Pacific Edge is part of the Orange County trilogy. It was published in 1990.

In a near future California after a revolution in legislature, an ecological utopia has been reached. But greed and grief still exist.It follows the story of Kevin Claiborne, a member of the Green party in the town of El Modena, California, who fights against the conversion of a parcel of wild land into a commercial-industrial complex. The importance of personal relations in local politics and the intricacies of water law are prominent. Many aspects of the life of El Modena can be found in Robinson’s interests (town council meetings, softball) and in his current town of residence, Davis, California.

In many ways, Pacific Edge presents Robinson’s most accomplished utopia and served as a basis for ideas explored in the Mars trilogy.

Structure

The novel is composed of 11 chapters, all written in the third person. The majority is written from the point of view of the main character, Kevin; parts are from the point of view of his grandfather Tom (ch. 3, 10). Letters from Oscar, of a different style and content, close some chapters (ch. 3, 5, 9). Starting with ch. 2, each chapter begins with a short passage in the first person, close to a personal diary or a stream of thoughts, from an unnamed narrator that we come to identify as a younger Tom, before he started actively fighting for legislative change. Special mention must be made to ch. 6, which takes place in a single evening, with long descriptions of a communal experience and of the wilderness. The novel takes place in 2065 (approximately from winter-spring to October).

Summary

After a difficult legal struggle in the 2020s-2040s, the United States have reached a way of life comparable to an ecotopia. Company sizes are limited; land, water and energy are nationalized; and green ideas are respected and taken seriously. People do town work, like tearing out the asphalt roads from the wasteful past; they live in common houses; they take shifts in taking care of the neighborhood kids; citizens can be active in the town council; and softball is a very popular game.

In the small town of El Modena, California, in 2065, Kevin Claiborne is a 32 year old man that works in building renovation and construction with Hank and Gabriela – work that makes buildings energy-efficient, green and beautiful, thus more livable. He learns that Ramona Sanchez just broke up with Alfredo Blair after a long relationship; Kevin knows he’s in love with Ramona. He just got a place in the town council as a member of the Green party, along with Doris Nakayama (with whom he has had a relationship). The party opposing him is the New Federalists, of which Alfredo became the new town mayor; Oscar Baldarramma is the new town attorney. In his first town council meeting, Kevin notices an item concerning the purchase of large quantities of water from Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Water District with a lower rate, thus making savings for the town. Kevin disapproves this proposal from Alfredo, sensing there’s more to it.

The Green policy is that little water means growth control: offering more than what is needed is bad. The New Federalists say that job generation and business development can be beneficial to all: pushing the negative growth of the last decades too far can become dangerous. Acquainting with the peculiar huge and intellectual Oscar, Kevin and Doris learn that Heartech, Alfredo’s firm, might have plans for a new complex on Rattlesnake Hill, the only hill of El Modena that is still kept in the wilderness.

Doris’ friend Nadezhda Katayev is an aged Russian-Indian teacher that’s visiting El Modena, her ship being docked in Newport. Nadezhda actually had met Tom Barnard, Kevin’s grandfather, when they were both younger, when they were changing international law and the world in the famous Singapore conferences in the 2020s-2030s. Tom now lives as a recluse, remembering his dead wife and his achievements as a lawyer far away. But the energetic Nadezhda and the pleas of Kevin needing help with the Rattlesnake Hill developments draws him out to the open again. As Kevin and Ramona draw closer, often going to fly with a glider, things between Kevin and Alfredo get tense. Then Doris discovers a rezoning proposal for Rattlesnake Hill from open space to commercial in the town planner’s files.

Oscar takes Kevin and Doris to Bishop, where they meet Sally Tallhawk, specialist in the murky law of water; they hike and they camp as Sally explains El Modena has more than enough water and gives them hints of actions they could take. In Bishop, Kevin and Doris are surprised to discover Oscar and Sally are professional wrestlers and they watch a match between them. After getting drunk and a bar fight, Kevin and Doris end up together for the night.

Kevin, Hank and Gabriela start doing heavy renovation work on Oscar’s house. Kevin, supported by the Green party, tries to bring the non-partisan town council members to their side. Doris quits her job as she discovers her firm is joining Heartech in the Rattlesnake Hill complex project – but not before making a copy of all the firm’s documents!

The night of the first manned landing on Mars, all the friends spend a surreal night in hot water ponds among the woods, with animal masks, shamanic incantations and tequila. Tom and Nadezhda are happy together; Kevin and Ramona finally confirm their relationship; Doris is jealous of Kevin and Oscar, believing he has a chance with Doris, follows her and ends up spending a night alone lost in the woods.

Tom’s investigation reveals that Heartech might have an illegal source of capital from Hong Kong. Oscar finds out that municipalities in fact cannot resell water, this is a business allowed only by the state; so Alfredo’s plans to have the water pumped back into the underground basin, thus saving money for El Modena, are impossible. The town council ends up voting down the buying of the water! Kevin and Ramona have a great time, until Alfredo comes back to talk with her. Ramona, confused and uncertain what to do, takes some time off El Modena. Later, Kevin is numbed to learn that Alfredo went to find her and this visit won Alfredo his relationship back.

Tom further investigates as both parties go on a public campaign for and against the Rattlesnake Hill complex development. Oscar takes Doris to a drag cars race (cars using alcohol). As Tom discovers connections between Heartech and the American Association for Medical Technology, a conglomerate rebuilding the medical industry power base, a brushfire spreads and burns Tom’s house; Kevin and Hank find inconclusive evidence of arson. Tom explains that from the beginning Alfredo and Heartech got involved with the black operations of AAMT with illegal loans to get Heartech going; eventually dealings became a mix of saving lives and making money; Alfredo couldn’t bargain against AAMT – but Tom has no tangible proof. Tom ends up leaving with Nadezhda on her ship.

Kevin and Doris keep campaigning. The Green party stops approving the fight: if the Green let go of Rattlesnake Hill, Alfredo shall make concessions elsewhere. Kevin and Alfredo discuss Ramona and Rattlesnake Hill and still can’t come to a compromise.

On a tropical storm, Tom drowns; everyone is dismayed. Work on Oscar’s house is finished. A public vote in El Modena approves of the Rattlesnake Hill development. The Hill is rezoned from open space to commercial. Then Kevin has an idea so symbolic that it changes everything: he holds a memorial service and puts a commemorative plaque for Tom on a sycamore tree on Rattlesnake Hill.

Later that year, Ramona and Alfredo get married. Kevin realizes he wanted Doris, but he now sees that she is with Oscar. Kevin bikes away madly, feeling the unhappiest man alive. Then he laughed at this very thought.

Characters

Kevin Claiborne
At 32, he was recently appointed as a town council member for the Green party in El Modena, California. He is shy and works in building renovation and construction.

Thomas Barnard
He is Kevin’s grandfather. He did law and politics and was very active in the legal reforms of the 2020s and 2030s. Now at 81, he lives like a recluse until Nadezhda draws him out once again.

Oscar Baldarramma
From Chicago and Bishop, he is the new town attorney. He is around 40 and has an imposing physical appearance. He is cultured and has a critical view of the simple rural life in El Modena.

Ramona Sanchez
Now a teacher of population biology, she is strong and very beautiful. She had a longtime relationship with Alfredo, then a short relationship with Kevin before ending up with Alfredo.

Alfredo Blair
After 6 years in the town council for the New Federalists, he was recently appointed as the new mayor. He is handsome and has a moustache. He created and runs the medical technology firm Heartech.

Nadezhda Katayev
Originally from Russia but a longtime dweller of India, she was part of the legal struggle of the 2030s, headed the Soviet State Planning Commission and worked in a superconductor institute. Now she teaches history in a school freighter.

Doris Nakayama
Housemate and friend with Kevin, she has been in the town council for the Green party for 2 terms. She is passionate and works as a materials scientist.

Gabriela
At 22, she is tough, wild and has a mouth. She works with Kevin in construction.

Hank
At 42, he tries to go by the rule “moderation in all things, including moderation”. He works with Kevin in construction and he’s a Minister in many churches.

Themes

(to develop)

Quotes

Note: Page numbers refer to the 1995 Orb paperback.

• “I detest softball. […] The world plays hardball.” (Oscar, p.43)
• “Legislation is a revolutionary power” (Thomas, p.56)
• “Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.” (p.95)
• “In California, water flows uphill toward money.” (Sally Tallhawk, p.101)
• “I try to live by the old Greek rule, you know. Moderation in all things. […] If you say moderation in all things, then among all things you gotta include moderation itself, see what I mean? So you gotta go crazy once in a while, if you ask me.” (Hank, p.184)
• Last lines of the novel: “it seemed to him [Kevin] without a doubt that he was the unhappiest person in the whole world. And at that thought (thinking about it) he began to laugh.” (p.326)

Reviews

• Jo Walton – Tor.com
• Val’s Random Comments
• Nic – Eve’s Alexandria
• Richard – Book Addiction
• Fred’s Place

Reviews of the entire trilogy/triptych:

• Fred’s Place: 1, 2

Resources

• Excerpt at macmillan.com
• Pacific Edge at The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Pacific Edge at Google Books
• Rattlesnake Hill, presently El Modena Open Space on Google Maps

The Gold Coast is the second novel of the Three Californias triptych (or Orange County trilogy). It was published in 1988 and by his own account is the most autobiographical of all of Robinson’s novels.

In a future California where technology has run wild and everywhere is an urban sparwl, a young English teacher tries to find love, meaning and a way to make things right.

It follows the story of young Jim McPherson in the not so distant future, where Orange County is an endless urban sprawl full of highways, malls and condo towers. The novel depicts different modes of resistance to the capitalist system and most prominently to the industrial-military complex; this is best illustrated with the confrontation between Jim, who takes active part in sabotages against aerospace companies, and his father, who works in one of these companies.

Structure

The novel is composed of 83 short chapters, all written in the third person but each taking the point of view of one of the characters (a technique later used extensively in the Mars trilogy). These “a day in the life” chapters give the reader a sense of the everyday life of the characters. Poetry, either from the thoughts of one of the characters or from the lyrics of the music being listened to, often illustrates the descriptive prose. Intermittently, certain chapters detail the history of Orange County, from its prehistory to the present time of the novel; they are detached from the main narrative but their source is explained at the ending.

Summary

Jim McPherson is a young man of 27 who lives in an Orange County full with malls, condos and freeways, a sprawl of urbanism, in 2027 AD. He works only in part-time jobs (as a writing teacher and in a real estate agency), a source of arguments with his parents, particularly between father and son. With his friends Sandy, Abe and Tashi he tracks along the well-known freeways, takes part in parties and loses himself in a world of design drugs and video-obsessed sex. Jim is a poet and writer with little self-insurance; he loves history and satisfies his quench of OC history by visiting his old uncle Tom in a retirement home. He and his friends try to find a way to be as independent of the capitalist system as possible. Sandy designs and sells drugs. Abe drives a rescue truck for car accidents. Tashi lives in a tent and sells repaired items to the black market. Without having properly left his previous ally, Jim starts a relationship with Virginia for the sake of her looks; but the couple argue often. Jim, dissatisfied with his preposterous world, accepts to help his friend Arthur in a kind of underground resistance. First, it’s sticking anti-war posters; fast enough, it involves using small stolen missiles in sabotages against aerospace defence contractors, destroying their hardware and software (with no human losses). Jim enjoys doing something active and meaningful immensely.

Dennis McPherson, Jim’s father, is an engineer in Laguna Space Research (LSR), an aerospace defence contractor; his superior Stewart Lemon is a manager who is all profit and doesn’t understand anything technical. Lucy, Jim’s mother, is a social worker with the catholic church. LSR wins a superblack (secret) program “Stormbee” from the Pentagon to develop a reconnaissance system for drones. Dennis is so impressed by the speed and efficiency of the first results that he thinks that if both parties in the ongoing Cold War get hold of such a technology, an all-out war would effectively be impossible! But eventually the superblack program becomes a proposal in an open public bid; much at the bewilderment of Dennis and the wrath of Lemon, LSR loses the contract to another company. At the instigation of Hereford, LSR’s mother company’s vice-president, Dennis starts legal procedures to overturn the military’s decision at Washington.

Sandy is offered by an associate to operate the transfer of a new illegal aphrodisiac by boat off the OC coast. Sandy at first refuses but economic difficulties make him accept. While carrying the merchandise, a search by the coastguard makes Sandy and Tash to hide it on the coast, at the base of LSR HQ. In view of the recent sabotages, LSR announces heightened security and Sandy is unable to retrieve the merchandise. Sandy, Jim and friends take a trip to Europe while things calm down. They visit Russia (which looks surprisingly like OC), Cairo (where Jim is shocked by the level of human suffering and poverty) and Crete (where the sheer history of the place is overwhelming in contrast to OC).

Dennis is also assigned to a project involving laser defence against soviet ballistic missiles (“Ball Lightening”). The project proves impossible to render, with LSR having previously faked test results to take the contract; Houston, one of Dennis’s engineers, succumbs to alcoholism complaining about a system that puts one company against the other in a meaningless game of competition, destroying many people’s lives along the way. The Stormbee appeal is denied but Dennis keeps trying at the advice of his lawyer Goldman. Goldman gets the unofficial story that the entire Stormbee program was but a small pawn in a personal power struggle between two Air Force Generals

Jim starts a relationship with Hana, a teacher in arts who corresponds more to Jim’s intellectual aspirations. Involuntarily, Jim spreads sorrow once again when Hana witnesses him with Virginia. Things seem to be going worse for his surroundings: Abe and Lucy are devastated by the death of a young friend and Tashi ends a long relationship. Sandy links Jim to the underground resistance and resistance to an acquaintance’s personal vendetta against the airborne military. Hereford suggests to Lemon that they can manipulate the resistance to attack LSR, thus getting rid of the annoying Ball Lightening program. Jim and Arthur get assigned the job.

The second Stormbee appeal is denied; all hope dies in Dennis. Lucy tries to reunite father and son in a common dinner. Jim and Dennis confront their ideas and means of ultimate struggle for a better world, one through immediate action, the other through technological advancement. Jim leaves, discomforted and unsure of the legitimacy of any kind of action. He sabotages the resistance effort by taking the sabotage material and attracting the attention of the police to Arthur; he then goes on a spree of violence attacking aerospace industries’ infrastructures, real estate offices, malls, and trashing of his own apartment. Sandy, who was told to retrieve the merchandise simultaneously, is arrested by coastguards; he is released later. Jim is stopped by Tashi, who takes him on a trip to the surviving wildlife preserve; a tiring but reinvigorating experience for Jim. The aftermath at LSR has Dennis and his team being fired. Jim abandons extreme actions and seriously decides to start healing those friends whose feelings he has hurt, mainly Hana, and to turn to writing as his weapon of choice in view of a better world.

Characters

James (“Jim”) McPherson

Though he’s 27, Jim admits he doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t have a very high opinion of himself and lacks self-insurance dramatically – he thinks of himself as a dull, humorless person. He loves his friends all the more and prefers talking about them than about himself. He describes himself as a culturevulture, in his choices for reading, music, art and his will to know the past in order to build the future. He is a history buff and loves maps; more particularly, he loves to study the history of his own environment and he knows every little detail about the history of Orange County. On his spare time he tries to write, mainly poems, but he is never satisfied enough with them for him to show them to others. He lives in a small apartment among the pylons of an elevated highway. In his relationships and alliances he is rather awkward and progressively realizes he inflicts much more pain than he ever intends to. He works in the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company and in writing classes at night. These small, not entirely satisfying jobs get him a small living; his laziness to pursue more ambitious professions often get him in odds with his parents. He has some vague ideas of the reality of social injustice – later reinforced by a trip to Europe – and of the unfairness of the American defence policy – which gets him into taking action through sabotage. Ultimately, the sabotage actions and his confrontation with his father’s worldview bring him close to a breakdown. After a trip discovering a non-urban, natural environment, he decides the best way for him to take part in a resistance against the established system is through his engaged writing – for example a critical history of Orange County.

Dennis McPherson

Dennis has been working at LSR for 27 years as an engineer in high precision guidance systems. Far from being pro-war, he justifies his work in the defence industry as developing technology that might ultimately make the whole process of conventional war-faring moot. Thus he trusts the system and has a strong belief that though it makes one’s life difficult, it is ultimately fair. Adamant on technical precision but uncomfortable with management and human resources, he often comes to a head with his more profit-inclined superiors. At home he fancies doing maintenance and repair on his car, or the one of his son Jim. He loves his ally Lucy and when the work is too stressful, his thoughts turn to her. He sometimes considers moving to other things by settling in the land he owns in Eureka. Through a legal investigation into the decision-making progress of his country and after the restructuring of LSR, he will end up getting fired, with the bitter realization that his life’s work is nothing but a pawn in a machinery far outside of his reach.

Stewart Lemon

Lemon, LSR executive and Dennis’s boss, is comfortable in his position of power and takes advantage of his acute sense of human psychology and skill assessment to manage his employees so that his company may benefit the most. He often curses the engineers who look only at the technical aspects and do not adopt a wider, financial view. Highly stressed by his job, he lives under the constant impression that his career is on the brink of destruction. When orders that will have heavy consequences on his company come from higher in LSR’s hierarchy, Lemon will comply, comforted he is not the one to make such ruthless decisions.

Sandy Chapman

One of Jim’s friends. Very active and lively and with a big laugh, Sandy is the one to look for having fun. With his ally Angela he lives in his rich apartment which, with its many rooms and screens and powerful sound system, is often home to many friend gatherings or night-long parties. Sandy is a drug designer – an occupation mixing biology, chemistry and artistic intuition. He develops the drugs in his rented warehouse-turned-laboratory, then he has awfully busy days meeting suppliers and distributors. He hopes the money he gains will be able to pay for his father’s liver treatment. These facts Sandy tries to hide behind his intense sociability. Though his is a high-risk illegal job, Sandy has his own strict rules of conduct he won’t stray from. However, financial problems will finally push him into a deal that turns wrong.

Tashi (“Tash”) Nakamura

One of Jim’s friends. Tashi is secretive and doesn’t talk much, but he’s highly estimated by his friends, always compassionate and ready to help others. He lives for free in a large tent, installed on the top of a condo tower – an illegal agreement with the tower manager. Decided to live as independently of the machine and of money as possible, he makes his living by repairing salvaged equipment and reselling it to the black market. He loves surfing, especially at night when there’s less people. He also loves trekking away from Orange County’s urban nightmare, illegally accessing national parks.

Abraham (“Abe”) Bernard

One of Jim’s friends. Abe works in Orange County’s Freeway Rescue squads as a car driver. He tracks or drives to an accident scene and helps get victims out of their damaged vehicles, using even chainsaws to separate flesh from metal. With all the horrors he sees, this mentally exhausting work has him going to the edge – especially when he discovers Lillian, a girl he knew, dead in an accident. He lives in a wealthy neighborhood of Orange County with his parents, with whom he has a very good, almost fraternal, relation.

Lucy McPherson

Lucy shares her life between home and church. She is a social worker with her church, a work which includes baby-sitting and general help of poorer families in Orange County or Bible readings. She helps set up this and other humanistic activities with people like Lillian Keilbacher. She often clashes with Reverend Strong, whose sectarian views of faith and church she doesn’t share.

Arthur Bastanchury

One of Jim’s friends. Arthur is a pacifist and idealist who became part of an underground network of resistance against the war-encouraging military-industrial system. He sticks anti-war posters, but more importantly he’s involved in using stolen military equipment to strike against military equipment manufacturers – taking extra care not to have anyone killed or wounded in the process. All persons involved, Arthur included, are very secretive and won’t reveal all the workings of the organization. Arthur is the one that brings Jim in the fold, and Arthur will be very surprised when Jim betrays him and the means Arthur thought was just.

Hana Steentoft

Jim met Hana in her night art classes, they became friends and eventually lovers. Hana is an abstract painter and her house is filled with her creations. She loves to talk about art, music and many other cultural topics; in that way, and also in her physical appearance and clothing, she is different from the average youth of Orange County. However, she doesn’t bear with all of Jim’s eccentricities and comes to cut off all contact with him. Jim is determined to make up for it and share with her his writing, that he previously hid from her.

Minor characters

Uncle Tom is Jim’s old uncle (probably Lucy’s father), over a hundred years old, hospitalized and scarcely visited by relatives. In his youth, Tom tried to fight the social injustice by doing his best as a public defender, but he lost the strength in his cause through meaningless repetition and time. Now he can but only tell Jim stories of Orange County’s past, confined in his room that feels too much like a prison cell.

‘Xavier (“X”) is Abe’s co-worker in the rescue squads. He has had a complementary experience as an army medic. Once in an accident he mistook a victim for his own son; this traumatizing experience leads Abe to fear for X’s sanity in their ungraceful job.

Virginia Novello became for a time Jim’s ally; for Jim it was mainly because of her attractive looks and the prestige his alliance with her would bring. Very quickly their relationship becomes just arguing and sex, always parting swearing they’ll never make the mistake to speak to one another again.

Dan Houston is an engineer working under Dennis McPherson. He knows very well the problems tied to the Ball Lighting program and grows desperate as the program heads to a dead-end. His personal life doing no better than his professional life, his drinking problem develops. He tragically deplores the fierce competition among defence contractors encouraged by the Air Force that result in many lives’ worth of work becoming useless (“the American way”).

Donald Hereford is LSR’s president and a fast rising power in LSR’s mother company Argo AG/Blessman Enterprises. His variety of skills and his ruthlessness won him the admiration of Stewart Lemon. He coolly makes big decisions with an understanding of the worlds of the industry, the Pentagon and the underground.

Sheila Meyer was Jim’s once ally. Jim suddenly cut all contact with her and left her with no explanation. This came very hard on Sheila, much more so than Jim had suspected, a fact that ultimately led him to take fresh resolutions for his life.

Angela Mendez is one of Jim’s friends and also Sandy’s long-time ally and often helps him in his business.

Humphrey Riggs is one of Jim’s friends and also colleague in the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company. He is notorious among his friends for his thrifty attitude; he is known to go to great lengths to make savings or bargain a good deal.

Lillian Keilbacher is an innocent girl of 18 and could be seen in Sandy’s parties. She is much appreciated by Lucy McPherson with whom she works in church. Her death in a car accident was a heavy blow for everyone.

Bob Tompkins is one of Sandy’s most important drug dealers; the two of them will have to work together to bring in a shipment of a new aphrodisiac. He lives in a rich seaside villa South of Orange County.

Raymond is Bob Tompkins’ dealing partner. But ever since some friends of his were killed by drone planes in Venezuela, Raymond has invested his resources on a personal vendetta against the US Air Force, who provided the planes. He is behind the sabotages of the military equipment manufacturers and is responsible for recruiting people for doing the job – Arthur being one among them.

Louis Goldman is LSR’s lawyer on the Stormbee proposal rejection case. He is Dennis McPherson’s contact in Washington DC and though Dennis hates lawyers, he comes to appreciate Goldman. With much work and thanks to many contacts and unofficial channels, he is able to unravel much of the political intrigue that goes much higher than LSR. But despite his efforts to push the case with repetitive appeals, LSR puts an end to the case.

Glossary: the world of The Gold Coast

• OC: Orange County, a part of the continuous urban maze of the West American coast. Orange trees no longer exist.
• Ally: a term describing a close relationship that can mean many things, like boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife. People make allies and break alliances. The term is probably used as a result of the decline of the concept of marriage as a social means of declaring a long-term relationship.
• Condomundo: term that describes the residential areas of the limitless urbanized world, a concatenation of the words condo and mundo (“world” in Spanish). Residential towers offer hundreds of apartments (aps) and form apartment complexes (applex).
• Mallsprawl: term that describes the huge areas where individual malls have merged into one. Malls are enclosed environments that can offer accommodation, food and leisure, so much that one can live all his life inside a mall without really needing to get out.
• Track: Cars no longer have combustion engines running on gas or oil, they are electric cars that follow the electromagnetic tracks set in the streets or freeways. The driver taps in his destination and the car’s central computer (the carbrain) does the rest. Cars rely heavily on software and electronics. Also used as a verb, to track, instead of driving.
• OC Freeway Rescue Squads: emergency teams that drive cars that can follow the track system but can run on internal combustion engines when necessary. The squads rush to the scene of the accident (sota) to assist the California Highway Patrol (CHP, or Chippies) in extracting people from the cars involved in the accident and providing first aid. Some victims can be already dead at the time (dots – dead on the spot), otherwise they’re carried to the ER. An accident can be attributed to a non-human error (sits – something in the silicon).
• LSR: Laguna Space Research, an aerospace company based in New York; division of Argo AG/Blessman Enterprises (or A/BE). It has offices in Orange County and an open air test facility in White Sands. Among their projects are:
• Project Ball Lightning: a Star Wars-like strategic defense program that would use ground lasers bounced by mirrors in orbit to destroy Soviet ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) in their boost phase.
• Project Stormbee: a precision guidance system that would guide an unmanned drone (RLV – Remotely Piloted Vehicle) to an extremely fast strike against ground targets.
• Designer drugs: drugs are most often chemical molecules designed in laboratories. They come in liquid form and they are taken directly from dropping the liquid on the eyeball, using an eyedropper. The verb for using an eyedropper is to lid.
• Molecular ceramics: a molecular glue that is activated by passing a rod over it. It is used to stick posters on walls.
• Sleepwalkers: young gangs who surf at night time. “Nazi” is used as a compliment (for example, “that’s real nazi”, or “surfnazi”).
• Warsaw Pact: established in 1955, still in force. To this day, the line of Soviet forces in eastern Europe are ready to invade the Free World.

Themes

Different modes of resistance (Sandy, Tashi, Dennis, Arthur) Resistance against industrial-military complex War as economy stimulant Extreme urbanization Globalization (trip in Russia) Fascination with the image (video screens), looks (Virginia vs Hana) Culturevulture vs Postmodernism Recreational drugs Tom: old people put away to convalescent homes to be forgotten in a society that lives only for the young consumer Consumerism, pop music culture (to be expanded)

Reviews

• Val’s Random Comments
• Richard – Book Addiction
• Fred’s Place
• Brendan – Balancing Frogs

Resources

• Excerpt at Macmillan.com
• The Gold Coast at The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Gold Coast at Google Books

The Memory Of Whiteness is a science fiction novel published in 1985.

The novel tells of the adventures of a man playing a strange musical instrument traveling throughout the solar system.

Summary

(To do)

Characters

Johannes Wright
Ninth master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra, blinded at a young age as the result of nepanathol withdrawal; during the withdrawal he hallucinated a conversation with Holywelkin. He embarks on his first grand tour of the orchestra as Grand Master, playing original compositions based upon Holywelkin’s equations.

Dent Ios
A native to the Uranian system, Dent is a music critic who writes for the journal Thistledown. He is selected by the journal’s staff to accompany the Grand Tour, where he meets and is befriended by Johannes Wright.

Richard Yablonski
Eighth Master of Holywelkin’s Orchestra, who selected Wright as his successor against the wishes of Ekern.

Arthur Holywelkin
Pioneering physicist, born on Deimos in the 30th century, who in his final years created the orchestra that bears his name. His Ten Forms of Change ushered in a new paradigm in physics, unifying relativity and quantum mechanics with a ten-dimensional universe and sub-qurak particles known as glints.

Ernst Ekern
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Holywelkin Orchestra; also a high-ranking figure in a metadrama society that is secretly manipulating events during that Grand Tour whose ambition is to replace Wright as master of the Orchestra.

Margaret Nevis
Crew manager for the Orchestra’s grand tour; a Russian woman from Iapetus.

Jan Atargatis
Head grey of the Jupiter system and member of Ekern’s secretive metadrama society.

Anton Vaccero
Lighting chief for the Orchestra’s grand tour; also a member of Ekern’s secretive metadrama society. A childhood friend and classmate of Wright’s who lived in the shadow of Wright’s budding talent at the Holywelkin Institute.

Karna Godavari
Security chief for the Orchestra’s grand tour.

Bloomsman
Known primarily as Red Whiskers through Dent Ios’ description of him; one of Ekern’s apprentices who frequently tangles with the security team.

Yananda
A member of Karna’s security team.

Marie-Jeanne
A member of Karna’s security team.

Delia Rosario
Sound chief for the Orchestra’s grand tour.

De Bruik
A composer and contemporary of Holywelkin; by the time of the novel her compositions have become part of the canon and are considered an artistic response to the paradigm-shift of Holywelkian physics.

Publication History

• Tor Books, September 1985
• MacDonald, February 1986
• Tor Books, July 1986
• Orbit Futura, January 1987
• J’ai Lu, as La Mémoire De La Lumière (French Translation), January 1987
• Bastei-Lübbe, as Sphären-Klänge (German Translation), 1987
• 東京創元社, as 永遠なる天空の調 (Japanese Translation), April 1994
• Tor Orb, January 1996
• Voyager, March 1999
• Le Livre de Poche, as La Mémoire De La Lumière (French Translation), November 2005

Text Variants

The short story In Pierson’s Orchestra, first published by Damon Knight in Orbit 18 (1976), was altered and became the first chapter of The Memory of Whiteness. It was the first of Robinson’s work to be sold.

The poem A Poem for Johannes, first published in The Anthology of Speculative Poetry #4 (1980) was altered and became the metalogue that Ekern speaks at the end of chapter 4.

Interview Comments

From Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, by Thomas E. Jackson, The New York Review of Science Fiction’, May 1988, No. 117:

Shelley is one of my favorite poets and when I was intensively involved with the Romantic poets, I read his work and the great biography of him, The Pursuit by Richard Holmes, and it seemed to me he was a kind of proto-sf writer, very cosmic, but at the same time a very political writer, a revolutionary utopian. So he was a kind of exemplar for me when I began to write, and The Memory of Whiteness is to a certain extent, a science fiction retelling of his long poem “Alastor“. Beyond that I don’t know what his influence has been, but I still admire him as one of the greatest English poets.

Reviews

• Val’s Random Comments

Resources

• Excerpt at macmillan.com
• The Orchestra, vocal and piano work to accompany text from the novel, composed by Stephen Andrew Taylor
• The Memory of Whiteness at The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Memory of Whiteness at Google Books
• Loruvani: Songs of the Maasai Steppe, music from a Maasai choir in Tanzania, an example of otherworldly music to most ears (recorded by Impossible Music)
  • Audio clips

Icehenge is Kim Stanley Robinson’s second novel, published in the same year as The Wild Shore, 1984. The novel consists of three stories connected through time, two of which were published before and significantly revised for the novel, and one written for the novel.

Icehenge deals with many themes, with each part complementing or shedding light to the other. In a background setting of the colonization of the solar system and social unrest in Mars, Icehenge explores the effects of longevity on human memory, historical memory, historical revisionism and the imperfect knowledge of past events. It shifts from a failed Martian revolution in 2248 to an expedition investigating these events, to an expedition to explore Icehenge, a mysterious monument on the north pole of Pluto, which is perhaps linked to a reclusive and wealthy woman who may hold the key to solving a mystery spanning centuries.

Structure

The novel consists of three parts bearing the names of the narrators and the date of the events, each written in first person narration:

• Emma Weil, 2248 A.D. : Written as a personal log or memoir.
• Hjalmar Nederland, 2547 A.D. : An important parallel is the ragged surface features of Mars and the half-erased memories of the narrator.
• Edmond Doya, 2610 A.D. : Switching between the Pluto expedition in the ‘present’ to Doya’s past across the Solar System.

Synopsis

Part One: Emma Weil, 2248 A.D.

This part takes place in the asteroid belt, used by big mining companies, and on Mars, which is controlled by a Mars Development Committee; these essentially American and Soviet colonies serve to supply Earth with ore. Social unrest and emerging revolutionary groups, such as the Mars Starship Association (MSA) and the Washington-Lenin Alliance (WLA), threaten to overthrow the Committee.

Emma Weil, a Biological Life Support Systems expert, finds herself amidst an MSA mutiny aboard the Rust Eagle in the asteroid belt: it had been planned for her to take that ship, as the MSA wanted her to work with them, due to her past liaison with a leading figure of the MSA, Oleg Davydov. The ship is joined by two others: Emma is asked to help them with the life support systems, as the MSA plans to convert them into a starship with 80 years’ autonomy. Emma assists but does not join them. She goes to New Houston, Mars, where she is welcomed by the Texas cell of the WLA, and joins the rebellion against the Committee. A guerilla with Committee forces ensues and she escapes to underground.

Part Two: Hjalmar Nederland – 2547 A.D.

Mars is greatly populated and partly terraformed, and is a American & Soviet colony fully under the control of the Committee, which revises history to arrange each new discovery from the past. The WLA revolution of 2248 is known as “the Unrest” and the WLA is considered to have never existed. People have gerontological treatments that extend their life spans, but do not prevent memory loss.

Thanks to his Committee contact (and relationship), Alexander “Shrike” Selkirk, Hjalmar Nederland and a team of areologists (Mars archeologists) arrive at the ruins of New Houston and carefully start a dig, trying to build a case with concrete proof. They discover a buried field car that the rioters had used to escape, full of documents, names, plans, and Emma Weil’s journal! A Committee press conference presents their finds:  WLA should be seen as heroes for things that are now taken for granted.

The Persephone expedition discovers Icehenge on Pluto. After a year at the dig, Nederland goes back to Burroughs and publishes a theory about Icehenge being built by MSA. In Alexandria, he researches the archives and asks to get access to classified documents. He finds evidence of Oleg Davydov, the disappearance of two space ships and confirms the existence of the MSA; he publishes throughout. Shrike saves him from his exhaustion and memory losses; Shrike is promoted and Nederland thinks that the Committe is counting on their amnesia not to care that they’re re-writing history.

A year later, Nederland is back at the New Houston dig. He goes on a long expedition through Martian terrain alone, to find out what some dots on a WLA map were. He has to go on foot with a cart and limited oxygen. He thinks he sees Emma and follows her to a lookout spot, loses her, ends up spending a night in exposure and hiking back with nearly no oxygen: he wonders whether he had a hallucination. He returns back safe with a resolve to keep pressuring to make Mars free. He will head an expedition to dedicate Icehenge to those killed in the Unrest, for the 350th anniversary of the convening of the Committee.

Part Three: Edmond Doya – 2610 A.D.

The Solar System is colonized and people often move from colony to colony throughout their lives. The Waystation, a hollowed-out asteroid, taxis between planets; it is owned by Caroline Holmes, a shipping magnate with a low public profile.

Edmond Doya (incidentally, Nederland’s great-grand-son) spent his childhood with his father on the Jupiter moons, reading all of Nederland’s works and writing a book on Davydov. He moved to Titan alone, doing manual jobs, discussing philosophy at his boarding house and becoming a self-made scholar on Martian history, getting published and getting annoyed at Nederland’s attitude. He had a life-changing experience when drunk on New Year’s Eve he came across an old stranger that said very convincingly that he built Icehenge.

He lived on the Waystation for 15 years, setting out to find out the truth about Icehenge, tracking down records from across the Solar System, painstakingly making connections and seeing patterns, doubting findings from other experts, saying the New Houston findings were planted. He eventually becomes a lecturer at the Waysation Institute for Higher Learning (founded by Holmes). He develops the Caroline Holmes theory: born on 2248, she would have built Icehenge with her own ships.

He is invited by Holmes to her abode, Saturn Artificial Satellite Four, in polar orbit around Saturn. They have lunch, visit the Sas’s telescope observatory. He has a dream that she is accusing him of destroying Nederland’s work: was she somehow manipulating his dreams? He tells her everything about his search and she responds calmly that all evidence is circumstantial, and won’t have him associate her with it. Edmond dares her to finance expedition. Later, he identifies and breaks into a large locked space: a perfectly realistic reconstruction of Icehenge on a smaller scale in a small planetarium, with laser beams that connect liths and prolong to stars. Edmond senses she had meant him to find the model and gets a feeling of already knowing her — confusion with Emma?
Edmond joins the Snowflake expedition to Pluto; Nederland refuses. Edmond tiredly argues his academic position with other specialists onboard. One of them, Arthur Grosjean, a member of the original Persephone expedition, theorizes that Icehenge’s geometric design is  based on ancient Celtic patterns; another, Theophilus Jones, has pulp theories about ancient astronauts.

On Pluto, they reach Icehenge. The Nederland expedition commemorative plaque on Pluto reads:

This Marker Has Been Placed Here
To Honor the Members of the
MARS STARSHIP ASSOCIATION
Who Built This Monument Soon After the Year
2248 A.D.
To Commemorate the Martian Revolution of 2248
And To Mark Their Departure From the Solar System.
There Will Never Come An End to the Good That They Have Done.

They study Icehenge for weeks. Through numerology and the megalithic yard, Jones discovers connections through the liths; the top of the tallest lith points to Pluto’s North Star and Edmond is reminded of the laser pointing upwards in Caroline’s model. They discover a hollow lith and descend through it: they find a cobalt blue ovoid chamber, with red streaks of changing patterns. Analysis and dating connects this to Holmes: “Doya’s Theory” is confirmed. Another theory states that the Perspehone crew built it before ‘discovering’ it. Jones makes a new theory: the Davydov expedition really happened and Emma’s journal is genuine; years later, Emma became Caroline; she visited Pluto, saw that the MSA had left no trace there, and built Icehenge; she wanted to slip the truth back into the world and fabricated evidence and planted it. Edmond and Jones wonder.

Background

The two previously published stories were:

• To Leave A Mark, first published in 1982 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 63); this became the first part of Icehenge. It is markedly influenced by the West/Soviet opposition still on-going at the time of writing and by Soviet revolution history; by extension it bears some similarities with the later Mars trilogy (social unrest on Mars and underground groups).
• On The North Pole Of Pluto, first published in 1980 (Orbit 18); this became the third part of Icehenge. Robinson gave the novella in rough form to Ursula K. Le Guin to read and edit while he was enrolled in her writing workshop at UCSD in the spring of 1977 (see KSR’s entry in 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin). Views of Saturn from the space station inhabited by the Caroline Holmes were inspired by images of Saturn taken during the Voyager flybys (see KSR’s introduction to Saturn: A New View).

This is completed by the middle part of Icehenge, which is the part that bears the most resemblance to the Mars trilogy: long passages with the exploration of the Mars terrain, sun mirrors to reflect sunlight, a Greek temple made of Martian rock (as in Red Mars, “The Crucible”), human longevity prolonged by advances in medicine and the effects of memory loss, tented cities often in craters (including one called Burroughs), even a character experiencing a sighting of a beloved person that is possibly a hallucination due to exposure. In this part, descriptions of the Martian terrain and areology are in italics; they are followed by thoughts and parallels with memory, the psyche, and the body marked with the passage of time.

Robinson was inspired for the structure of inter-linked short stories dealing with the uncertainty of memory and truth by Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Quotes

Part 1

“Something to leave a mark in the world, something to show we were here at all” – p.60

Part 2

“Memory is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past.” – p.77

“What we feel most, we remember best.” – p.78

“Life is the history of losses.” – p.85

“You see, quiet people know they have a reputation for being close-mouthed. Sometimes the reputation is like a power, for they see their acquaintances think that when they are moved to speak it will be for something special. But that is also a sort of pressure, a pressure that grows as the years pass and the quiet person’s reputation ages. What, after all, is really important enough to say? Not much. And quiet people become overly aware of that, and thus aware that most talk is a code masking vastly more complex meanings — meanings unfathomable to the very people most aware of their existence.” – p.85

“When human witness becomes weak evidence we’re in bad trouble. I say it happened. I was here, I saw it. That’s how we make history, by eyewitness accounts.” – p.94

“And so history is made, because facts are not things. But things make facts or break them, or so the archaeologist believes. For every great lie of history — if we assume they were all caught, which would be wrong — for the Tudors’ Richard III, for the first Soviet century, the Americans’ Truman, the South African war, the Mercury disaster — for each of these lies there had been a revision based on things.” – p.100

“Now I begin to see that I have underestimated the memory. Events keep piling into it beyond its natural capacity, and it becomes packed tight. The chambers of the hippocampus and amygdala are overwhelmed. What remains of the distant past is jammed under the weight of subsequence, so that recollection is stressed, then disabled. But the memories remain. To be able to recall them takes a particular form of intelligence; so that when I curse my poor memory, I am really lamenting my stupidity. The other form of remembrance, the epiphanic recollection, is not really recollection at all. Under the right pressure the past bursts into consciousness, as a string of images we have created — so we see not the past, but a part of ourselves, a sweet fragment to make us ache with the poignancy of time lost, and the beauty of connection with it. In the interregnum, in the naked moment between lives, we are most vulnerable to experience. On the Earth events have a sheer physical weight of significance. When we leave our natural span, and venture into the centuries, we are like climbers on Olympus Mons, hiking up out of the atmosphere. We must carry our air with us. I don’t know what I am.” – p.137

“The memory’s the bone; imagination, flesh;
The animating spirit? — is a forlorn wish.” – p.149

“We could be making a Utopia of Mars, the planet insists we create a new society with every bloody icy dawn — in fact we need to create such a society for our sanity’s sake, because now we’re all going to live a thousand years and we are going to have to live in the system we make, for year after year beyond our ability to imagine! That’s what we’ve forgotten, Shrike. It used to be that people could say to themselves, why should I sacrifice my life for social change, it will take years and I’ll not see the benefits of it, let this time be peaceful at least and the next generation can worry about it. That was one of the biggest forces against change, the selfishness of the individual who only wanted peace. But now people are dragging it out day to day on Mars forgetting that not their children but they are going to have to live in the future they build.” – p.153

“Marx never guessed how technology would fix wood-and-steam capitalism into concrete for the ages. We’re just tiny organic components of a solar-system-wide machine, Hjalmar. How can you fight it?” – p.154

“We plunge through the years like giants, as the poet said, and not one of us can be understood except as creatures continuously exfoliating. When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us — or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very tips, their spatial selves — no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.” – p.183

Part 3

“Could it really be true that all we knew was what our senses told us?” – p.198

“How can you be so sure, Edmond? How can you be sure?” – p.199

“Autobiography is now the necessary extension of memory. Five centuries from now I may live, but the I writing this will be nothing in his mind but a bare fact. I write this, then, for that stranger myself, so that he may know who he has been. I hope it will be enough. I am confident it will; my memory is strong.” – Edmond, p.224

“Acute students of finance will have observed that money, abstract concept though it is, behaves as if it had mass. Economic laws imitate physical laws. Everyone’s collection of money is a planetary body, in other words, exerting influence on everyone else’s. Thus the more money you have the stronger its gravity is, and the easier it is to attract more. Now most of us own mere asteroids of money. But some people own stars of money” – p.233

” I considered it. “Do you really think that if we did not exist, Saturn would not be sublime?” I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The silence stretched on, for a minute and more. Then: “Who would know it?” “So it is the knowing,” I said. She nodded. “To know is sublime.” ” – p.247

“How I hate people who say that! Everyone is a political person, don’t you understand that? You would have to be autistic or a hermit to be truly apolitical! People who say that are merely saying they support the status quo, which is a profoundly political stance–” – p.257

“There are so many influences in our lives that we don’t control – you might as well not worry about another one that you may be making up.” – Theophilus Jones, p.266

“We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.” – Theophilus Jones, p.287 (closing phrases)

Publication History

• Ace Books ISBN 0441358543, 1984
• Futura Orbit ISBN 0708881661, December 1985
• MacDonald ISBN 0356124029, October 1986
• Denoël ISBN 2207304256, as Les Menhirs De Glace, (French translation) September 1986
• Editrice Nord ISBN 8842901717, (Italian translation) 1986
• Bastei-Lübbe ISBN 3404240928, as Die Eisigen Säulen Des Pluto, (German translation) 1987
• Tor Books ISBN 0812502671, September 1990
• Voyager ISBN 0006482554, September 1997
• Zagrebačka naklada ISBN 9536234262, as Ledeni Hram, (Croatian translation) 1997
• Лира Принт ISBN 9548610183, as Айсхендж, (Bulgarian translation) 1997
• Tor Orb ISBN 0312866097, July 1998
• 漓江出版社 ISBN 7540726105, as 冰柱之谜, (Chinese translation) 2001
• Gallimard ISBN 2070313042, as Les Menhirs De Glace, (French translation) 2003
• Minotauro ISBN 8445074954, as Icehenge: La Memoria Perdida, (Spanish translation) March 2004
• Voyager ISBN 9780007336746, August 2009

Reviews

• Jo Walton – Tor.com
• Val’s Random Comments
• Richard – Book Addiction
• From A Sci-Fi Standpoint
• Words Uttered in Haste

Resources

• Excerpt at Macmillan.com
• Icehenge at The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Icehenge at Google Books
• Icehenge at Goodreads
• New Houston flag reconstruction at Flags Of The World