It’s the story of immense, long-lived creatures whom many people think of as little more than simple automatons, but who, in fact, communicate and synchronize with each other both over the air and through complex underground networks, who trade with and protect and sustain their own and other species. The Overstory may present an even greater challenge to the sense of exceptionalism we humans carry around inside us. But it was also a story of forgotten kinship with creatures who have stunning navigational and problem-solving skills, who keep a complex and shared calendar, who gather in great communities and dance together and mate for life and sacrifice themselves for their young. The Echo Maker dealt in the strange intelligence of birds, an intelligence deep and foreign enough to be invisible to many of us. RICHARD POWERS: If anything, the intervening dozen years have deepened my desire to close the gap between people and other living things. How was this relationship evolving as you began to imagine The Overstory, and how did it matter - or not - that the interspecies tie is not just to other animals, but to trees? RICHARD POWERS, National Book Award–winning author of The Overstory (Norton, April 3, 2018) and 11 previous novels, talks with Everett Hamner, a scholar of literature and science who has written about Powers’s fiction.ĮVERETT HAMNER: One of my favorite aspects of your National Book Award–winning The Echo Maker, published a dozen years ago now, is the way its birds are not anthropomorphized so much as its human characters are zoomorphized: we find the public “banking and wheeling in such perfect synchrony,” a man who has “grown as placid as a bottom feeder,” and another dancing like a “clumsy, autumn-honking fledgling.” In short, there is no humanism here without an even larger biocentrism.
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