Summer of Love, a Time Travel

A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist. A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year.The year is 1967 and something new is sweeping across America: good vibes, bad vibes, psychedelic music, psychedelic drugs, anti-war protests, racial tension, free love, bikers, dropouts, flower children. An age of innocence, a time of danger. The Summer of Love.San Francisco is the Summer of Love, where runaway flower children flock to join the hip elite and squares cruise the streets to view the human zoo.Lost in these strange and wondrous days, teenager Susan Bell, alias Starbright, has run away from the straight suburbs of Cleveland to find her troubled best friend. Her path will cross with Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, a strange and beautiful young man who has journeyed farther than she could ever imagine.With the help of Ruby A. Maverick, a feisty half-black, half-white hip merchant, Susan and Chi discover a love that spans five centuries. But can they save the world from demons threatening to destroy all space and time?A harrowing coming of age. A friendship ending in tragedy. A terrifying far future. A love spanning five centuries. And a gritty portrait of a unique time in history--the Summer of Love.From the author of The Garden of Abracadabra and The Gilded Age, A Time Travel (A New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book).From Library JournalSent from the 25th century to track down an individual crucial to the preservation of the timestream, time-traveler Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco (the character's full name) plunges headlong into the myth and mania of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene of 1967-the legendary "summer of love." The author of Arachne (LJ 4/15/90) opens a window into the past in this masterful re-creation of time and place. Far future and recent past come together in a story that combines speculative science and historical accuracy. A priority purchase.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistIn Mason's second novel, the media's recent love affair with the 1960s finally reaches its fictional apotheosis with an admiring backward look from 500 years hence. Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco is a twenty-fifth-century San Franciscan sent back to the 1967 Summer of Love to uncover the source of an anomalous information gap in his era's archives. Armed with high-tech sunscreen and other assorted protections against twentieth-century toxins, Chiron must locate and study a teenage runaway nicknamed Starbright, who may or may not be the axis for a series of inevitable historic events. Although trying to obey strict tenets of noninvolvement, Chiron slowly finds himself sympathizing with Starbright and the causes of her day, thereby risking not only his mission but the fate of his own time line. Mason faithfully re-creates the frenzied flavor of the 1960s Haight-Ashbury scene while skillfully delineating believable and engaging characters. A unique blend of nostalgia and wry speculative fiction. Carl Hays