Customer Reviews

The Gold Coast

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

To judge from some of the other reviews of this book, many read The Gold Coast expecting more of Robinson's excellent adventure-SF, like the magnificent Mars Trilogy or Antarctica. Those expectations are understandable but do this great book a disservice.

The setting is Orange County in the middle of the 21st Century, with the USSR and the Cold War alive and well. Orange County has largely disappeared into a maze of highways and strip malls. The protagonist, Jim, is a twenty-something still dependent on his parents, who dabbles in Zen, post-modern poetry, works at an insurance agency and teaches night classes at a local community college. He cannot concentrate on anything for too long and tends to see other people as characters in a novel who come and go at random: when Jim's dad taught him about engine mechanics, Jim is interested and sees how the thermodynamics involved can be a metaphor for society, but then he promptly forgets it. When he visits his uncle Tom in a massive retirement home, he is fascinated by the lonely old man's storys of how Orange County used to be and resolves to spend more time with him, but as soon as the visit ends, he gets the heeby-jeebies about the retirement complex and ignores his uncle until he's obligated to visit again. He is in a relationship showing signs of becoming serious, but betrays his girlfriend for a random hook-up with a girl at a party. When Jim's friends tell him that his ex's heart was broken by the betray, he is surprised and rather indifferent.

Eventually Jim realizes how hollow he is and his first attempt to find meaning is to get involved with some saboteurs trying to end America's huge military-industrial complex. Eventually, we see him grow up and develop a mature relationship with an art teacher, and even become reconciled with his parents. He also finds his voice as a history writer who seeks to find out what Orange County used to be like, and how it came to be a suburban nightmare.

Jim is the main character, but Robinson also looks at Jim's parents, friends, and intersperses the fiction with prose meditations on the stages of Orange County's history. The result is a rich journey to a world that is hauntingly like our own. For instance, nobody has a boyfriend or girlfriend, they have "allies", much like the modern term "partner", and while the Cold War may be dead in our world, Robinson does a good job of making our consumer culture take a look in the mirror.

Many people talked about "American Beauty"'s indictment of American suburbia, but ten years before that movie came out, Robinson created a much better examination of suburban culture, without the blatant polemics of American Beauty.

It's different from much of Robinson's other work, but it still has his unique style and is well worth your time.

This book continues KSR's musings on one of his favorite places, Orange County, California. The main protagonist, Jim, is a twenty- or thirty-something in search of a cause. In fact he's a bit of a Gen-Xer. The setting of an OC thoroughly covered in concrete and highway forces Jim to search for deeper meaning, which he does via reading history, digging up parking lots, writing poetry, and "lidding" psychotropic drugs with his pals. Oh yeah, he also plays around with various women, none of them really compelling his (or our) interest. In short, he's a rather self-centered idealist (?) who gets so caught up in his own world, he cares less than he should about his family and friends. Not an uncommon phenomenon, particularly among Gen-Xers, one might claim.

In any case, the plot thickens as Jim gets involved in the underworld of anti-military-industrial complex sabotage. We realize some personal cataclysm's inevitable, as Jim's own father develops high-precision munitions a la the Strategic Defense Initiative (the book was written in the 1980s). We follow Jim, his dad, and Jim's pals as they work, play, and blow up various weapons plants. The plot ends with something of an epiphany for Jim - a rather postmodern one. Postmodern, because it leaves that empty, "existential" or "what does it all mean" feeling in the reader that people who chronically wear black, smoke cigarettes, and inhabit coffeehouses so like to affect. We hope that Jim makes a turn for the better.

Be that as it may, there are more than a few telling passages that leave their impression. KSR has developed the skill of capturing the moment - and the observer's reflections thereon - beyond the level of most modern writers. Those individual versus the world (or individual-in-the-world) moments are rather "existential" in the original, phenomenological sense of the word (not the coffeehouse sense), and are KSR's real contribution to fiction. A case in point is when one of Jim's friends, a surfer, undertakes his sport at nighttime. You'll have to read the passage for yourself to believe how incredibly well it distills the narrator's experience.

I admit to some disappointment after the great expectations raised by the previous volume in the trilogy, The Wild Shore. In sum, Gold Coast is strong work compared to most sci-fi, but weak for KSR.

This book does not have any big bangs or soaring flights of imagination, instead it is a very straight forward linear extrapolation of trends present in the mid-eighties involving the military-industrial complex and the urbanization of America. Both trends have had some deviations from that straight line in the years since this was written, but that does not invalidate the main focus of this book, that of not only how an individual can make a difference in the world around him, but why he should try to make that difference.

Jim, the prime protagonist, is a much conflicted individual, who really has not found out what he really believes is right or what he should do with his life. Involved in a seemingly endless round of parties with his friends, having no serious commitment to his lady friend, holding two desultory part-time jobs that he has no enthusiasm for, considering himself to be a writer with a strong interest in the history of Orange County but without any finished product he thinks is good, and still partially dependent on his parents for support, he is a prime target for suggestion and peer pressure to define his actions. When one of his friends suggests that he should actually do something to change the domination of the country by the military-industrial complex, he jumps at the chance, and soon finds himself involved in industrial sabotage. His father, in the meantime, is also fighting the same war, but from a completely different perspective of an engineer actively employed by that same complex, trying to find a technical solution to the MAD arms-race.

Along the way to Jim finding his own resolution to his life, we are treated to historical snapshots of Orange County from its very early settling by native Americans to the coming of the Spanish, to its flowering as an agricultural paradise, to its great industrial expansion during and after World War II, and finally to the condition depicted at the time of this book, as an almost totally asphalt covered warren of apartments, malls, offices, and neon lighting that has forgotten its historical and ecological heritage. These sections, viewed separately from the rest of the book, form something of an extended prose poem, with a very heavy 'back-to-nature' message, that intertwine with Jim's search for meaning in his life, and provide a strong under-current to the novel's action.

The opening of this book is very rough, with too many characters introduced too briefly, with trivial and sometimes outdated dialogue, and without any apparent clear focus or direction. It is not till almost halfway through the book that it settles down and starts showing depth and direction. From this point on, the novel becomes much better, as the reader becomes interested in the characters and moral dilemma's they and their world face.

This is not KSR's best novel. The book wanders for too long before finding its legs, and the ecological sub-theme is sometimes too strident, the bashing of capitalism inadequately supported. But it has something to say about both our current industrial society and about the everyday individual's place in that society, about making a difference, about having commitments and moral integrity, about both the 'how' and the 'why' a life should be lived.

I'm not sure I've appreciated the full meaning of the California trilogy - I can't help but feel I'm missing something deep. Nonetheless the series is highly enjoyable. KSR has a magnificent ability to convincingly portray near future scenarios. The Gold Coast is brash and packed with technology and science, yet manages to be sensitive and politically aware. I think I prefer Pacific Edge but this is definitely better than The Wild Shore.

I've read most of KSR's books and I've got to say that I think Gold Coast is the best yet. A magnificently written piece with an honest and believable main character. A SF masterpiece, Robinson knows his stuff but doesn't waste space showing off his knowledge, choosing instead to add information subtlely and cleverly.

A must read for any SF fan, or anyone who wants to read a great novel.

Not his best work, lacking in conflict and suspense, but KSR rarely resorts to the typical SF plot structures or action scenes. This is a fairly successful attempt at literate SF. Enjoyed this more than Pac Edge, less than Red or Green Mars...

The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych)

This is my least favorite of the three books. In this story the characters, who match up with similar characters in the other two books, seem to be pretty useless since they spend their time partying and doing customized drugs of the day. This book was hard to get into and I never really got to know or like any character. The main character spirals out of control and the book never really goes anywhere. All three books are unsatisfactory but this one more so. This author has other books that I like much better.

In each of the three books the individual concept sounds like a good story line. But it's like the author just wants to experiment with placing the same characters in different settings. So each concept seems like back ground for that process. If there was a message about society, in it's variations or anything else, I missed it.

This novel is far less well written than Robinson's much more recent novel, Forty Degrees of Rain, a cautionary tale about the climate crisis. I think it could have benefitted from cutting out about a third of it. There are too many boring discussions among the bored, drugged characters, for example, a silly discussion about which is better: a Big Mac, Whopper, or Jumbo Jack. Some of the dialogue is just too trite and silly. There is very little suspense, and I have to disagree with the commercial review above: this novel has none of the menacing atmosphere of a 1984 or that kind of dystopia. Indeed, it feels more like the 80s or 90s, with a few added things like strange new drugs delivered via eye droppers, and "alliances" instead of marriages or partnerships. Somehow Robinson was too rambling in his plotting here, and even his theme gets lost amid all the disjointed events. I hope the other novels in this series are better than this one. Normally I like dystopian fiction, because I like the critique of society that genre permits. But this one is deeply flawed. Also, the chapters from the POV of Jim's father, the military industrial complex worker, are kind of boring, unless one is into the technicalities of defense contracting and weapons design. He should have whittled some of these scenes way down, conveyed more through summary.

The premise of this novel is an interesting one: in the near future, in an overdeveloped Orange County, California, a dissatisfied poet becomes involved with industrial terrorists bent on subverting the war and weapons industry, in which his father is employed. But the writing is stilted and disjointed and interrupted at odd points by rather nonsensical poems. And Robinson's vision of the future doesn't ring true either. Even writing at the end of the 1980s and able to foresee sprawl run amuck and auto-piloted cars on unending freeways, he still completely overlooks the importance of the Internet or digital information in future society. The presence of videotapes and CDs in Robinson's 2027 now makes the novel seem hopelessly dated.

Southern California sex, designer drugs, malls, and corruption are all here, but the eerie part of KSR's dystopian vision goes beyond materialism. In this novel, the US is engaged in several simultaneous small wars around the globe and gags the media to keep images of American casualties from the public eye.

The military-industrial complex is unassailable, openly controlling the US economy, which has become completely dependent on warfare. Nevertheless, some rebels plan a guerrilla strike against a warbucks company. The climax of their sabotage effort involves a skillful plot twist that reinforces the author's critique of corporate greed.

The technological gadgetry (e.g., cars driven by computer, which keeps accidents low in light of all the recreational drugs) hardly qualifies this as science fiction, but the book is after all a vision of the future. The protagonist's scattered, other-directed quest for meaning, embedded in a culture that is almost as purposeless as Huxley's Brave New World, complements the strong notes of hope that the author sings in the other two novels of this series.

The passages about Orange County history are not distracting, but they foreshadow the poorly executed "author's diary" that KSR indulges in throughout the third novel of the series. Also, sad to say, the personality named Tom is virtually insignificant in this book, languishing in an old age home and doing little more than recount "dreams" that are actually references to the eponymous characters in the first and third novels.