Richard Powers was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Overstory. I am just now getting around to reading it.
Neelay, a character in the novel who is a computer programmer and video game nerd, has a dream in which aliens come to earth in spaceships. The aliens are small and think so fast and move so fast that they can see humans only as immobile hunks of meat. Although they recognize humans as alive, they don’t recognize that they are able to communicate or in fact able to do anything at all. They butcher the humans and pack them into their spaceship lockers. Sound a bit like the way most humans think about trees?
Neelay is one of nine main characters in this novel, each of whom experiences some form of meaningful encounter with trees. Their stories begin with their childhoods and are told individually. At first the stories seem disconnected, but they come together when they join a radical conservationist group. At this point the plot reminds me of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Some of the characters seem a lot like people I’ve read about in the news, and I wondered at one point if I was reading fiction or not. Google confirmed that the characters are all fictitious but some of their deeds may be inspired by real people.
There are two reasons I think you will enjoy reading this book. First of all, I think most of you will recognize some part of yourselves in one or more of the main characters. We are all natural science nerds, and it is not often that you get to read about other such nerds, even if they are fictional. If you’re like me, you will find a character or two to identify with. The second reason you are going to enjoy the book is that there actually is a good bit of technical plant information, especially about trees. So, you will probably learn some science.
Some reviewers have criticized the book as a naïve attempt to change attitudes about the human relationship with the natural world. I don’t know if that was the author’s intention or not, but it was not the way I read the novel. I enjoyed the opportunity to think about trees and other parts of the natural world in a different way while reading a highly entertaining story.