The Gold Coast
Books | Fiction / Alternative History
Kim Stanley Robinson
“Bold, manic, wonderful,” this dystopian sci-fi thriller imagines ecological collapse in an alternative future California (Los Angeles Times). 2027: Southern California is a developer’s dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent in to the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals. “Owes more to 1984 and A Clockwork Orange than to the usual SF scenario. . . . Robinson offers a stark cautionary tale with a glimmer of hope at the end.” —Publishers Weekly “A rich, brave book . . . It celebrates, with an earned and elated refusal of despair, the persistent, joyful survival of human persons in the interstices of the American juggernaut.” —Washington Post
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More Details:
Author
Kim Stanley Robinson
Pages
400
Publisher
Macmillan + ORM
Published Date
2013-12-31
ISBN
1466861339 9781466861336
Community ReviewsSee all
"This book was written in the 1980’s and it kind of shows… This is the second book in Robinson’s California Triptych but it takes place 20 years earlier and in an alternate timeline (maybe?). In this book the cold war is still happening, and we see an Orange Country that is thriving because of its abundance aerospace and military industrial corporations. Capitalism has won the battle and giant malls run the area. The housing crisis is bad, so most people live in duplexes or apartments, and houses seem to be relics of the past. Drugs seem to be more socially acceptable and now come in the form of eye drops. You can change your mood, change your reality, or just have a good time with just a few small drops in your eye. Cars drive themselves on magnetic tracks and jobs are hard to come by. It’s the vapidness of the 80’s on steroids. The book follows Jim and his friends as they try to find their place in a world that seems on the brink of catastrophe. This book can be read as a standalone, you do not have to have read The Wild Shore. The triptych is just 3 different visions for California’s possible future."
Nicole Falche
