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
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…
