The Wild Shore

by

Paperback, 352 pages

English language

Published Nov. 20, 1994 by HarperCollins.

ISBN:
978-0-00-648019-8
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5 stars (1 review)

2047: and for sixty years America has been quarantined after a devastating nuclear attack.

Seventeen-year-old Henry wants to help make America great again. Like it was before all the bombs went off. But for the people of Onofre Valley, on the coast of California, just surviving is challenge enough. Living simply on what the sea and land can provide, they strive to preserve what knowledge and skills they can in a society without mass communications. Then one day the world comes to Henry, in the shape of two men who say they represent the new American resistance. And Henry and his friends are drawn into an adventure that will make the end of their childhood...

The Wild Shore is the first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias Trilogy.

5 editions

reviewed The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson

A fresh wind

5 stars

This took a couple of chapters to get fully into, but really is a great story. Full of humanity, subtle questioning, and dramatic yet natural character development, The Wild Shore also has gripping action and beautiful scenery. Robinson's is the best realistic sci-fi I've read - I find it very impressive how the full power of SF/F imaginary worlds can be used in such a realistic way - and I'll certainly read the rest of the Three Californias.

As ever, Ursula K. Le Guin puts it elegantly:

There's a fresh wind blowing in The Wild Shore... welcome, Kim Stanley Robinson

Nearly 40 years after The Wild Shore was written, the wind is still fresh, but brings with it the disappointment that little has improved.

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