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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Utopian Gnats, 5 Nov 2003
This book is part of Robinson’s 'Three Californias' triptych about alternate futures seen from the perspective of Orange County, California. Gold Coast is a dystopia, The Wild Shore is post-apocalyptic, and this book completes the thematic triangle as a utopia. Here we find a future that is a melding of socialism, capitalism, democracy, and strong ecological concerns. Personal income and business sizes have strict upper limits, everyone is required to devote some of their labor hours to community projects (usually involving some form of ecological cleanup), most people live as part of communal co-operatives, but at the same time people are free to chose their own jobs, live where they wish, have a voice in community affairs, and can say what they want. Like most utopias, there are a few flies in the ointment, and it is around these that the story line is based. Here we find Alfredo, the town mayor, scheming a way to go beyond the personal income limit, and the company he is associated with has become involved in shady deals to try and sidestep the limits on company size. The object of the scheming is an undeveloped hill commanding a great aesthetic view of the town and valley it sits in, and the book starts with an attempt to rezone the hill for commercial development. The book’s protagonist, Kevin, something of an idealist and nature lover, not terribly politically astute but stubborn, stalls the attempt, but the battle is joined. As counterpoint to the political battle, Kevin becomes romantically involved with Alfredo’s long-time lover Ramona, who has just split up with Alfredo. Unfortunately, these story threads are only mildly interesting. There is little work done to explore either the pluses or minuses of the envisioned society, Kevin’s personal problems are not strong enough, do not have enough angst, to make the reader become terribly involved in them, the basic object of the battle, the hill, does not seem deserving of all the energy devoted to it. This seems to be a typical problem with utopian novels – at their heart, utopias are necessarily dull, not having any strong points of contention on which to base a story. All of the actions of this book seem somewhat inconsequential, the object of contention is really a molehill, not a mountain. The prose style is easy, the main characters are reasonably well developed, the plot line is coherent. But this is at best an average book, not nearly as good as The Wild Shore.
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by Kim Stanley Robinson
by Kim Stanley Robinson
by Kim Stanley Robinson
by Kim Stanley Robinson
by Kim Stanley Robinson
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