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SBN 441-04758-095 (US pbk)
hbk: Faber & Faber, ?, 1969,,, Doubleday & Company, (New York) US, 19??
pbk: ?, UK, 19??,,, Ace, (New York) US, October 1972
© 1969.
"Rising from the dust and ashes of a Europe still reeling from the effects of the great Acid War comes Colin Charteris, a futuristic Don Quixote riding the mechanized brontosauris of the times.
"Charteris tries desperately to make sense of the drugged, chaotic world he lives in, and finds himself hailed as the new Messiah. Stranger still, Charteris himself comes to believe this.
"His adventures as he tries to save the world from its insanity are brilliantly told, a satiric science fiction comment on the future of mankind." [jacket blurb, US pbk, 1972]
"The setting for this extraordinary achievement is a Europe which has been through a war fought with psychedelic agents; its characters are madmen bombed (both literally and in the slang sense) back into the Stone Age..." --James Blish (in Fantasy & Science Fiction , 19??).
"This novel, shorn of some of its pop songs and poems, has been appearing -- differently fashioned -- in chunks in New Worlds over two years, thanks to the encouragement of its editor, Michael Moorcock; although the original chunk, 'Just Passing Through', appeared in Impulse for February 1967, edited by Harry Harrison. To both of these gentlemen and to the Procol Harum of 'Whiter Shade of Pale', not to mention the shade of P.D.Ouspenski (1878-1947), my grateful acknowledgements." --Brian W.Aldiss.
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