Summary
The Wild Shore is the first novel published by Kim Stanley Robinson and the first of his Three California’s trilogy. It follows the story of teenager Henry Fletcher on the shores of what used to be Orange County, in an America that is trying to recover from a nuclear war. The novel opposes the views of a violent effort to rise America from its ashes to restore its past grandeur and a sense that the clean slate the war offered is an opportunity to correct past mistakes.
Review
Excerpt from review at Weighing a pig doesn’t fatten it, June 2020
Partly coming of age story, the narrator is the 17-year-old Hank Fletcher, who lives in a small community of about 60 people that try to make by in 2047, about 6 decades after a nuclear attack sent The United States back to a pre-industrial setting, with isolated communities of survivors scattered across the land.
Information is key in the novel. Just like the readers, the characters are in the dark about what happened. They are also in the dark about what is happening, for Robinson shows glimpses of a bigger narrative in world politics in the aftermath of the attack – but characters nor readers get to know its true extent. It is a clever narrative device, maximizing the reader’s empathy with the characters: we share uncertainty and frustration about it. It is especially clever because – like the readers – the characters do know about what once was: trains, electricity, hospitals, national pride, and general literacy.
Robinson isn’t showy, and he doses the post-apocalyptic horror extremely sparsely, at the right times, with supreme command – so much that most of the time you even forget you’re reading a post-apocalyptic story at all.
Just as Hank doesn’t have a grip on what happens, he doesn’t have a grip on what he himself is doing. He doesn’t know whether his actions are the right ones, and moral information doesn’t come cheap. The obligatory old man in the story – Tom – seems to have a better grip on things. He’s the only character that survived from the olden days, but ultimately confesses to be a fool too, like anyone. Robinson leaves it to the reader: how much in control are we really, and how is history formed?
It’s a testament to Robinson’s great wisdom that this novel doesn’t offer judgement: “People are what they are, eh?” And while there’s clearly some nostalgia towards a simple life, when his characters try to determine which life is better – the heydays of American imperialism in the 1980s, or the remnants of that civilization forced to fish and farm – it quickly becomes clear that figuring such a matter out is impossible.
All that makes for a richer novel. Robinson is not preaching, only pointing at a few problems, and has no answers ready. That’s maybe surprising to those who think of Robinson as a proselytizing writer. I guess they should reconsider, as I’ve always thought of KSR as a humble servant, not the know-it-all info-dumper.
Granted, the book makes a case for pacifism, but even that isn’t spelled out 100%, as the failure of violence in the book is mainly a matter of tactics and context, not necessarily principle, and Robinson writes with tons of sympathy for the youthful impulse of resistance.
Some have written about KSR’s bad luck with timing, publishing this novel a few years before the implosion of USSR and the end of the Cold War, as if that makes this story somewhat dated. Let me assure you: such sentiments miss the bigger picture, even in 2020, The Wild Shore has lost none of its power. It hasn’t aged a day.
The End and After 