The Gold Coast

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The California trilogy might be KSR's most autobiographical work - at least the setting is, as he moved to Orange County when he was 2. Stan was 34 when he wrote it, and it is very much a book about saying goodbye to late adolescence - the extended period of drugs, booze and parties, being twentysomething before settling down.

I'm not sure how much of an epicure KSR is or was, but Jim McPherson, the main character, is an idealist - something he shares with his inventor. McPherson teaches languages for a living, and KSR taught freshman composition. McPherson is also a struggling writer, writing poetry and history, trying to come to grips with postmodernism, something I'm sure Robinson had to do as well under the auspices of his PhD mentor Frederic Jameson - a giant of pomo literary criticism.

In an excellent 2012 interview in the LA Review of Books, Robinson confirmed the partly autobiographical nature of The Gold Coast, implies his father was a military engineer too, and even goes as far to call it "the story of that time and place, Orange County in the 1970s, in a way I don't think any other novel has."

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Full review on Weighing A Pig...