Read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Surprisingly Accurate Vision for Autonomous Cars — From 1988

Here’s an exclusive excerpt of ‘The Gold Coast’ (1988), which Tor Books is reissuing as part of KSR’s ‘Three Californias’ trilogy

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Today, Kim Stanley Robinson is best known for his celebrated Mars trilogy, which follows a techno-utopian society establishing itself on a terraformed red planet, and books like New York 2140, which explore a relatively near future consumed by accelerating tech and ecological collapse. But before those books brought him fame, he began with a trilogy of novels forecasting — and exploring — three different futures for California.

This week, Tor Books is reissuing the novels — The Wild Shore (1985), The Gold Coast (1988) and Pacific Edge (1990) — in one volume, called Three Californias. Today, the title conjures the specter of the secessionist daydream espoused by fringe ideologues, of splitting the state into smaller ones. That’s fitting, in a way — these are divergent futures for the state indeed, from nuclear apocalyptic to overwhelmingly networked. The books, as you might expect, contain rich and nuanced visions for forthcoming futures — including, in the example you’ll find below, an astonishingly relevant portrait of highways overrun by self-driving cars…