From Publishers Weekly
This fine, bleak look at Orange County, Calif., owes more to 1984 and A Clockwork Orange than to the usual SF scenario. By 2067, the land between L.A. and San Diego County is a maze of gigantic shopping malls, "condomundos" and huge aerospace facilities, all joined by soaring, multilevel "autopias" that have paved over practically everything. Brushfire wars and famines are widespread, nuclear terror reigns and the business of America is weaponry. The narrative concerns young Jim McPherson's attempts to be a poet and his stabs at revolutionary action. His father is trying to make a tactical, nonnuclear missile that will end war, and Jim's best friends (drug-dealer Sandy, nightsurfer Tashi, emergency medic Abe) seek to avoidburnout and ennui. Some thingscorporate greed, Pentagon politicshaven't changed much. Improvements have been made (cars run on electronic tracking), and some changes are acidly funny: most people watch multiple video images of their love-making. Interspersed in the story are elegiac views of the history of "OC" and its possible grim future. Robinson (Planet on the Table, The Memory of Whiteness) offers a stark cautionary tale with a glimmer of hope at the end. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Midwest Book Review
Some of Robinson's most acclaimed works are the novels from his "Three Californias" trilogy: enjoy a new presentation of works reprinted in a trade paperback edition. This puts the three linked novels into proper perspective and explores the underlying message presented by the Southern California stories.


Review
"What a bold, manic, wonderful book this is!" --Los Angeles Times

"A rich, brave book . . . It celebrates, with an earned and elated refusal of despair, the persistent, joyful survival of human persons in the interstices of the American juggernaut." --The Washington Post

"Like light focused into coherent beam, The Gold Coast brilliantly illuminates the craziness of technology out of control." --Interzone



Book Description
2027: Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad, an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent in to the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals.

The Gold Coast is the second novel in Robinson's Three Californias trilogy.



About the Author
Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy -- The Gold Coast, The Wild Shore and Pacific Edge -- has been observed as "an intriguing work, one that will delight and entertain you, and, most importantly, cause you to stop and think" (The Santa Ana Register). His many other novels include Escape from Kathmandu and Green Mars -- which won the Hugo and Locus Award for Best Novel.

ANNOTATION

From the author of the award-winning Red Mars comes the second book in the groundbreaking "Three Californias Trilogy." The Gold Coast presents a nightmarish urban future of uncontrolled, ruthless development which "celebrates . . . the persistent joyful survival of human persons in the interstices of the American juggernaut" (Washington Post Book World).

FROM THE PUBLISHER