The sun was obscured by a cloud for a moment, then burst out again. Big clouds like tall ships coasted in, setting sail for the mountains and the desert beyond. The ocean was a deep, rich, blue blue, a blue in blue within blue inside of blue, the heart and soul and center of blue. Blinding chips of sunlight bounced on the swelltops. Liquid white light glazed the apricot cliff of Corona del Mar, the needles of its Torrey pines like sprays of dark green. Ironwood color of the sun-drenched cliff. Eye still jumping a bit here, oxygen starvation, then enrichment. What a glossy surface to the massive rocky substance of the world! These boulders under his feet were amazing pieces of work, so big and stony, like the broken marbles of giants.
He skipped from boulder to boulder, looking. From time to time his hands came together and swung the imaginary bat in its catlike involuntary swing.
He came to the end of the jetty, the shoulder-high lighthouse block. The wind rushed over him and the clouds sailed in, the waves made their myriad glugs and the sunlight packed everything, and he stood there balancing, feeling he had come to the right place, and was now wide awake, at the center of things. End of the world. Sun low on the water.
For a long time he stood there, turning round, staring at all of it, trying to take it all in. All the events of the summer filled him at once, flooding him from a deep well of physical sensation, spinning him in a slurry of joy and sorrow. There was a steel chisel someone had left behind. He kneeled, picked it up and banged it against the last granite rock of the jetty. The rock resisted, harder than he would have imagined. Stubborn stuff, this world. A chunk of rock about the size of two softballs was wedged between boulders, and he freed it for use as a hammer. Hammer and chisel, he could write something, leave his mark on the world. All of a sudden he wanted to cut something deep and permanent, something like I, Kevin Claiborne, was here in October of 2065 with oceans of clouds in the sky and in me, and I am bursting with them and everything has gone wrong! The granite being what it was, he contented himself with KC. He cut the figures as deep as he could.
When he was done he put down his tools. Behind him Orange County pulsed green and amber, jumping with his heart, glossy, intense, vibrant, awake, alive. His world and the wind pouring through it. His hands came together and made their half swing. If only Hank hadn’t caught that last one. If only Ramona, if only Tom, if only the world, all in him all at once, with the sharp stab of our unavoidable grief; and it seemed to him then that he was without a doubt the unhappiest person in the whole world.
And at that thought (thinking about it) he began to laugh.
Acknowledgments
For help on this one, many thanks to Anne Schneider, Joan Davis, Karen Fowler, Patrick Delahunt, Paul Park, Terry Bisson, and Beth Meacham.
By Kim Stanley Robinson from Tom Doherty Associates
The Blind Geometer
Escape from Kathmandu
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (Editor)
The Gold Coast
Green Mars
Icehenge
The Memory of Whiteness
Pacific Edge
The Planet on the Table
Remaking History
A Short, Sharp Shock
The Wild Shore
Review
An outstanding achievement, the concluding volume in Robinson’s Orange County, Calif., trilogy again takes place in the middle of the next century. The books are not strict sequels, providing instead several versions of an alternate world. While The Wild Shore depicted a postnuclear holocaust society and The Gold Coast reflected a period of uncontrolled technological growth, this novel is set in an ecological utopia with a reduced population and rational use of renewable resources. Because utopias can be boring, Robinson generates action through several intertwined conflicts, combining the political and personal lives of his characters. The introduction of the newly hired town attorney provides a fresh insight into the community of El Modena and an external viewpoint on its citizens’ “usual array of Machiavellian battles,” as do excerpts from a diary writtten in the past. The characters are fully developed and individually motivated; the reader identifies with them easily. Robinson’s writing ranks in the highest levels of the genre, and the last sentences of the book generate a soaring optimism. Taken together, the books of the trilogy invite interesting comparisons or their several worlds, but separately each is a completely independent, excellent story.
“Through a blend of dirt-under-fingernails naturalism and lyrical magical realism, Robinson invites us to share his characters’ intensely personal, intensely loyal attachment to what they have. The result is a bittersweet utopia that may shame you into entertaining new hope for the future.”
“An outstanding achievement…. Robinson’s writing ranks in the highest levels of the genre. The book generates a soaring optimism.”
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
PACIFIC EDGE
Copyright © 1988 by Kim Stanley Robinson
All rights reserved.
This book was originally published as a Tor hardcover in November 1990.
An Orb Edition
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Kim Stanley.
Pacific edge / Kim Stanley Robinson.
p. cm. — (Three Californias)
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 0-312-89038-9
1. Orange County (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Twenty-first century—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Robinson, Kim Stanley. Three Californias.