A race of aliens move so fast that ‘Earth seconds seem to them like years’ and humans ‘nothing but sculptures of immobile meat.’ By analogy, we must see trees in ‘tree time’ to understand them not as static, but as active, moving and purposeful beings, and the energy and vibrancy of Powers’s language does just this: a chestnut ‘spirals’ into the sky trees in a forest ‘fight for scraps of light’ the roots of Douglas firs ‘run into each other underground.’ And Powers doesn’t only give us poetic description, but poetic science. The novel’s computer genius (whose pioneering games act as analogies for so much else: codes branch a bestselling game involves the competitive extraction of value from a virtual Earth) remembers a snippet of sci-fi. There’s a running theme about time and the relativity of time here. These descriptions are not static, either, but full of dynamic life.
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