Customer Reviews

Pacific Edge

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is fantastic--I'm amazed that no one has reviewed it. The setting is Southern California in a future following an ecological collapse. Some will find it utopian, others will be disappointed to find no galactic empires, but everyone should enjoy this extremely well-written story and its finely-wrought, believable characters. Robinson debates technowhizzery versus the New Age, and finds no easy answers--indeed, the issue is still up for grabs at the end--but this is SF at its best, thought-provoking and intense. Still rates #2 on my all-time list, and I've read a ton of SF.

This book is not action-packed and it's not really what I consider science fiction. All that makes it futuristic is that it's set a few decades into the future. If you're looking for high-tech or hard sci-fi, look elsewhere. However, if you want to read a pleasant story about the lives and loves of a small, mid-twenty-first century liberal community in southern California rendered in simple, clear prose that even achieves a certain degree of lyricism at times, then give this a try. You may end up loving it, as I did. Liberals probably more than conservatives will enjoy this book because the good guys are liberal while the one bad guy, if the story can be said to have a bad guy, is a republican-type who lets his greed get the better of him at the expense of the community. But nobody in the story is really all that bad (or completely perfect either); they're just basically decent people trying to do their best given their character flaws. The town, while not exactly a shangri-la, is a pleasant, healthy place to live. I really grew to like this community and its simple, back-to-basics (but without being primitive) way of living. In a sense, reading this book is therapeutic; there's nothing morbid here, but lots that is beautiful and uncomplicated, even spiritually uplifting (God is not banned from this liberal community). I found the plot compelling. It kept me turning the pages. The characters were mostly likable, some even adorable. When I finished this book, I got the sense of having visited a place in which I would like to live. Instead of giving a doom-day scenario of the future, the book allows the reader to imagine a future that, while not perfect, is still better than the past. If you are a parent looking to find a book to share with your young adult, this book is good because it works for both adults and kids (over fourteen, I'd say). Notwithstanding the somewhat melancholy ending, this novel is a very pleasant, light-hearted read. If innocence is not your thing, you may not like this book. But I am usually into much darker stuff and I nonetheless found this book to be like a ray of light shining through a cloudy sky.

I enjoyed the first 2 of KSR's "Three Californias," but this one was disappointing (see my reviews). It is simply not as morally or aesthetically compelling as his other books. The plot drags its anemic self through predictable interludes, leaving the reader surprised at the missed possibilities. The characters, even the lead, come off as rather cardboard-thin.

In fact, it becomes apparent that KSR has more or less a set of stock characters: the athletic idealist who's rather dumb (Kevin = John Boone from the Mars set); a dark scheming male who's Kevin's romantic rival (Alfredo = Chalmers); a sexy Ramona both men fight for, and who uses both ( = Maya), et al.: Doris is the Russian woman from the Mars books, and Oscar is equivalent to the big guy who shows up in Green Mars (I forget his name at the moment - is it Arthur?).

Not only are characters repeated but so are settings. Spas seem of great interest in all 3 Mars and all 3 California books. So are socio-economic-idealistic battles involving the environment + sports + romantic struggles. All very interesting the first time, but rather tiresome by the nth iteration.

One nice point was Tom Barnard's appearance in all 3 books. I liked how this theme character set off colorful motifs in this California "triptych," as KSR terms it. It's interesting to see how KSR puts Tom in relation to the global events of each book: (1) post-apocalyptic storyteller, (2) drowning in the nursing home as a forgotten inmate of suburbia, or (3) the depressed-but-then-revived old attorney who sails off into the wild blue of utopia.

Another point: "Pacific Edge" as a utopia - does it work? I can't speak to this question, since this is the first utopia I've read (not counting Plato's Republic or Critias (?)). I haven't read St. Thomas More's "Utopia," which KSR seems to take as a prime reference. All the same, KSR's points is likely that utopia is actually nowhere in the original sense of the Greek word. The setting's idyllic, but the undercurrents are not. People get hurt, get sad, die, lose. Seen as an experiment or hypothesis rather than as a finished statement, then, "Pacific Edge" does the job.

I haven't read this book for several years, but it popped up on a search and when I saw the low rating I felt compelled to comment. Kim Stanely Robinson is one of the best sci-fi writers working today; in fact, I find him one of the most intelligent and talented writers in any genre. Scenes from these books (originally published separately) come into my mind frequently. The people living in storage containers. The "perfect fast food meal." The last book was somewhat utopian, very mellow and uplifting. I highly recommend this book.

This book is part of Robinson's 'Three Californias" triptych about alternate futures seen from the perspective of Orange County, California. Gold Coast is a dystopia, The Wild Shore is post-apocalyptic, and this book completes the thematic triangle as a utopia. Here we find a future that is a melding of socialism, capitalism, democracy, and strong ecological concerns. Personal income and business sizes have strict upper limits, everyone is required to devote some of their labor hours to community projects (usually involving some form of ecological cleanup), most people live as part of communal co-operatives, but at the same time people are free to chose their own jobs, live where they wish, have a voice in community affairs, and can say what they want.

Like most utopias, there are a few flies in the ointment, and it is around these that the story line is based. Here we find Alfredo, the town mayor, scheming a way to go beyond the personal income limit, and the company he is associated with has become involved in shady deals to try and sidestep the limits on company size. The object of the scheming is an undeveloped hill commanding a great aesthetic view of the town and valley it sits in, and the book starts with an attempt to rezone the hill for commercial development. The book's protagonist, Kevin, something of an idealist and nature lover, not terribly politically astute but stubborn, stalls the attempt, but the battle is joined. As counterpoint to the political battle, Kevin becomes romantically involved with Alfredo's long-time lover Ramona, who has just split up with Alfredo.

Unfortunately, these story threads are only mildly interesting. There is little work done to explore either the pluses or minuses of the envisioned society, Kevin's personal problems are not strong enough, do not have enough angst, to make the reader become terribly involved in them, the basic object of the battle, the hill, does not seem deserving of all the energy devoted to it. This seems to be a typical problem with utopian novels - at their heart, utopias are necessarily dull, not having any strong points of contention on which to base a story. All of the actions of this book seem somewhat inconsequential, the object of contention is really a molehill, not a mountain.

The prose style is easy, the main characters are reasonably well developed, the plot line is coherent. But this is at best an average book, not nearly as good as The Wild Shore.

In all aspects of this book, I fell in love.

The descriptions of Ramona, the town beauty, left me longing for her. The realtionship between Ramona and Kevin sent my heart afluttering. I found Kevin to be as human as a character could be, hence his likablity and conveyance of the situations. Kevin is a very well-rounded and developed character whose eyes are suitable for the window into this world.

When the plot thickens, the characters thicken, as well. The reading is fluid and enjoyable. The ending seems a fitting end to all things brought to the forefront in the book. It left me smiling as I finished the last page and closed the book and set it upon my bookshelf.

The theme of community that was touched on early in the first novel is fully developed here -- socially, economically, historically, politically, and even romantically. The story is primarily about a threat to the utopia of worker-owned businesses (a middle way between capitalism and socialism) and secondarily about two romances: the love triangle involving the protagonist, and the affair between two old people (which KSR dares to portray as passionate).

Considering that this book was written pre-internet (its original edition is dated 1990, a couple years BEFORE the Mars Trilogy was published), the two-way TV link-ups for global communication seem prescient. There are few other technical innovations, and the story really qualifies as speculative fiction rather than SF.

The character "played" by the personality named Tom comes into full bloom here as a global hero who was a significant force in establishing the utopia. I think KSR's greatest contribution to the utopia genre is his pointed question "How does a utopia come about?" I don't recall any other author addressing this issue in sufficient (let alone convincing) detail -- futuristic utopias appear out of nowhere as the story begins, without a good explanation of how we got (or can get) from here to there.

Unfortunately, KSR indulges in a kind of "author's diary" that opens each chapter with an entry full of his own ruminations. He should have spent less effort on it and more on developing the sketchy background story about how Tom et al transformed the kind of society epitomized by late 20th century US into the community-oriented utopia of the novel. But at least KSR gave it a try. The unsatisfactory fence-straddling ending keeps me from giving this book 5 stars. Even so, it's the best of the three.

Though I enjoyed this book, you must push through some slow parts, and at times the main character became annoying. Yet there's some excellent writing here, and you can see very clearly here how the ideas and style lead to Red Mars. Bottom line, if you've enjoyed his Mars books and are willing to read something more mainstream than SF, give it a go.

In this, the third of Robinson's "Three Californias" trilogy, we get a very personal story of love and life in the idyllic ecotopia of El Modena, a small California town where water is a treasured resource, the abandoned cities are being broken up for scrap, and economic development is carefully controlled by the democratically elected local government. The protagonist is Kevin, a likable conservation-minded young man who builds multi-family homes with an outdoorsy feel and complete with interior gardens. His rival for the attentions of the beautiful and athletic Ramona is Alfredo, who lusts for power and the glory of accomplishment. The love triangle between Kevin, Alfredo and Ramona takes center stage, paralleling the two men's conflicting designs on their magnificent natural resource.

The three novels in the series are completely independent of each other, and in fact exist in alternative timelines, so there's no reason to read them in any particular order. The idea is to show the various possibilities latent in California's present, but if one didn't know better, one could have read all three books and not realized they were connected. In this installment, Tom, the only character who appears in all three books, is a lonely elder statesman who enjoys a late-blooming romance with a traveling scientist, but he doesn't really have much purpose here.

The angst-ridden conclusion causes one to question the author's state of mind. While certainly realistic enough, there seems little real point to it. Perhaps Robinson felt it necessary to remind us that even in a utopia, the basic problems of love and death will still plague mankind. Unfortunately, this ending undercuts the pleasure one might have derived from reading the book, and given that it's pretty lightweight to begin with, this is a crucial failing. There's very little science fiction in this book, and not much philosphy (for a utopia novel) so the melancholy conclusion leaves this third of the triptych with nothing to especially recommend it.

I'm dumbfounded at all these bad reviews. I've read this book several times, as it touches me pretty deeply every time. It seems the main complaint is about anemic story lines. I personally don't agree, but think the book is fascinating for its search for utopia. Even though all these characters are searching for different things, and no one is completely happy with the current status, the very act of working towards creating their idea of utopia is utopic. "Dynamism" is a term used in the book to describe that effort to improve things. Dynamism is the utopia. It's the possibility of creating utopia (through dynamism) out of less-than-ideal situations that helps the book manage to be hopeful even in the face of some not-so-good things happening.

I've read The Wild Shore and was sorely disappointed after Pacific Edge. Seeing as all these reviewers liked the other two so much more, I don't think I'd dig the other one.