Laidlaw's novel picks up the pieces of California's story in the middle of the next century, on the eve of the state's bicentennial. One section in which the infrastructure has gone to hell is declared a disaster area but written off as irreparable because there is no money to fix it. It becomes a ghetto of religious cults and earns the name the Holy City. Most people in Laidlaw's future are wired RO-receiver only. The senders' experiences are recorded and broadcast as shows.
Receivers experience everything to which they are tuned, and transmissions run constantly.
The only place where the wire signals are jammed is at work, since corporate America has decided that the shows distract wage slaves from their other tasks. Kalifornia is not Laidlaw's first foray into permutations on California's future evolution. Dad's Nuke also explores religious fanaticism in the face of social crises and, more than that, pursues the wedding of religious and technological mysticism. Neon Lotus, his second novel, traces that marriage further, though in that book the union of the two comes off as a kind of diminishing of myth, complete with an ending in which the world is rescued from a megalomaniac and the indigenous people of Tibet are liberated. Look at me, is his tightest yet, and he seems to be giving his darker instincts their head.