272 pages
English language
Published Dec. 14, 1990 by Unwin Hyman.
2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.
Pacific Edge is the third novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias Trilogy.
Just a warm hug of utopian fiction. Complete with peddle power planes
3.5 stars
Utopia means 'no place' or 'nowhere'. You can't ignore this irony reading K.S.Robinson' s concluding book of Three Californias series about alternate futures seen from the perspective of Orange County, California. Pacific Edge (first published in 1990) is an ecofiction, it portrays a near-future utopian dreaming scenario that it is only slightly shifted from our own reality.
Most of the region has undergone hyper-development but citizen action has limited growth and the expansion of big corporations. The multi-nationals are disbanded and everything from businesses to homes to transportation, is small scale, sustainable and green. Social arrangements are in place, and citizens’ group manage the healed natural systems with democratic governance. Daily life is quite mundane and it is based in close face-to-face relationships.
In Pacific Edge, KSR underlies a few of his concrete ideas for creating a utopia. The year is 2065 and it involves advanced technologies but …
3.5 stars
Utopia means 'no place' or 'nowhere'. You can't ignore this irony reading K.S.Robinson' s concluding book of Three Californias series about alternate futures seen from the perspective of Orange County, California. Pacific Edge (first published in 1990) is an ecofiction, it portrays a near-future utopian dreaming scenario that it is only slightly shifted from our own reality.
Most of the region has undergone hyper-development but citizen action has limited growth and the expansion of big corporations. The multi-nationals are disbanded and everything from businesses to homes to transportation, is small scale, sustainable and green. Social arrangements are in place, and citizens’ group manage the healed natural systems with democratic governance. Daily life is quite mundane and it is based in close face-to-face relationships.
In Pacific Edge, KSR underlies a few of his concrete ideas for creating a utopia. The year is 2065 and it involves advanced technologies but the economic systems go beyond capitalism. People are part of the biosphere, but not antitechnological. In the Pacific Edge the story is, perhaps, less exciting than the post-apocalyptic society of The Wild Shore, but it is more real and believable. What KSR give us, in a sense, is how it might feels if we decide to take the first steps of reconfiguring the landscape, the infrastructure, and the social and economic sytems of our societies.
Utopia is not a state but a struggle. And a struggle located in the everyday. Small, not big. Robinson's book convinces us of all this.
A book ultimately about future California water policy and alternative future economic systems! Tailor-made for my kind of nerd. And I did enjoy it, just not nearly as much as I could have.
I keep wanting to like KSR's books, and this is another one in that vein: some interesting ideas; a compelling setting; characters that I initially find compelling; and ultimately it just all goes off the rails for me with a somewhat unsatisfying ending and characters who are well-drawn yet never really develop.
