adrian_turtle

This was Robinson's first novel, one of a set of three set in future Orange County, Californias, exploring three different futures for America. The second one is about a future much like the present day, hyper-capitalist and dystopian. The third is set in an ecotopia which apparently involves lots of softball. (I've only read The Wild Shore, and gleaned this information from reviews of the others.) After reading The Ministry of the Future, I thought I'd give Robinson another try, and this book sounded most relevant to my personal interests. (I've attempted Years of Rice and Salt multiple times and never gotten very far in. It sounds so interesting!)

The Wild Shore is set about sixty years after the US was shattered by multiple neutron bombs, then quarantined by the rest of the world. It's now a bunch of extremely small, struggling towns which are kept separated from each other as the rest of the world uses satellite imagery to bomb them any time they attempt to do something like build railroad tracks. The California coast is patrolled by Japanese vessels who prevent them from sailing too far out. No one in the book has any idea who bombed the US or why, but given the quarantine I assume the US started the war and someone else finished it.

The book is narrated by Henry, who is 17 and lives in a village of 60. He hangs out with a bunch of mostly-indistinguishable other teenage boys. (I spent three-quarters of the book thinking Steve and Nicolin were two different boys. They are not. I wish writers wouldn't randomly call characters by their first or last name.) They fish and farm and trade with scavengers. Henry is the prize student of Tom, one of four elders who recall the pre-catastrophe days. It is immediately obvious that Tom's teachings are a mix of real and complete bullshit, but as the younger generation has no context or means of fact-checking, they tend to think it's either all true or all bullshit.

The village gets contacted by the remnants of San Diego, which wants to build a rail line and fight back against the quarantine. Henry gets sucked into this, with disastrous results.

This book is SLOW. I often like books that are mostly about daily life, but Henry's daily life was not that interesting - he spends a lot of time hanging out with boys and talking and thinking about girls and daddy issues, and you can get that in any contemporary novel about teenage boys. The only real character is Tom - everyone else is lightly sketched in at best. Girls and women are only present as girlfriends, potential girlfriends, and moms. (There's one girl who's the leader of the farmers, who are mostly women - the men are mostly fishers - but she doesn't get much to do.) The book was just barely interesting enough that I finished it, but it didn't end anywhere more interesting than the rest of it.

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Content note: Characters use racial slurs for Japanese people.

An incredibly beautiful book and a very faithful adaptation. Much of the language is word-for-word from the book. I would happily hang most panels on my wall.

A number of sequences are completely wordless, and while very beautiful I don't think I would have understood what was going on in all of them if I hadn't already read the book. There's also a lot of panels which are extremely dark, so much so that it's hard to tell what's happening. Most of these are indoors. I know there's no electricity but in most of these there is magelight!

Also, the otak is the size of a mouse and looks very much like a mouse. That is too small - in the book it catches a mouse and brings it to Ged, and other people tease Ged that it's a rat or a dog. I pictured it the size of a kitten or squirrel, and looking somewhat like a stockier weasel, or a small wolverine or marten. Definitely not a mouse!

It's always interesting to see other people's visualizations of books. The dragon of Pendor is seen mostly through a thick fog, all glowing eyes and fiery breath and insinuation. The flying creatures that pursue Ged and Serret from the Court of the Terrenon are not monstrous pterodactyls, as I always imagined them, but hideous living gargoyles.

I highly recommend this to anyone who's already read the novel, but I don't suggest reading it instead of or before the novel.

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