2047: for 60 years America has been quarantined after a devastating nuclear attack. For the small community of San Onofre on the West Coast, life is a matter of survival: living simply on what the sea and land can provide, preserving what knowledge and skills they can in a society without mass communications. Until the men from San Diego arrive, riding the rails on flatbed trucks and bringing news of the new American Resistance. And Hank Fletcher and his friends are drawn into an adventure that marks the end of childhood...
Three Californias Triptych Series
This series explores three distinct potential near-futures for a specific region in California. Each installment follows the lives of young people across different timelines, reflecting societal, environmental, and technological shifts. The narratives offer an engaging examination of societal trajectories and possible paths toward a more utopian existence. It's a thought-provoking read that prompts reflection on our own present.
Recommended Reading Order
The Gold Coast
- 389 pages
- 14 hours of reading
Young Jim McPherson becomes enmeshed in a fast-track world of land development, defence contractors, and drug dealers in Orange County, California, in the year 2067.
The concluding book in Kim Stanley Robinson's critically-acclaimed Three Californias Trilogy, Pacific Edge .2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.
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Three Californias
- 896 pages
- 32 hours of reading
From the internationally bestselling author of the Mars Trilogy and New York 2140Before Kim Stanley Robinson terraformed Mars, he wrote three science fiction novels set in Orange County, California, where he grew up. These alternate futures―one a post-apocalypse, one an if-this-goes-on future reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, and one an ecological utopia―form a whole that illuminates, enchants, and inspires--collected here as Three Californias .What if... there was a limited nuclear war that left the United States blockaded, fragmented, the few survivors living in the ruins of a once-great nation?What if... this goes on, and technology continues to accelerate, and power continues to be consolidated into corporate culture, a developer’s dream world gone an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls, and designer drugs?What if... a revolution happens, and the US addresses climate change in a responsible way. Is a future green Utopia all that great when you’re young and in love?This Tor Essentials edition of Three Californias includes an introduction by Francis Spufford, bestselling author of Golden Hill and Red Plenty .“[Robinson] invites us to share his characters’ intensely personal, intensely local attachment to what they have. The result may shame you into entertaining new hope for the future.”― The New York Times on Pacific Edge