Plant Life and Richard Powers' The Overstory

The paper looks at the contribution of Richard Powers as a novelist who blends genres and disciplines with the consummate ease of an artist combining various colours and shades to lend magical touches to landscapes. An abiding strength and theme running through Power's novels is the delicate mixing and inter-mixing of disciplines and the inevitable overlapping of science with arts, imagination with scientific temperament and artificial intelligence with natural. In one of his novels, he lends his surreal touch by combining the natural sciences with environmentalism and the bigger issues of our time--racism, sexism, gender disparity, discrimination against women in scientific establishments, etc. and shows himself as another Rachel Carson, whose spring of ideas is not silent this time. Keywords: Richard Powers, The Overstory, fiction, plant life, eco criticism, ecology, science