The novel “The Gold Coast” by Kim Stanley Robinson was published for the first time in 1988. It’s the second book in the trilogy of the Three Californias.

Jim McPherson has a part-time job as a teacher with ambitions as a poet but his life is mostly about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. It’s an unstable situation that among other things generates constant conflicts with his father Dennis, an engineer at Laguna Space Research (LSR), an aerospace company struggling with problems connected to a major US Air Force contract.

Jim McPherson criticizes the many US military engagements around the world and for that reason, he becomes a pacifist activist but he feels he’s getting nowhere. Disenchanted, he ends up joining a group that carries out attacks on industries that work with the military.