Added: 02/21/2006 |
Hyper-industrialized future of the Gold CoastThe legendary Disneyland Park, and a learned discussion of its social function, deliberately occurs in fiction, on the pages of numerous novels. Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel ?The Gold Coast?, which forms the second volume of the Three Californias trilogy, mentions a game that involves rides at Disneyland.
The Gold Coast is the second of Kim Stanley Robinson?s three books set in Orange County, California. Each covers a different possible future. The Gold Coast is about what might happen if the trends of the 1980s were to continue unchecked.
The Gold Coast is set in 2027 as imagined from the vantage point of 1987. The Cold War is still raging, with forty active hotspots. People listen to compact discs and watch videocassettes. There are no cell phones. Computers are used pretty much exclusively for engineering and word processing. The novel is written in a manic style ? present tense, mile a minute, stream-of-consciousness in places, lots of humor, lots of slang. 21st century Orange County, CA is full of designer drugs, freeways that glide and soar. It's a mass-culture, video-saturated world for Jim McPherson who is adrift in society. He lives his life through dreams of the past. Dennis, his dad, is an aerospace engineer involved in military research. Father and son, separate for so long, are finally on a collision course. The Gold Coast's version of California is hyper-industrialized, hyper-urbanized, and no sane person's vision of utopia. Robinson writes characters of astonishing depth, and the human story here demonstrates that life, in all its diverse splendor and horror, goes on. The Gold Coast core characters mention a perverse game where the person who has to wait the longest for the least thrilling ride at Disneyland wins.
A number of conflicts form the basis of the book. Jim is rebelling against the life of his father. Dennis has been a drone in the military-industrial complex for his entire life. This drives Jim to some extreme actions. The book also follows the ups and downs of Jim's relationships with the opposite sex. He meets a woman named Hana, who does not quite fit into the flashy drugs and cars scene of Jim and his friends. The Gold Coast matches its subject matter with a kind of intensity that is entirely appropriate. The readers also get snatches of the poetry that Jim is writing. Robinson also captures Jim's voice in a completely different genre - Jim is writing a history of Orange County. This history forms one of the backbones of the story, as there are layers of tradition and change that have accumulated.
By 2067, the land between Los Angels and San Diego County is a maze of gigantic shopping malls and huge aerospace facilities, all joined by multilevel autopias that have paved over practically everything. The Gold Coast offers a stark cautionary tale with a glimmer of hope at the end.
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