Woodstock Rising

by Tom Wayman

It's late 1969 and Communist China has successfully launched its first satellite. Inspired by this feat, a group of college students in Laguna Beach, California, set out to put their own satellite into orbit in homage to the recent Woodstock Festival.

A young Canadian graduate student at the University of California finds himself at the centre of the mayhem when he and his friends break into a mothballed missile silo and commandeer everything they need, including a nuclear warhead, to blast the Woodstock Nation into the space age. The activists have big plans for their loot, schemes that may well culminate in the Light Show to End All Light Shows in the Nevada desert.

An extraordinary black comedy shot full of the social and political issues of the time, Woodstock Rising is a coming-of-age tale couched in free love, rock anthems, and revolution as well as a chronicle of an era whose causes continue to speak to us.

Genres: Fiction

472 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 2008

About the author

Tom Wayman has published nineteen poetry collections, edited six anthologies of poets writing about their employment, and published three collections of essays on labour arts. He has taught at the post-secondary level in the United States and Canada and co-founded the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union and the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing. Wayman has been the recipient of several significant literary awards over his career, most recently the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry for his book Dirty Snow.

Reviews

[Mary Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a Canadian hippie version of The Mouse that Roared, funny and yet with importance. I would have given it 5 stars but it was a little too long-winded. Nonetheless, it is an amazing book that looks back at the time of the Vietnam War, the draft, student protests, harsh police actions, and provides a very powerful look at protest against war, the draft, racism and other social ills. "If we don't want this country to be the bully everywhere in the world, we have to see the connection between racism at home and imperialism abroad, between the struggles of working people here in the America and the National Liberation of struggles in Vietnam, Africa, Latin America." Add to that list, the Middle East, and all the other places that are embroiled in various struggles today. The pervading irony is that despite the protests, nearly all of the problems they were protesting are still with us. There is much humour in the daily lives of the students in the novel, and we get to like the narrator for his determination to be honest and sincere. But the question is, why write a book about that time? Perhaps it is to show that nothing has changed.