Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a problem with mirrors. He sees things in them that others don't-like the future.
He first noticed this, he recalls, as a small child, soon after his family had moved from Illinois to a tract of unincorporated land by the foothills near Orange. The neighborhood, back at the start of the '60s, consisted mostly of orange groves, with new suburban streets extending into the trees.
Across the street from his home, construction workers were putting up a house on an empty lot. Robinson would wander around the lot, watching the men work and looking at the piles of sand and boards. One day, Robinson stood in front of a stack of window glass placed on end and leaning against some dark boards. The surface of the outer sheet of glass reflected the scene behind him-the rows of orange trees that surrounded his street.
"But when I looked at the glass, the reflection showed me more houses, the street extending off to the west, big buildings in the distance, immense spans of concrete cleaving the sky."
Disturbed by this vision of endless development, Robinson ran home and said nothing about it. But three decades later, this stark and foreboding image of what Orange County could become re-emerged, this time as the setting for a science-fiction novel, "The Gold Coast" (Tor Books, $17.95).
This is the future as a slow-growther's worst nightmare. The year is 2030, and the developers, left unchecked, have had their way with Orange County. The northern half of the region is nearly as densely packed as the Gaza Strip. Double-decker freeways embedded with gas stations, coffee shops and low-income housing crisscross the county, connecting a weblike network of omnipresent malls.
Fifty years from now, unemployment runs rampant, especially among the young; drug abuse has reached pandemic proportions, and the system rises or falters on the economic fortunes of the local weapons industry. Not at all, Robinson acknowledges, what he, as a child, would have anticipated for the area. "It was very rural," recollects Robinson, who is 35 and makes his home in Washington, D.C., "and I spent a lot of my time in the orange groves reading. It was easy to pretend, having immersed myself in Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, that I was growing up in the 1880s, say in Hannibal, Mo.
"Through the 1960s, as I was growing up, I noticed a curious thing. Every adult in Orange County seemed to be rushing about, working as hard and as fast as they could to transform the landscape into something more like the one I saw in the glass. Groves were going down at an incredible rate; houses and office complexes and condominiums and shopping malls were going up even faster."
Robinson believes it was this rapid transformation of Orange County from "agricultural reserve into urban corporate-capitalist consumer society" that contributed to him becoming a science-fiction writer and, according to a left-wing French newspaper, a Marxist. "I stepped out of the 19th Century and into the 21st in one brief adolescence. It taught me that America was not the place I thought it was."
Later, Robinson enjoyed what some right-wing critics within the science-fiction field characterized as his revenge on the homeland of which he despaired. The year 1984 saw the release of his novel "The Wild Shore," as the first in a new line of prestigious "Ace Specials." In it, he portrayed Orange County as a rural backwater still reeling from a limited nuclear war that had reduced the entire United States-the only country in the world to suffer such ravages-to Fourth-World status.
"The right attacked the book as an act of aggression against the U.S. The left attacked me for having championed some basic American values in the book."
The science-fiction field as a whole, however, seemed more interested in the seemingly unheralded arrival of a new talent on the scene than in Robinson's politics.
"I was your typical 10-year overnight success," he quips. Robinson had sold his first short stories in 1974, to editor Damon Knight's then-famous "Orbit" anthology. A year later, he attended Clarion, a workshop for fledgling science-fiction writers each summer at Michigan State University. And in the ensuing years, Robinson created a solid body of work that included titles such as "Icehenge" and "The Memory of Whiteness."
Robinson also forged a reputation as a critic. His doctoral dissertation-a study of the novels of Philip K. Dick, a Bay Area science-fiction writer who spent the last years of his life in Santa Ana before dying of a stroke in 1982was published by UMI Research Press in 1984 and received some acclaim. Robinson turned to Dick at the behest of Frederick Jameson, one of the world's foremost Marxist literary critics and his academic adviser at UC San Diego.
"At the time, Jameson believed that Dick was America's greatest living novelist, and he suggested that I have a look at his work, which was available in manuscript form at Cal State Fullerton. In fact, I once ran into Dick in the halls there. But we were never friends."
Dick's literary stock has gone up immeasurably since his death. But though Robinson professes great affection for the man and considerable respect for his determination to write as best he could under onerous physical and mental conditions, Dick did not, he says, exert a direct influence on his own work or career. "Dick's style was so much his own, his way of thinking so distinct, that you can hardly point to anyone whose work is similar."
In the end, however, Robinson achieved what passes for notoriety in the genre after being identified as a point man for a coterie of writers who served as counterpoint for the Cyberpunk phenomenon sweeping the field during the mid-1980s.
Labeled the "Humanists" in an article that appeared last year in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, these writers purportedly rejected Cyberpunk's technological fetishism, its filmic tone, its feverish pacing, its slick surfaces and cool interiors.
Instead, the so-called Humanists demonstrated a familiarity with and respect for "mainstream" literature, a love for science fiction and its conventions, an interest in the traditional elements of well-crafted fiction and a basically optimistic regard for humanity and some human endeavor.
Robinson was identified as a humanist by Cyberpunk writers who, using pseudonyms, attacked him savagely in a science-fiction fan magazine.
He also was criticized for the pacing of "The Wild Shore," which was leisurely by the standards of much S-F and most Cyberpunk. "There were some who called it `The Wild Snore.' " The furor within the insular science-fiction community hasn't hurt him. "The attacks, carried out by the Cyberpunks in their usual Rambo style, mean that I'm doing something of interest. I think they're bothered that I'm not doing Cyberpunk and yet I'm getting some critical attention.
"It's certainly boosted my sales in France. The French love these ridiculous literary battles." For the moment, however, Robinson has removed himself from science fiction's insider skirmishes, preferring to publicize "The Gold Coast" and complete work on a new volume, the third in what is proving to be a thematically related trilogy of novels set in Orange County.
The new book, several drafts old but as yet unnamed, is, ironically, a utopia.
"Having set myself up as a critic of the way things are," Robinson explains, "I felt I had to make some positive suggestions as well. In this novel, everything, starting from now, goes right. Americans, using local power and small-scale government, employ high-tech to create a better quality of life for themselves instead of military goods. They learn how to recycle resources, how to design a town in which people can use bicycles instead of cars.
Genuine utopias are a rarity in science fiction because perfection tends to be boring. Robinson admits that imbuing a utopia with drama is a challenge.
"But no matter how good things get for society, people will still experience unhappiness. We will still die, we will be rejected by those we love, disasters will befall the innocent. I'm trying to invest it with the standard elements of fiction-love, death, social life, family concerns, politics. There's no reason why it shouldn't be as entertaining as your usual science-fiction nightmare."
Illustration PHOTO: Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson with his new book, "The Gold Coast," his vision of the nightmare to come in Orange County. / BRIAN VANDER BRUG / Los Angeles Times