Woodstock Rising

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.

Tom Wayman has published 25 previous books, including High Speed Through Shoaling Water, Boundary Country, A Vain Thing, and the 2003 Governor General's Award nominated volume of poems My Father's Cup. He divides his time between the University of Calgary, where he teaches, and his estate in Winlaw, British Columbia.