The Gold Coast cover art

The Gold Coast

The Three Californias Triptych, Book 2

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The Gold Coast

By: Kim Stanley Robinson
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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About this listen

This second book in Kim Stanley Robinson's richly detailed Three Californias Triptych reveals a second, all-too-plausible possible future for Orange County.

North America, 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 an epic work of science fiction that explores a grim future and what one man can do to turn the tides.

©2013 Kim Stanley Robinson (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc. and Skyboat Media, Inc. Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
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the whole time I was waiting for the bombs to go off but instead I got a slice of midle class near future california dream. great story

great story from close future

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Impressive this was written in the late 80s. Stanley Robinson based The Gold Coast’s technologies on what was foretold at the time, and took them to some logical conclusions with regards to how they would intermesh with a hyper-capitalist, hyper-consumerism American west coast super-city, and what kind of culture would result. Something like the reality in parts of the world today. In particular, the narcissistic, performative selfie culture, plus driverless cars, plus remote or pilotless military technologies.
Within this world, four friends develop their own individual responses to an exhausting and vacuous world, for better or worse, in a kind of coming of age (belatedly, again spot on for today) dystopian tale.
There’s a lot here; concern about unfettered urban development, the military industrial complex, the dehumanising effects of hyper-consumerism and the importance of nature. I enjoyed it a helluva lot more than his Ministry for the Future. Also, there is that sort of quaint and pleasing retro vibe you get when you read old science fiction; the author gets the results of the technologies right but the actual description of them is based on the info they had at time of writing; so driverless cars run in magnetic tracks, folks still have CD players and while they have multiple screens and cameras to film themselves in their various hedonistic acts to rewatch later; they store the material on VHS.

Prescient

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Far too descriptive in places, and mind-numbingly boring. I did not end up caring about any of the characters.

Dry, and overly detailed

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