Month: January 2015

Audio edition of Pacific Edge, the most uplifting novel in my library by Cory Doctrow

I’ve written many times about Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990 novel Pacific Edge, a utopian story about a world where corporate growth has been checked and people have found a way to live together without the need for extreme haves and have-nots, and without the imperative to destroy the world to enrich the few. Now it’s available as a DRM-free audiobook (download, MP3 CD).

By Cory Doctorow

…

Pacific Edge is a utopian novel about small-town politics. It deals with a town council fight over a zoning change over a hill in a small Orange County town. But while that provides unlikely and ample drama to pull the novel along, what it really serves to do is give us a tour of Robinson’s wonderfully plausible and human tomorrow, a vividly imagined world where people are an asset, not a liability; where greed is a vice, not a virtue; and where generosity is a policy goal.

Robinson’s book is a story about the confusing American character, everything that makes the country great and terrible. The American promise that every person is deserving of rights and respect, regardless of nobility and birth; the American reality that condemned whole populations at home and abroad to misery and terror in the service of profits for an elite who considered themselves to be nobility, albeit a self-made nobility.

It’s also a story about stories, about how the post-Reagan era has crowded out any kind of plausible narrative about people being fundamentally good and worthy, replacing it with a story about people being the competition — every migrant and every worker a drain on your taxes and a drag on the bottom line. Pacific Edge is a reminder about what a pathological state that is to live in, and takes as its theory of change that once you show people that there might be a way to live without your happiness being someone else’s misery, they will leap to it.

Pacific Edge