The Gold Coast

Second volume of Robinson's California trilogy, and probably the least dystopian of the three. Less dystopian in that it is more similar to today's reality in its description of environmental destruction and the excessive power of the military in the development of industry. Jim, the protagonist, goes from total indifference to a gradual and deepening discomfort that leads him to become a kind of terrorist. However, when he realizes that nothing escapes power, and that even the terrorist movement is a function of it, he understands that only a profound personal maturation can, in the long run, change society.

I wish I had read this book 30 years ago, because it hasn't aged well. Not just in terms of the technology, which can be overlooked and easily forgiven, but the whole Cold War pre-9/11 worldview, which pervades the entire book and make what should be penetrating insights seem misguided and ridiculous.
Couple that with a whiny hedonistic wannabe intellectual main character, and it isn't terribly compelling. The still relevant anti-capitalist and anti-military-industrial-complex themes are explored better in some of KSR's other works, so unless you are particularly interested in Orange County CA, a completionist, or a huge fan, I would probably skip this one.

Part of Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy, The Gold Coast is an alternative view of life in the 21st century. The writing style is unique and was a little annoying and distracting at first. However, once I got used to it, I found myself totally engrossed in the story. Periodically dissected by poetry, the story is riveting and the book hard to put down. The themes of globalisation, corporatisation and conquest are explored thoroughly and well, and the sense that there is something missing from today's fast-paced society is expressed well. This is definitely worth reading.

Robinson gets a hundred plates spinning, and then knocks them all down. Our hero then cooks breakfast. The hundred plates are interesting enough. It's mostly drugs and weapons. Hmmm, when did the Iran-Contra thing emerge, Oliver North... hmm, North was indicted in 1989; this book was published in 1988. So I can't really blame Robinson for missing the connection. With or without an excuse, the drugs and the weapons don't really get connected here, not in any meaningful way. Yeah, corruption in federal contracts, sure. That might have been standard Reaganomics.

This could have been a better book. Lots of raw material, but it never gets pulled together at any deep level.

Kim is too good!! The greatest compliment I can give is that his writing is THOUGHTFUL! He writes for those who live, who pay attention to their environment, the details. He makes you ask more by showing how to come up with questions. He has the Steinbeck discipline of starting from the ground up, every time. In tight, efficient writing he nails science, nails politics, nails characters, nails sense of place. Just nails it. Why aren't kids required to read books like THIS in school???
I haven't read the 3rd California book but I'm sure that Gold Coast is the best. It's head and shoulders above the first one, which was charming for sure. Kim, please read this comment and let ME be the guy who writes your retrospective! I have deep precise show more observations and questions about every book by Robinson I've read, and I think there is a certain class of writer who writes to have the material recognized and understood. Anyway. Another Kim classic. show less

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The California trilogy might be KSR’s most autobiographical work – at least the setting is, as he moved to Orange County when he was 2. Stan was 34 when he wrote it, and it is very much a book about saying goodbye to late adolescence – the extended period of drugs, booze and parties, being twentysomething before settling down.

I’m not sure how much of an epicure KSR is or was, but Jim McPherson, the main character, is an idealist – something he shares with his inventor. McPherson teaches languages for a living, and KSR taught freshman composition. McPherson is also a struggling writer, writing poetry and history, trying to come to grips with postmodernism, something I’m sure Robinson had to do as well under the auspices show more of his PhD mentor Frederic Jameson – a giant of pomo literary criticism.

In an excellent 2012 interview in the LA Review of Books, Robinson confirmed the partly autobiographical nature of The Gold Coast, implies his father was a military engineer too, and even goes as far to call it “the story of that time and place, Orange County in the 1970s, in a way I don’t think any other novel has.”

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Full review on Weighing A Pig show less

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.