The Wild Shore

The Wild Shore, Kim Stanley Robinson, 371 pages

Hank lives on what’s left of the coast of California, sixty-odd years after the devastating nuclear attack that nearly wiped the United States off the map. He spends his days fishing, helping around the village of Onofre, pulling pranks and joking around with his group of friends, and learning to read and write with Tom, an ancient old man who teaches him what life was like in the old time – the good and the bad. But when a group of San Diegans come to town on the old broken-down railway, Hank starts to think that they could help set up the United States again.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I’m a sucker for a good (non-cliched) post-apocalyptic novel, and this fits the bill. The Wild Shore doesn’t have any easy answers for the reader, there’s no obvious right path for Hank to take, but the moral grey areas don’t leave you feeling discouraged or bleak, but hopeful. This is also a wonderfully small-scale novel. I’ve talked a couple times about how much I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy novels (especially in the young adult genre, which this is not) that shy away from epic, world-changing story arcs and focus more on interpersonal relationships and solving problems in your small, local area. In The Wild Shore, the reader doesn’t know what’s happening in the outside world, or even more than fifty miles away, and that lack of knowledge isn’t stifling but freeing. It lets Robinson develop the Onofre Valley more deeply and richly, and utilize that tight focus necessitated by the communication difficulties in this post-apocalyptic land to tell a unique tale.