I’ve often read fiction as mental floss. It cleans my brain out. If you’re a software person, I view it as garbage collection for my brain.

Now that I’m writing fiction, I’m reading even more fiction. I’m also exploring different writing styles and letting each book roll around in my brain’s background processes, where I hope it’s working to improve my writing skills.

Around one in the morning New Zealand time, I finished Richard Powers’ Playground.

Powers is a fantastic writer. His character development, using both inside and outside voices, is incredible. He builds each character through multiple approaches: what they say and do, how they interact with other characters, and what’s going on in their heads. While they are interlinked, he gives each of them their own space to develop and evolve.

Playground follows four people whose lives end up connected to Makatea, a tiny island in French Polynesia: Todd Keane, a tech billionaire who built a social network called Playground; Rafi Young, his high school friend and rival; Ina Aroita, an artist who grew up on naval bases across the South Pacific; and Evelyne Beaulieu, a marine biologist who has spent most of her life underwater.

This morning, I woke up thinking about Rafi, who was the moral clarity and the beating heart of the story. I settled into his later arc, which has subtle parallels to some things I’m exploring at this stage of my life.

The ocean descriptions, especially through Evelyne’s eyes, were delicious. At some point last night, as I was finishing the book, I slowed down and just relished them. I have almost none of this type of description in Zero Knowledge, and I realize I could do a lot more in the book around the magnificence of the Colorado mountains.

Last night, while Todd was dying on the page, Jensen Huang’s resignation as CEO was unfolding at Nvidia. This morning, Amy shared a Bloomberg episode of The Circuit with Emily Chang built around four days Chang spent traveling across Europe with Huang in October, a few weeks before any of this came out.

Early in the episode, the line “Nvidia is Jensen and Jensen is Nvidia” appears. When Chang asks Huang what would make the trip a success, he says:

I don’t have a roadmap. I don’t have a plan. I’m not trying to get anywhere. There’s no completion. I’m kind of one of those people that the journey, the journey is the destination.

At the end, she asks whether his daughter is in line to be his successor. He says he hopes the next CEO is already at the company, and then:

20 years from now, I hope I stay healthy and I hope I continue to earn my keep.

Bloomberg closes the episode with this:

The recent allegations show just how tenuous it is to pin the hope and future of an industry on one person.

Todd built Playground into a tech giant, and Playground was Todd. Powers has him spend the book dying of Lewy body dementia, describing the arc of his life and the evolution of himself, his relationships, and his company. It ends with the ultimate destruction of some of it, along with Todd himself.

I kept waiting for Todd to be an AI. Maybe he was.