Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. Read full biography of Richard Powers →
We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.
I really like science because it seems to be that place where you get the big picture, everything connects.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and... →
A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of... →
Reading is the last act of secular prayer.
My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.
I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the... →
All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.
We build our technologies as a way of addressing all our anxieties and desires. They are our passions congealed into these prosthetic extensions of... →
I like to travel and connect.
The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has... →
I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big.
Richard Powers (born June 18, 1957) is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.