ABSTRACT
In the textual studies published between 1984 and 1990, Kim Stanley Robinson created three versions of the southern Californian landscape that perceptively explore the formal possibilities of the sf genre in the United States in the late 1980s. In each, a younger and older man cross generational barriers and engage in a conversation about society, personal life, and the vocation of the writer as they simultaneously confront the political crisis that shapes their particular spacetime variation. Robinson took up the challenge of dystopian narrative in The Gold Coast, but he did so in ways that drew on both the Wellsian sensibility of the classical dystopia and the noir pessimism of cyberpunk. Robinson's text is a carefully crafted dystopian effort in cognitively mapping the cultural logic of a system dominated by the Reaganesque military-industrial complex in the years just before the historic shift of 1989, when the United States became the infamous "victor" of the Cold War.
