>>The whole of California seems to be one big college campus and the only
>>'grown ups' are professors. I kept waiting for the story / characters
>>to develop but it was so slow and at the end I felt we were 20% there.
>>It was also bursting with IMHO naive, green optimism.
>>
> I think that Pacific Edge may appear to be naive, green optimism only if
>you haven't read it as it should be read--as the third book in a trilogy of
>alternative approaches to the future of California.
My take on this is that the three books are all different reflections of
possible future Orange Counties:
Pacific Edge - a pastoral heaven
Gold Coast - a high tech depersonalised hell
Wild Shore - a sort of post nuclear purgatory where life is hard and
difficult, but does have some rewarding features.
Of these three I loved Pacific Edge and quite enjoyed the other two, but
found the three taken as a single piece of work were an exceptional piece
of writing. Of the three Pacific Edge is the most imaginative, albeit in a
direction not generally accepted in sf, in that it concentrates on the
small parts of life in a utopia and makes them real. Anyone can write a
dystopia, but it's damn hard to write a successful utopia. The only other
book I can think of like this one is Le Guins "Always Coming Home".
And am I right that one character shows up in all three books?
Cheers
Steve
Steve Benson
Canberra, ACT, Australia
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http://fairlea.aaa.net.au/phlebas/ for my Phlebas Hard SF Site
"Now, it recognised a kinship that crossed not just the ages, species or
civilizations, but the arguably still greater gap between the fumblingly
confused and dim awareness exhibited by the animal brain and the near
infinitely more extended, refined and integrated sentience of what most
ancestor species were amusingly, quaintly pleased to call Artificial
Intelligence (or something equally and - appropriately, perhaps -
unconsciously disparaging). - ROU Killing Time from "Excession", by Iain M.
Banks.
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