The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 November 1998
by Kim Stanley Robinson
This is the first in Robinson's Three Californias trilogy, the one which this reader read last, but also the strongest of the three. A bizarre pre-emptive nuclear attack has left the United States crippled. Now, three generations later, loosely assembled towns and villages live on the remnants of civilization, and build their own new communities. Down on the coast, in the hills of what was once Camp Pendleton, Hank Fletcher lives in a village of about sixty people. They farm and fish for survival, and are highly skeptical of stories told by those who lived in the "old time", before the holocaust. The US is, apparently, the only victim of the attack, and the rest of the world has now quarrantined the country. Some people want to rise up and fight the quarrantine, but the isolation is so thorough as to prevent any sort of large scale inter-town communication, commerce or industry. Robinson convincingly evokes the conflict between those who just want to survive and those who want to bring back American glory, placing that conflict in the mind of his protagonist, Fletcher. Some of the characters are strong and colorful, while many others are two-dimensional backdrops for the action. The book is upbeat and adventuresome, but it is also low-key, sticking to this little village of Onofre and its people.
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a trilogy of novels, each of which is centered around his home of Orange County, in California. Each proposes a separate future for the area, the most realistic prediction for which might be a combination of the visions in the last two books. The books suffer from one failing of prognostication. They already seem dated. The USSR figures in all three, and some technical advances predicted for eighty years down the line are already realities today. Robinson cannot be faulted for not forseeing the demise of the USSR, but the books seem a bit aged, nevertheless. As speculative fiction, they are well wrought works, though that speculation definitely takes a second place to lifestyle. Robinson concentrates on lifestyle in a way rarely encountered in speculative/sci-fi novels. He talks so much, in fact, about the day to day lives of his characters, that all three books drag quite a bit. Also, much of the life of his male protagonists feels, at times, like personal fantasy. Just a touch on the self-indulgent side. The idea, however, of setting three divergent futures in one well-known location remains an attractive one. Familiarity with the place makes the books enjoyable page-turners, despite their drawbacks. This reader imagines, however, that enjoyment is diminished for those who don't know much about the California coast.
Also by Robinson: [The Gold Coast] [Pacific Edge] [Antarctica] [The Blind Geometer]
[Other Books in or about California]
[Other Science-Fiction Reviews]