The Wild Shore, by Kim Stanley Robinson

[rachelmanija]

This was Robinson's first novel, one of a set of three set in future Orange County, Californias, exploring three different futures for America. The second one is about a future much like the present day, hyper-capitalist and dystopian. The third is set in an ecotopia which apparently involves lots of softball. (I've only read The Wild Shore, and gleaned this information from reviews of the others.) After reading The Ministry of the Future, I thought I'd give Robinson another try, and this book sounded most relevant to my personal interests. (I've attempted Years of Rice and Salt multiple times and never gotten very far in. It sounds so interesting!)

The Wild Shore is set about sixty years after the US was shattered by multiple neutron bombs, then quarantined by the rest of the world. It's now a bunch of extremely small, struggling towns which are kept separated from each other as the rest of the world uses satellite imagery to bomb them any time they attempt to do something like build railroad tracks. The California coast is patrolled by Japanese vessels who prevent them from sailing too far out. No one in the book has any idea who bombed the US or why, but given the quarantine I assume the US started the war and someone else finished it.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is 17 and lives in a village of 60. He hangs out with a bunch of mostly-indistinguishable other teenage boys. (I spent three-quarters of the book thinking Steve and Nicolin were two different boys. They are not. I wish writers wouldn't randomly call characters by their first or last name.) They fish and farm and trade with scavengers. Henry is the prize student of Tom, one of four elders who recall the pre-catastrophe days. It is immediately obvious that Tom's teachings are a mix of real and complete bullshit, but as the younger generation has no context or means of fact-checking, they tend to think it's either all true or all bullshit.

The village gets contacted by the remnants of San Diego, which wants to build a rail line and fight back against the quarantine. Henry gets sucked into this, with disastrous results.

This book is SLOW. I often like books that are mostly about daily life, but Henry's daily life was not that interesting - he spends a lot of time hanging out with boys and talking and thinking about girls and daddy issues, and you can get that in any contemporary novel about teenage boys. The only real character is Tom - everyone else is lightly sketched in at best. Girls and women are only present as girlfriends, potential girlfriends, and moms. (There's one girl who's the leader of the farmers, who are mostly women - the men are mostly fishers - but she doesn't get much to do.) The book was just barely interesting enough that I finished it, but it didn't end anywhere more interesting than the rest of it.



It turns out that Tom is much younger than he claimed, didn't have the career he claimed, and was only 18 when the bombs went off. This was clearly not intended to be a surprise to readers, as he was claiming to be 120 or something like that, but is a surprise to Henry. It fell flat for me.

San Diego's carefully concealed rail line gets bombed. An attempt at ambushing a party of Japanese patrollers gets most of the Americans killed.

America's situation seems completely hopeless, as a handful of people armed with scavenged pistols, no industrial technology, and no means of developing it can't fight satellite imaging, bomber jets, and machine guns backed by the might of the entire rest of the world (or the part that cares about America, anyway) that's determined that it should never be allowed to become a functioning country again.

Tom and Henry think about trying to access a radio to communicate with the UN/Japan/whoever is in charge to ask to plead their case. The book ends with them just thinking about that, with no idea how to do it.



Content note: Characters use racial slurs for Japanese people.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Obviously they can bounce their signal off the moon!

[heavenscalyx]

I tried a couple of KSR's Mars books and nearly expired from ennui -- finished one, DNFed the other with prejudice. He seems to write his worlds moving his characters around, rather than the other way round? The characters are so lackluster and dull and often just bleak and depressing. This sounds about par for the course.

[rachelmanija]

I really liked The Ministry of the Future but it seems like that was a one-off.

[larryhammer]

I've read the other two in the trilogy but couldn't finish this one. The ecotopia (Pacific Edge) was the best, though I remember the softball way less than the character who moonlights on the local pro wrestling circuit.

(Hadn't realized The Wild Shore was his first -- I'd thought Icehenge came before it.)

[swan_tower]

I think I'd rather read about a character in another part of the world who thinks the U.S. is now an uninhabited nuclear wasteland, then finds out that no, actually, their leaders have decided the right thing to do is to collectively punish everybody there for generations on end.

WTF. What a depressing concept, and then such uninteresting use of it to boot.