Orange County, Thus Will You Live : THE GOLD COAST<i> by Kim Stanley Robinson (Tor Books: $18.95; 389 pp.) </i>

What a bold, manic, wonderful book this is! The story is set in 21st-Century Orange County, where the freeways are stacked upon each other, shopping malls are so huge that they contain apartment complexes, where the only undeveloped land left is far up in the canyon of Modjeska. Kim Stanley Robinson describes one freeway interchange:

“Twenty-four monster concrete ribbons pretzel together in a Gordian knot three hundred feet high and a mile in diameter--a monument to autopia--and they go right through the middle of it, like bugs through the heart of a giant.�

In Robinson’s future Orange County, people are as frantic as the landscape is dense, and there’s a deadness in the soul of most. The hero of “The Gold Coast� is Jim McPherson, a 27-year-old who hasn’t really grown up. He’s an idealist, slow to act, prone to the whims of his friends. He’s a “culture vulture,� meaning he collects fragments of Orange County’s past: orange crate labels, written histories, even bits of wood from “historic� structures such as the now-buried El Modena Elementary School.

He fancies himself a poet, but he doesn’t write much. If a poem lacks flair, he runs it through his computer “randomizer,� which rearranges the lines to give it a properly skewed, fractured, “post-modern� feel. He and most of his friends spend their nights in less than casual sex, surrounded by walls of video screens which monitor the events and are as integral to the act as the people themselves. (If the videos malfunction, so does the sex.) They ingest massive quanti-ties of synthesized drugs with names like “California Mello,� “Funnybone� or “Apprehension of Beauty.� At the nightly party held by Sandy, the drug designer:

“A lot of people are pretty stoned, they’ve got eyes like black holes and their mouths are stretched wide . . . they’re grinding their teeth and giggling a little and staring around like the walls have sprouted fantastic morphological formulations out of the usual condo cottage cheese ceilings, say, is that, could that be a, a stalactite there?�

Jim hates the hyper-crowded urban sprawl around him, and he all but hates himself. But he’s usually too anesthetized to think of anything to do about it. So when he’s approached to join a terrorist group that is sabotaging defense plants, he joins up.

Jim’s father Dennis is an engineer for just such a defense contractor, LSR of Laguna Beach. He’s been approached by the Air Force to begin work on a superblack (ultra secret) program to develop a guidance system for an unmanned fighter jet that can blast Soviet tanks in Europe. Dennis is a bright, hard-working, and underappreciated designer who detests (but is employed by) the vast and sometimes corrupt defense industry. Still, he believes that his work on conventional weapons (as opposed to strategic nuclear ones) has positive, genuine worth. As he explains to his son:

“You can’t make war impossible . . . . Nothing can do that. But you can make it damned impractical. We’re getting to the point where any invasion force can be electronically detected and electronically opposed, so quickly and accurately that the chances of a successful invasion are nil. Nil! So why ever try? Can’t you see? It could come to a point where no one would try!�

Jim doesn’t buy this argument, and when the leaders of his sabotage cell pick LSR as their next target, Jim is faced with the toughest decision of his life. Should he act to inhibit the death merchants, of which his father is one? Or should he swallow his idealism, let his father do his job, and find some other way of resisting the military buildup that is--in his mind at least--a focus and symbol for everything that is wrong with his insane, dense-packed, soulless homeland?

But what makes this book so good isn’t the character interplay, but the ideas that Robinson is dealing with. He’s extrapolated a future for Orange County (and the nation) that feels accurate, arresting and frightening. When Jim rants idealistically against the military-industrial complex and the greed of developers, who can’t hear that small fierce voice inside himself? And who among us, watching a wasteful defense industry that helps to drain an already overspent economy (while monopolizing some of the best minds of the nation) doesn’t share Jim’s outrage and disgust? The strongest arguments that Robinson makes aren’t contained in the dialogue, or even in the characters, but in the frantic, stifling, overloaded world that he pictures in our near future:

“Headlights and taillights, red and white blood cells, pushed through a leukemic body of light . . . There’s a brake light in your brain . . . A billion lights . . . (Ten million people.) . . . How many kilowatts per hour? Grid laid over grid, from the mountains to the sea . . . A billion lights . . . Ah yes: Orange County.�

“The Gold Coast� is ambitious, angry, eccentric. The writing is quite good except for the dialogue, which is weak; and the present-tense narrative, which I suspect would have worked better in the simple past. Offered as a counterpoint to the breathless, headlong prose are some beautifully written (and wonderfully researched) rhapsodies about early Orange County. But Robinson has succeeded at a novelist’s toughest challenge: He’s made us look at the world around us. This isn’t escapist stuff--it sends you straight into a confrontation with yourself.