paradise now the story of american utopianism

The nuts and bolts of this future green society-how they arrange transit, housing, jobs, construction-offer genuine guidance to the contemporary left, worth mining for ideas as we envision and fight for a Green New Deal. Here, Robinson’s focus is on a disillusioned young man struggling to figure out how to resist.įinally, in Pacific Edge (1990), a series of flashbacks to 2012 shows a world falling apart, even while the bulk of the novel focuses on how that world might look should it be put back together. Next, in The Gold Coast (1988), we see Robinson’s portrait of an America where that “glory” has run amok: a hyper-capitalist society that, rather than fetishize the past, barrels ever onward in the name of progress, with nary a thought given to the land or the global poor. Many throughout the country dream of restoring America to what they imagine is its former glory-a glory whose warts they never saw up close. The series begins with The Wild Shore (1984), in which a nuclear attack has decimated the United States, knocking technology and economies back hundreds of years.

The novels also hold up as thorough and plausible outlines of the potential futures we have ahead of us, made only more realistic by the passage of time.

Most striking, perhaps, are the moments of real prescience: each book foresees some crucial aspect of America under Donald Trump and offers, if not prescriptions, helpful tools with which to examine our present. The first two novels offer variations on barbarism in the last, Robinson gives the first of what will be several stabs throughout his career at utopia.Īll three books are a pleasure to read, though the prose is less consistent than in his later Mars trilogy. Re-released by Tor Books this year in a one-volume, 930-page edition, the Three Californias trilogy imagines three possible futures for the world writ large through the lens of Orange County, California.

Pacific Edge is the third and final novel in a series Robinson composed throughout the 1980s, one of the earlier books in the author’s now nineteen-novel oeuvre. Taken together, Robinson’s trilogy forms a meditation on how we relate to the past, and how these relationships can and can’t guide us to a brighter future.

Paradise now the story of american utopianism