Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Paperback)

I've read The Wild Shore and was sorely disappointed after Pacific Edge. Seeing as all these reviewers liked the other two so much more, I don't think I'd dig the other one.

Like most utopias, there are a few flies in the ointment, and it is around these that the story line is based. Here we find Alfredo, the town mayor, scheming a way to go beyond the personal income limit, and the company he is associated with has become involved in shady deals to try and sidestep the limits on company size. The object of the scheming is an undeveloped hill commanding a great aesthetic view of the town and valley it sits in, and the book starts with an attempt to rezone the hill for commercial development. The book's protagonist, Kevin, something of an idealist and nature lover, not terribly politically astute but stubborn, stalls the attempt, but the battle is joined. As counterpoint to the political battle, Kevin becomes romantically involved with Alfredo's long-time lover Ramona, who has just split up with Alfredo.

Unfortunately, these story threads are only mildly interesting. There is little work done to explore either the pluses or minuses of the envisioned society, Kevin's personal problems are not strong enough, do not have enough angst, to make the reader become terribly involved in them, the basic object of the battle, the hill, does not seem deserving of all the energy devoted to it. This seems to be a typical problem with utopian novels - at their heart, utopias are necessarily dull, not having any strong points of contention on which to base a story. All of the actions of this book seem somewhat inconsequential, the object of contention is really a molehill, not a mountain.

The prose style is easy, the main characters are reasonably well developed, the plot line is coherent. But this is at best an average book, not nearly as good as The Wild Shore.

I want to give specifics to back up my opinion as any good review should, but I'm finding myself at a loss trying to think of a descriptive, creative way to explain just how lacking this book was in plot, characters, and everything else. When I was two thirds of the way through the book and nothing had happened yet, I simply stopped reading. And again, I'm actually a very big KSR fan, and I hardly ever stop reading a book in the middle, let alone a KSR book. Unfortunately Stan just lost his way with this one.