Product Description

The Home Secretary of the UK decides to recruit a Countercultural Think Tank of pop stars in order to make the government look too cool to be overthrown. It's just another publicity stunt for the rockers, until the shooting begins. Now, Slater and her friends must find a way to stay alive, and overthrow the dominant social order, while the UK disintegrates under their feet. Will rock and roll's revolutionary promise finally deliver, or will ethnic violence drown hippie idealism in rivers of blood? Either way, the world will never be the same.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3337932 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 280 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Bold As Love is technically a science fiction novel, set as it is in a near future of political collapse and technological development, and yet it sprawls over the border between SF and fantasy. Ax is a rock musician conscripted by the government of post-Union England to consider the future and co-opt the counter-culture. He stays on to run things when the disgusting character, Pigsty, massacres his way to power, and Ax gradually becomes the much-loved centre of power and policy. Part of what keeps him ahead of events is a brain implant with all the information a benevolent despot might need; part is his fey lover Fiorinda and his best friend Sage, who is in love with Fiorinda and not sure of his exact feelings for Ax. These three are almost a latter-day Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot... a fact that does not bode well for the second volume.

Jones' picture of a world falling apart at the seams--with its worryingly coherent portrayal of a competent dictator--is one of the more impressive things she has done; and Fiorinda with her conscience and angst-ridden past is a passionately lovable heroine. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
Gwyneth Jones writes fiction for adults and children (the latter under the name Ann Halam), as well as reviewing and writing criticism for magazines such as The New York Review of Science Fiction and Interzone.

Customer Reviews

worthy winner of the Clarke award
This is a superb book. (I actually read its sequel, Castles Made of Sand, first, as it was in our local library; read that in one sitting and went out and bought this the next day.) It's set in a recognisably near-future England, where devolution for Scotalnd and Wales is just about to become independence, anti-capitalists and the lunatic fringe of the environmental movement have grown from a minor nuisance to a serious threat to society, and a government even more devoted to focus groups than Tony Blair has decided that the best way to tackle the problem is to instigate a Counter-Cultural Think Tank to give it street cred. Add to this a double-cross which leaves most of the said Think Tank dead, and an armed uprising by Islamic militants in Yorkshire, and you have all the ingredients of a total social collapse - which Ax Preston, brilliant guitarist and committed, driven social idealist ("I don't want to be a politician, I want to be a leader") is determined to avoid. His allies are rock stars, his methods range from a small shooting war through rock festivals to religious conversion, and the whole thing is played out over some of the most historically resonant bits of the English landscape.

The real strengths of the book are the writing, which is magnificent, and the characterisation of the three principal actors, Ax, Fiorinda and Sage Pender, which is deep, subtle and brilliantly drawn. (Though I do think the portait of Ax the strategist - super-competent, driven, frighteningly prepared to sacrifice anything for the greater good - needs the balance that we get with Ax the lover (decidedly more human, actually *making mistakes*) in Castles.) The evocation of England - people, history, landscape and myth - is also beautifully done. Having been raised in Scotland, I was suitably flattered that my adopted country copes much better with Jones' set of future disasters than England does - but in all honesty I think that's a literary device to keep the focus tight.

Okay, so I do have a few quibbles, mainly with the basic scene-set, which seems curiously old-fashioned: I'm not convinced that rock music has the sort of high profile these days that it has to have for Bold As Love to work, and would a techno-wizard whose performance consists of computer imagery, a seriously acrobatic stage act, and "vile noises" really idolise - and take his stage name from - the Grateful Dead? And comment, not criticism: for a Clarke award winner, this has a rather tangential relationship with science fiction (if Iain Banks had written it, I think it would have been a black-and-white-cover and no middle initial job).

Summary: good plot, fine writing, engaging characters. I've put a few hatchet-job reviews on this site: it's nice to be able to redress the balance with a wholehearted recommendation!

a festival novel
Though this novel is a fantasy, the fact that its author is Gwyneth Jones means that we have a book here with a conscience. Bold As Love works because its author, already known for her strengths of characterisation and originality of setting, has decided to take the festi culture that she knows as her backdrop. The whole thing has enough twists and turns to keep it moving, enough heart to make it feel real, and enough SF interest to keep the reader thinking.

Quite rightly, it has won the 2002 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Recommended to all readers who love a novel with: ingenuity, originality, readability, great one-liners, oddness, social comment, horrible bits (thankfully not too many, but the author is a bit of a social realist, if I could borrow that term from Blackadder), strange bits, moving bits... I could go on, but there really are alots of bits to this multi-faceted novel.

Blazed (like a bonfire)
I love this book. "Bold As Love" is not fantasy, it's not sci-fi, it's the world around us with a rock and roll twist, treated in a way that manages to be incredibly harsh and yet optimistic at the same time. The only other sf writer who can write about music convincingly (IMO) is Jeff Noon, but to be frank, Bold As Love is an easier ride... The plot is nailbiting, because the characters are so well drawn. You feel you know these people and you are terrified that they aren't going to make it. To say more is superfluous because you have to experience this, no summary will do it justice. Castles Made of Sand is also brilliant, Midnight Lamp probably the best actual *novel* of the three, but Bold As Love is still the boss book. Intense!