Summer of Love

The funky rainbow cover of this book was what caught my eye at first, then the title began to resonate in my hippie soul. Summer of Love is about a runaway girl who calls herself Starbright who goes to the Haight-Asbury district during the summer of 1967, looking for her friend Penny Lane. She meets a time traveler from five hundred years in the future, who is looking for her as the key to resolving a rift which has occured.The vivid texturing of the historical situation at the time alone makes this book well worth the read. I also recommend the Golden Nineties as a sequel to this great book.

Summer of Love is an important American literary contribution that may very well have a strong and viable fan base. Where are you? Join us! This novel is loads of fun to read. The majority of the characters are hippies from the 1960s who meet a stranger from the future who's looking to save his world. This fellow, Chiron, needs to find a troubled adolescent teen named Susan Stein (a.k.a. Starbright) for a very compelling reason. The book has a great deal to offer: swift action, lovable characters, spiritual insight, and well-chosen primary documents such as essays, poems, and news articles which round out the reader's understanding of the worldview of the novel.I think Summer of Love has excellent potential for a wider audience. I hope it continues to enjoy a healthy amount of sales in the used books market on this site. I wish even more for it to be in wider circulation. Some books talk about the sixties. This novel IS the sixties, thanks to the spirit and scholarship of its author. And, as one reader aptly put it, "the sci-fi stuff is just plain off the hook." Get a copy. Most people who have read it seem to respect it and enjoy it every bit as much as I do.

I can agree with what has been written heretofore about this book. I think it's a great book. The level of character development is much higher than what we have come to expect in Scifi-Fantasy. What I can add is that Lisa Mason has done a meticulous job of researching what the sixties were REALLY like, not the candy coated version of them which one normally sees in the media. That one could go to the Fillmore and see Quicksiver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, of the Jefferson Airplane, legendary groups almost any night. The idea that this quality of music would last forever. The naive optimism about the future mixed with the omnipresent paranoia about the Man or the System. The wide open experimentation with living styles. The idea that anyone who dressed like you was your brother/sister. The dark side of "free love". That someone with bell-bottomed pants and bare feet would hitchhike across the country to San Francisco with little or no money because a friend was there (somewhere) and a record said in the "Summer of Love", all you needed was a "Flower in Your Hair". The individual acts of giving and charity mixed with the fundamentally parasitic nature of the "Love" generation. Ms Mason's love of San Francisco shines through her story so one can taste and feel "Haight Ashburg" local of the 60's. It is a sad commentary on the publishing industry that there is a deluge of new dreck each day and by the time the word gets around that a scifi book is really exceptional, it's often out-of-print! Let's hope the publisher returns this gem to print SOON!

This is one of my all time favorite books, thanks to the amazing narrative, plot, characterization, and colorful vivid imagery. From the very first paragraph you feel as if you're really there, in San Francisco during the summer of 1967. You see, hear, smell, taste and feel everything that's happening, and there's never a dull moment with all the colorful characters. With this book there's a little something for everyone. Time travel for sci fi buffs, historical references for history buffs, and a large assortment of characters for a great story in general.

Two types of people will like this book: Hippies/wannabe hippies and Sci-Fi fans. Some people like to read about them hippies. This books is pratically a textbook for hippie slang, hippie music, hippie clothes, hippie's nicknames for drugs, hippie lifestyle. It does not sugarcoat any of it. It just tells it like it was. Poor Starbright (aka Susan Stein) runs away from the Cleveland suburbs to find her friend Penny Lane (aka Nance Jones, aka Crinky) in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Fransisco in 1967. Along the way she tries LSD, gets pregnant, gets an abortion, drops the mod look, picks up some new vernacular, goes to enough concerts to make you jealous, and ends the book a hippie. People who like to hear about that stuff will like this book. Some people like reading about time travelers. They want to hear Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco tell five hundred years of history from the perspective of 2467. They want to hear about him consulting the computer on his knuckletop to find whether the Prime Probability has collapsed. They like when he uses his maser and explains Cosmicism. They like the descriptions of tachyportation. They'll love this book too. Like, wow, man, the WHOLENESS of the universe that I glimpsed while tripping on...uh...this book tells me to, like, tell ya this book is really groovy and I bet you'll really dig it, y'know what I mean??