I tend to go on binges when I discover a writer I really like, taking down as many of their works as I possibly can voraciously for the first few months of my acquaintanceship with their works. Hell, I read really fast, so it's not like I don't have time. So I'm kind of in that stage with Kim Stanley Robinson.I've read science fiction pretty regularly since I was pretty young, devouring my father's and uncles' collections indiscriminately. When I was about 14, I decided I was more interested in grown up SF, and read more of the experimental New Wavers, Dick, Delany, Sturgeon and Ellison. Later I discovered the wonder that is Gene Wolfe. They wrote better than the bulk of the hard SF writers that filled the shelves at the used bookstores I frequented, they were more "literary." But in the past year or so, I started rereading some of the authors that I had discarded before high school, and I rediscovered the wonder and joy of great imaginative storytelling. This lead me somehow to the works of Kim Stanley Robinson.I should say first that Robinson is a stylist of the first order, and the texture of his prose is a beautiful thing. The characters he creates are rich and believable. And I think that that is sort of the miracle of the Mars trilogy, as well as the promise of the Three Californias: these are novels of Big Ideas, for sure, but the narrative is never sacrificed for the sake of lumbering speculative exposition. Sure, the Mars books regularly feature capsule lectures about the possible effects of terraforming on Martian weather patterns, or the psychological effects of long interplanetary voyages, but they feel perfectly balanced by the furtherance of the rich tapestry of narrative and character development. Such digressions do not make up the fabric of The Wild Shore. It's a tightly constructed, fairly simple narrative set on the West Coast after the United States has been largely destroyed by a nuclear assault. This is a very well traveled sf conceit, but the simple, narrative-oriented approach makes it much different from Alas, Babylon or A Canticle for Leibowitz. The focus here is not so much survivalist porn or the extrapolation of how society would crawl out of the ruins, although both themes are present. It focuses more on how normal people balance the necessities of survival with the dream of a return to an almost mythical lost civilization. In Robinson's scenario, America was destroyed in a terrorist-style attack by an unknown enemy, and there was no time for retribution. The rest of the world, mediated by the UN has elected to quarantine the United States, rather than escalate into war over who controls the blasted territory. America exists for the postbellum characters in this novel only through fragmented reading and the stories of a handful of survivors, crystallized in the character of Tom Barnard, who is the memory of the fishing village of San Onofre and the teacher to its youth. He has tried to instill a knowledge of the past in the young people of the village so that the ideas of civilization and learning don't vanish in the slide back into primitive subsistence-based existence. This creates a sense of having had something stolen from them from them in the younger characters, and after making a trip south to the relatively-civilized metropolis of San Diego, it ignites the hope that they might be able to strike back at their oppressors. This leads to predictably tragic consequences.The Three Californias is not a trilogy in the traditional SF sense. Rather than each novel moving forward in time, each novel covers the same period in a different possible future, with characters and themes recurring. In The Wild Shore Robinson plays with mirror structures that indicate the approach of the books to come. This is really a minor detail, but I think that it's good to note that with Robinson, the book doesn't end with the pages. His writing is the sort that bleeds into the rest of our realities, and that's really the best kind, isn't it?
This was the overwhelming pick by my correspondents for the next book to read, and I was quite happy to comply. I picked up a paperback copy of The Wild Shore in 1985, then a hardback in 1990, and both copies had been hanging around my to be read shelf since then, possibly leading many another volume in their bad ways (how else to explain the sheer number of books not read?). It was quite rewarding to be able to remove it from its place of honor as the book that I have owned the longest but had not yet read.Why is it that every post-apocalyptic book must have the same old tired plot: a youth, hearing about the grand old past, investigates and discovers the "truth" of the past? Of course, the fact is that these books, like most "non-adventure" SF, are about the present using this simplified vision of the future as a looking-glass to it. My problem with the sub-genre is that I don't hold with the simplification--most of these books imply that our present life is "out of balance" and that, in a antediluvian world, the balance will be restored. I can hold with the former, but I disagree with the latter.So too may Stan Robinson, if I understand the theme behind his Orange County trilogy, of which this is the first book. Taking a common starting point, Robinson looks at the world through three different fun-house mirrors, the first of which is a back-to-nature, return to the "simpler" life. This is pure conjecture on my part, not having read the other two volumes as of yet, however.The Wild Shore was an Ace SF original, published in the same line edited by the late Terry Carr as William Gibson's Neuromancer. While it did not set the genre on its ear as Gibson's novel, the seeds of Robinson's later career and his interests can be seen here. While post-apocalyptic, this novel is not a rehash of Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle of Leibowitz--rather than concentrating on the tragedy of the apocalypse and how it might happen again and again, Robinson celebrates the enduring human spirit by attempting to show that life goes on much the same as it ever did. Parents will continue to be parents, both supporting and domineering, and children will continue to be children, full of rash actions and the naive belief that they can live forever. Like his short story, "Down and Out in the Year 2000," The Wild Shore can be read as an answer to the cyberpunk belief that technology will reinvent the world. Robinson says, the world may change, but people will not.As a final aside to this incoherent rambling, I was surprised early on in the novel to find another coincidental relationship between this book and Neuromancer. Much has been made of Neuromancer's first line, which, to paraphrase, goes "The sky was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel." On page 34 of The Wild Shore, Robinson depicts the same color by saying, "On the coast the sky was the color of sour milk...." The two similes are one of the best indications of the different milieu depicted, and the underlying themes of both books.
What do You think about The Wild Shore (1995)?
In 1984, somebody sets off 2,000 or 3,000 (different characters give different numbers) neutron bombs hidden inside vans all over the United States, destroying the country. This makes no sense, since a neutron bomb is basically an anti-tank weapon, not a city-destroying weapon, but let us forgive Robinson this error. Although the attacker does not name itself, it is clear that no nation other than the Soviet Union possesses this many nuclear weapons. Yet the President does not retaliate, unwilling to kill millions of innocent Russians, unlike in our timeline, where a terrorist attack 17 years later that only killed 3,000 people brought massive retaliation. Fast forward to 2047. The United States is a wilderness, radioactive in places, with perhaps a million residents altogether: farmers, fishermen, beekeepers and scavengers. At San Onofre Beach in Orange County, California, there is a community of 8 families and lone individuals, mostly farmers and fishermen, 60 people in all. Other nations have high technology, including satellite-based lasers that can melt rail track into a puddle of iron; the United States has scavenged pistols and wooden sailboats; other nations intend to keep it this way. The novel follows the adventures of a 17-year-old boy from the San Onofre community. In such post-apocalyptic novels as Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker or Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz the protagonist sets off a chain of events that brings a rebirth of civilization; not here: at the end of the boy's adventures, nothing changes much.This was Robinson's first published novel, and frankly, it is not very well-written, though it does not have the pretensions of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and thus does not invite the mockery.
—Ilya
It’s 60 years after the US was blown up by thousands of neutron bombs hidden in all of its major cities by an unknown enemy. The rest of the world, unaffected except for climactic shifts, decided to quarantine the States for 100 years, leaving the survivors to make their own way - aside from using satellites to blow up their bigger attempts at re-modernization. Americans are somewhat bitter about this.The novel takes place in San Onofre, a sleepy-ish valley community featuring one Tom Barnard, an elderly survivor of the war and a rascal of a fellow who concocts a variety of adages and fables and outright lies to mythologize (and demonize) the American way of life before The Day. As the town’s educator and historian, Tom’s guidance of his pupils really speaks to me, especially since this kind of twisting of modernity/history is one of my favorite parts of post-apocalyptic literature. His attempts to keep up a happy face despite his rage and despair at the course of history and the ignorance of those around him also inform many of the book’s more compelling scenes.Sadly, though, Tom is just a side character, and the main action follows a teenager and some other teenagers making very bad teenage decisions.
—Zach
Kim Stanley Robinson has quite a following. but I can't count myself among the legions. Because I know he's got a got a great fan-base, I have attempted three of his books. But I have not been able to finish any of them.Mr. Robinson may have some interesting ideas, but I've never been able to find any of his characters compelling. In The Wild Shore, even the premise seems kind of goofy. There has been a war that has been devastated America, but apparently the rest of the world is not similarly affected. It's as if the other great powers had ganged up on the United States to take it down. Furthermore, they continue to work hard to keep it in something of a post-apocalyptic state. The Japanese patrol our Wast Coast and bomb any efforts remaining Americans attempt to improve their technology, like building a rail line.Mr. Robinson obviously spends a lot of time conceiving the "universes" in which his stories take place, and he fills them with details of how life is conducted in each "universe's" context. So we get a lot of dialogue between characters on the "small-talk" level. "Oh, hi, Tom. How are you?" "Fire, Joe. And you?" "OK. Say what are you doing today?" "Oh, just the usual . . ." Enough already! Cut to the chase! Fiction can be realistic, but to be good it shouldn't be mimicking every boring part of reality. While I'm sure Jesus had a lot of ordinary conversations with his disciples too, the New Testament writers had good enough sense to edit those parts out.
—Gary
