Rating: 
Summary: Good Retrospctive, Mediocre Sci-Fi
Review: ...While not the best book I've ever read, it is a good contribution to the alternate history genre. I do, however, find some fault with the closed time loop logic used as part of the plot line here.I found the characterizations very real, but the historical name dropping (guest appearances by Janice Joplin and Bill Graham of Fillmore fame to name a few) a little annoying, but relevant nonetheless. I was a little older than some of the characters in the story during the time described and I felt that the characterizations were a true amalgam of the real Hippie movement of the time. Many genuine spiritual entrepreneurs were being replaced with monetary entrepreneurs by the late 1960's. Chiron's message to the generations preceding him is also based on truth. It indeed will be a tragedy if we do not learn to use our technology to preserve our planet, not under domed preserves, but as a whole. This is where I have some dissatisfaction with the book. If the story is to be a call for moral and ecological awareness, the message is not strong enough. The theme is found throughout the book, but is not brought out fully enough. The time travel tenets seem borrowed from an early Sci-Fi story, which I can't recall fully at the moment, and are not fully adhered to. I have a logical problem with someone being both a progenitor and an ancestor of themselves. All in all, the story is a well written fine read and I recommend it to all who enjoy some mental exercise.
Rating: 
Summary: A well-researched Classic!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: A really good book!
Review: I liked this book a lot. It had me totally hooked. It was very realistic for a science fiction time travel novel, and it had you believing you were there with the characters. I would recommend this book any day. I got it at a good used books store. While I am aware that it is out of print, I think it would be a good idea for fans of science fiction and\or the 60's to try to get their hands on it
Rating:
Summary: Tachyport to the Summer of Love
Review: Starbright, a 14-year-old runaway from suburban Ohio, spends the summer of 1967 in San Francisco, hanging out with the likes of Ruby A. Maverick, the "half Cherokee, half Haitian black, half Southern cream" owner of the Mystic Eye in the Haight-Ashbury, and Chiron Cat's Eye in Draco, a 25th-century time-traveler who needs to make sure that the Axis survives the hot dim spot of the Summer of Love. According to Tenet Five of the Grandfather Principle, Chiron can't let anyone know he's from the future, but with San Francisco full of flower children and Hells Angels, reincarnated pharoahs and men from Mars, Chiron can simply tell the truth, and people say, "Dig this," and pass the pipe. Lisa Mason shows all sides of the Summer of Love: innocence, foolishness, mind-expansion, addiction, freedom, anarchy, loving each other, using each other, anti-capitalism, dealing, stealing, turning on, tuning in, wisdom, naiveté, creativity, depravity, and all sorts of experimentation. You may both wish you'd been there and be relieved that you weren't. This is an interesting trip through 1967, with glimpses of 2467 and of the mess that the 20th century creates for the 25th and vice versa. (Another fun trip through "the sixties": Tom Wolfe's psychedelic, journalistic novel "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.")
Rating:
Summary: Calling All Fans
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An appeal to sci-fi hippies of all ages
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A word about Summer of Love
Review: The Sixties are remembered through the scrim of hindsight, posthoc analysis and interpretation, and the participants' romantic memories. To write this book, I returned to original source materials--the newspapers, magazines, interviews, home movies, and accounts of events as they occurred. The reality was in many ways far darker than the fond memories. I was struck repeatedly by the amount of child abuse (a family secret, then), sexism, and racism--and how many movements and attitudes we take for granted today had their roots in the troubles and triumphs of the period. The publisher will be promoting this title with my new book, Pangaea I: Imperium Without End, but if you ask Amazon.com for it, the publisher may bring this book out again!
Rating:
Summary: Born in the wrong decade...shed a lot of light on my ideas
Review: This book is a wonderful book. I've read it approxiamately 5 times. I bought it about 4 years ago at a used bookstore in Ft.Worth, and fell in love with it the minute I saw it. My mom always used to tell me I was born in the wrong decade, and i believe that is true. This book was so true to life that I felt like I was there. I recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Born in the wrong decade...shed a lot of light on my ideas
Review: This book is a wonderful book. I've read it approxiamately 5 times. I bought it about 4 years ago at a used bookstore in Ft.Worth, and fell in love with it the minute I saw it. My mom always used to tell me I was born in the wrong decade, and i believe that is true. This book was so true to life that I felt like I was there. I recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: To the publisher
Review: This book is brilliant. I want to assign it in a course at UCLA, but can't. Please do consider reprinting it.
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