Possible Mountains and Rivers: The Zen Realism of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias

While Buddhist sensibilities pervade all of Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction, their most aesthetically consistent development can be found in his first major achievement, the three novels depicting alternative futures for southern California: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge. Zen realism is quite rare in science fiction, since the genre’s most characteristic topoi are alien to Zen’s insistence on suchness. That is why Robinson’s vision is so distinctive. Each novel in its own way meshes science fiction and the aesthetic values of Zen: in narrative protocols, in linguistic style, and in the relationship between reader and text.