The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 March 1998
by Kim Stanley Robinson
In this novel Robinson describes the Orange County of 2027 as buried beneath the corporate fantasies of real estate agents and freeway builders. It is a dark future, but described with a certain optimism. Unlike the utopian chapter of the trilogy, this book tells of a future that seems to this reader far more likely. Freeways, malls and endless condominium complexes carpet the landscape. Santa Ana is a double-decked city. The citizens are numbed and the young folk take designer drugs with eyedroppers. Jim McPherson is the son of a man who works for a defense contractor. Trying to break free of a cycle of boredom and burgers, Jim becomes a low-grade terrorist, attacking defense plants. Jim, though, is also interested in how Orange County ended up looking so devastated. There are bits of historical reference and dreamy nostalgia for an earlier California. The story is more believable than Pacific Edge, more entertaining, less contrived, though there are many similarities in the telling. Writing about the near future, though, is risky. Written in 1988, this book postulates a cold war that continues for the next fifty years. The Soviet Union still exists. And there is a reference to something that was only just beginning in 1988, the Worldwide Web.
Also by Robinson: [Pacific Edge] [The Wild Shore] [Antarctica] [The Blind Geometer]
[Other Books in or about California]
[Other Science-Fiction Reviews]