Bold as Love

It is Dissolution Summer, and with political and social collapse rapidly approaching the United Kingdom prepares to break up into separate nations. The Counterculturals have gathered at a festival that goes on and on, a hedonistic melting pot where anything and everything is allowed. Amongst them is Fiorinda, searching for her father, the legendary Rufus O'Niall. A talented rock-and-roll princess by birth and a wild child by choice, she has a whole truckload of baggage and a stubborn heroic streak. She doesn't find her father, but she does meet Ax Preston, the intellectual guitarist of the Chosen with his own heroic ideals and delusions of saving the country from itself. Then there is Fio's quietly loyal friend Sage Pender, an awesome skull-wearing technical wizard and the lad of all lads. Together they join the pop-icon team that the government thinks will make it look cool and manipulate the Counterculturals. What none of them counted on was Pigsty, the pathetic commercial rock-star who nobody took seriously, turning out to be a fully paid-up member of the vicious dictator club and massacring his way to power. Fortunately Ax's ideals are strong enough to make him stick around in the aftermath and work to make things better. The violence of the Dissolution Tour and the bloody civil conflict with the English Islam take their toll, but he is not easily swayed from his vision. Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, this first part of a trilogy is certainly science fiction with subtle understated technological developments, but also an unusual fantasy that predicts the not-too-distant future. The involved story is set against a bleak and socially bankrupt background, but with powerful idealistic and romantic characters; a gripping evocation of what happens when the ideals and protests of popular music are played out for real with guns rather than guitars. (Kirkus UK)