Bantam, 1994. 433 pp.
ISBN 0-553-57241-5.
Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco, time traveler from the twenty-fifth century, drops into Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love to save the universe from total destruction. Data archivists in his time are alerted to this impending crisis when they find that, in all data bases around the world, the lyrics from the Yardbirds' song "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" have been corrupted. They trace the problem to the San Francisco of 1967, and believe the nexus is a 14 year runaway from Shaker Heights, Susan "Starbright" Stein. Authored by Lisa Mason, this science fiction novel is fairly well written. It's disappointing, though, if judged as either a work of science fiction, or as an historical novel.
The Haight, as presented here, has already passed though its hippie utopia period. It's now a place filled with thousands of hungry, dirty, homeless teenage runaways; and also the creatures who prey on such unfortunates. Add on the clueless cops, drunken Hell's Angels, murderous dealers, and gawking tourists, and the Summer of Love turns into quite an ugly event. This unsentimental portrayal of that summer's nature is the novel's best feature. But the tale, constrained as it is by the science fictional elements, never really provides a satisfying picture of that time and place. Not enough time is spent on the historical events and forces which led up to the Summer of Love. Mason tells us that the music was an essential part of everyone's summer, but she never really shows us.
The twentieth century characters are beset by all manner of catastrophe: asbestosis, rape, incest, drug addiction, sexual abuse, botched abortions, battering, prostitution; one even has a father who was killed at Pearl Harbor. Using so many traumatic events to develop just a few characters is melodramatic; these tragedies are often just used as an excuse for making speeches. In an effort to show how enlightened her characters are, Mason tends to imbue some of them with sensibilities more attuned to the nineties than to the sixties. They also will often act out of character if it will advance the plot. For example, Chiron immediately drops cover and breaks all his rules of engagement; highly unlikely for a young man who is both highly idealistic, and superbly well trained. Here it's used as an excuse to drop some inelegant exposition on the readers. At the story's end, the author's manipulation of the characters produces a trite resolution.
Summer of Love fails as an SF novel because we don't learn enough about the twenty-fifth century world and culture of Chiron. What we do learn is revealed in graceless expository chunks. The actual science is often bad - I can't conceive how increased UV radiation at the surface (due to destruction of stratospheric ozone by CFCs - Mason doesn't think the world will stop production) will turn the soil radioactive. Meanwhile, the ultimate threat to the universe is something taken from an old Star Trek episode, and displays the same errors in the understanding of the nature of anti-matter. An explanation of the time travel machinery is a particularly hilarious piece of (pseudo) techno-babble; but this might not be the author's fault - this is the type of thing her editor might have felt an SF novel requires.
I wouldn't recommend this book. I found it to be ultimately unsatisfying, and, at 433 pages, not worth the investment of time.