughout most of his adulthood, he finds vocational success and personal fulfillment from creating his Playground forum. The program and Todd’s related work in Silicon Valley allow him “to rewrite the code of life and create unthinkable new living things” (372, Powers’s italics). Although Todd's work consists of acts of creation and progression, it also effectively endangers vulnerable social groups and fragile ecosystems. By the novel’s end he has realized the ways in which “Every mechanical algorithm has vanished in compassion and empathy” and has allowed “the strong [to] grow omnipotent” and all “fables and fantasies [to] be brought...