Friday, September 20, 2002
Title: Pacific Edge
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Voyager
It seems to be an ongoing issue when I approach trilogies unconsciously - I always seem to end up reading the wrong book first, which I guess is to say any book of three instead of the first. Here Pacific Edge is the third in Kim Stanley Robinson's "orange county" series, though one suspects that each volume is in fact separate enough as to make little real difference.
Pacific Edge is the story of one of the most eventful phases in the life of Kevin Claibourne. Kevin has just taken a place as a green representative on the town council. On the same day as he finds out that the girl he liked the most in school and has remained friends with has just become single for the first time in 15 years. However that night at his first council meeting he catches the new mayor trying to slip something past the council. A motion which relates to the last piece of wilderness in the area, an area just behind his house. This sees him in a struggle to save the land, and then to complicate things the new mayor who is driving for the change is the ex of the woman he is falling in love with.
With the intensity of Kevin's life in the months that follow it is almost irrelevant that this book is set in the 2060's after a period of sweeping political changes across the world. With the battle for the piece of land it is already clear that KRS's familiar themes of environmentalism are present here - though with the detail of the current state of things KRS goes further than that. Corporations have been dismantled, companies now having limits on how large they can grow, as have the wages of people. Everyone in a community takes part in the preservation of that community in some way and the houses they live in are increasingly ecologically sound, giving rise to expanding home farms.
KRS combines the two levels of his book well, though in the end it seems that the side of emotional relationships takes more of the driving seat while also being the most striking and gripping force of the narrative.
RVWR: PTR
September 2002
