The Gold Coast was published by Tor in 1988, the second of the Three Californias novels. Where The Wild Shore imagined California after nuclear war, The Gold Coast extrapolates the California of the 1980s forward: Orange County has become an endless sprawl of freeways, defense contractor campuses, and shopping malls. The population has tripled. Every surface is paved.
Jim McPherson is a part-time poet and writing teacher whose father Dennis designs missile guidance systems for a defense contractor. Jim joins a group of eco-saboteurs who attack defense industry facilities. The novel alternates between Jim’s perspective (drugs, parties, sabotage, aimless dissatisfaction) and Dennis’s (the pride and compromise of building weapons, the awareness that his work may destroy the world, the desire to provide for his family).
Robinson uses the father-son conflict to embody the larger contradiction of late-twentieth-century California: a place of extraordinary natural beauty systematically destroyed by the very prosperity it generates. The novel is the darkest of the Three Californias — its characters are trapped in systems they can damage but not change.
Collecting The Gold Coast
First edition (Tor, New York, 1988): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$60
- Signed: $60–$120