A nuclear strike has wiped out civilization as we know it in the USA, reducing the population to isolated enclaves living in the ruins and the wilderness the disaster has left behind. It's a chance to start anew. It's an exciting opportunity for 17-year-old Henry to make America great again.
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2047: and for sixty years America has been quarantined after a devastating nuclear attack.
Seventeen-year-old Henry wants to help make America great again. Like it was before all the bombs went off. But for the people of Onofre Valley, on the coast of California, just surviving is challenge enough. Living simply on what the sea and land can provide, they strive to preserve what knowledge and skills they can in a society without mass communications. Then one day the world comes to Henry, in the shape of two men who say they represent the new American resistance. And Henry and his friends are drawn into an adventure that will mark the end of their childhood…
"Simply one of our best writers"
GENE WOLFE
"Robinson's writing ranks in the highest levels of the genre"
PUBLSIHERS WEEKLY
"Robinson's Orange County books form a multi-faceted reflection of the fears and desires of their age, our age – they make their market-place competitors look trivial"
THE GUARDIAN
About the Author
Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952. After travelling and working around the world, he settled in his beloved California. He is widely regarded as the finest science fiction writer working today, noted as much for the verisimilitude of his characters as the meticulously researched scientific basis of his work. He has won just about every major sf award there is to win and is the author of the massively successful and highly praised ‘Mars’ series.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By Patrick Shepherd
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
The world of SF has been filled with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories since its very beginning as a separately identifiable genre. Do we really need another one? In the case of this book, the answer to that is a resounding yes! Robinson has crafted a finely wrought work of character and theme that will resonate with readers, that is highly evocative of some of the other truly fine works within this sub-genre, from Pangborn's Davy to Stewart's Earth Abides, that delivers insights into societies and individual human motivations at a level rarely found in any fiction.
This book is part of Robinson's triptych (the other two pieces being The Gold Coast and Pacific Edge) that deals with various futures as seen from the perspective of Orange County, California. These books are related by theme only, and can all be read independently of the others. In this one the United States has effectively been destroyed by the use of about 3000 neutron bombs that were smuggled in by truck (the country of origin never provable but supposed to be Russia), turning almost every city into a waste land and wiping out the economic and industrial structure that allows today's Americans to enjoy a standard of living so very much higher than most of the rest of the world. The United States has now been placed in quarantine by the rest of the world, and any attempts to try to re-organize and re-build the country are ruthlessly disrupted. Orange County has returned to a fishing/agrarian level society with government by communal consensus. But this is the mere background to a remarkable tale of two young men, Henry and Steve, trying to find their own way and life answers within this community, underneath the strong influence of the town elder Tom, one of the last survivors who remembers what America was like before the bombs. Henry and Steve are close friends but are two very different personalities, and how each reacts to the opportunity to 'do something' to those who are maintaining the quarantine forms the main basis of the book.
The depth of characterization here is remarkable, and the portrayal of the society that grew under these imagined conditions is just as remarkable for its believability and economic viability. I found myself living and feeling right along with the main characters, could see myself in just the situations portrayed, facing the same moral dilemmas and wondering just how I would react, what I would do. The prose is smooth and with a nice balance between description, dialogue, and action, and a theme that is presented via 'show, not tell' methods.
All of the 'Three Californias' books are good, but this one is clearly the best, and should be put on everyone's 'must read' list.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Kim Stanley Robinson produces yet another masterpiece of future fiction. The book is a wonderful read, and you end up completely entangled in the lives of his characters, and their struggles with a bleak future.
Worth reading as part of the 'three Californias' trilogy for an insight into what the future brings.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Overall 'Wild Shore' is a clever, witty, moving and intelligent account of a post-nuclear war USA, over half a century after the bombs went off. The world in which the new USA operates is a very simple one: it doesn't, the US is a wilderness spied on and restricted by the rest of the world which has developed as normal. This forms the basis for a USA totally devoid of politics (at least at first) and this allows for the development of society in the novel which is the key element of the story.
It is refreshing to read a post-apocalyptic story which doesn't focus on the inevitable horrors the survivors face, i.e. mindless cannibals, rapes, warlords, radiation sickness, murderous dictators etc. 'Wild Shore' is set much later in the post war years after the development of local communities, surviving at almost subsistence level farming and fishing, have been created. Robinson creates a wonderful picture of California as it battles American resistance fighters, Japanese navy ships, strange weather patterns and duplicitous temptresses. He also keeps the story logical right until the end.
Almost as good as his 'Years of Rice and Salt', this is a must for the intelligent reader.
It is refreshing to read a post-apocalyptic story which doesn't focus on the inevitable horrors the survivors face, i.e. mindless cannibals, rapes, warlords, radiation sickness, murderous dictators etc. 'Wild Shore' is set much later in the post war years after the development of local communities, surviving at almost subsistence level farming and fishing, have been created. Robinson creates a wonderful picture of California as it battles American resistance fighters, Japanese navy ships, strange weather patterns and duplicitous temptresses. He also keeps the story logical right until the end.
Almost as good as his 'Years of Rice and Salt', this is a must for the intelligent reader.
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