Has anyone read the “Three Californias” novels by Kim Stanley Robinson?
The third novel is called “Pacific Edge”, and depicts the day-to-day life of characters living in a utopian town in future California. This town is sustainable, somewhat post-capitalist, and fairly relaxing to live in. On the margins of this utopian society, however, are signs that forces are seeking to chip away at all progress.
The second novel is called “The Gold Coast”, and presents the inverse of this. It’s a hyper-capitalist dystopia, set in the same region of California and featuring many of the same characters and plot beats. The novel recontextualizes the aforementioned novel, and shows how economics and politics affects human behavior and mores.
Many of the plotbeats in the novels are same – characters wishing to escape their lives, or resisting, or kowtowing, or falling in love, or going on long hikes etc – but are also radically different due to the differing ideologies on display.
The final novel is called “The Wild Shore”, and is set in the same coastal region of California, but takes the form of a post-apocalyptic story. Here America is reduced to a sparsely populated country, essentially becoming a primitive, pre-technology, pre-modern nation. This novel watches a kid growing up in this landscape – it feels like a political version of Huckleberry Finn – and watches as his buddies fall prey to the Make America Great Again rhetoric of several charismatic adults. Again, the novel shares key events with the other two novels, but its outcomes and details are colored by the different modes of social/economic organization present.
Anyway, I thought this was a fascinating and original series of books. The way each novel recontextualizes and contrasts with the other is interesting, and I’ve never seen an experiment like this done before.
by WetnessPensive