Let’s see, I think there was a musical about some HAIRy hippies. Hmm, what was the name of it again?
Depending on your attitude you might find a hero in book and movie documentaries (Do you think Ken Kesey is a hero, or John Lennon?).
Professor Clifford Jones, the hippie scientist hero from the Doctor Who story “The Green Death” (which I recently enjoyed on DVD).
“I mean, let’s face, who really does enjoy the stinking plastic rat-trap world we all live in?”
Captain Trips from the Wild Cards series falls into the hippy category.
I read that one, too. It was absolutely dreadful.
Louis Wu of Niven’s Ringworld stories (and some others) comes across as fairly hippified to me.
What about all of the people hooked on “melange” or “spice” from Dune? Particularly the Pilot’s Guild?
Yea, Brother!
Marc
In David Brin’s The Postman, one of the important characters is a “neo-hippie.”
Heroic? Yeah, I guess… but pretty damned stupid.
I thought of those durned dilitihium-huggers but they’re hardly heroic are they?
Lets see…
Faster-Than-Light Travel? Well, the physics are against it, but OK.
Armed, Hostile Aliens? Absolutely no evidence, but I can suspend disbelief.
Time Travel? I’ve never thought that this was possible, but let’s see where the story goes.
Heroic Hippies? Go ahead and pull the other one, pal.
PookahMacPhellimey writes:
> And the author [China Mieville] wears an earring: Hippie!
He also shaves his head. I think of him as looking more like a soccer thug.
Bridget Burke writes:
> Chester Anderson’s “The Butterfly Kid” tells how Greenwich Village freaks saved
> the world from giant blue lobsters.
This is the first book of a trilogy (with each book by a different author):
The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967)
The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland (1969)
The Probability Pad by T. A. Waters (1970)
I remember reading a book in the 80’s about an environmental activist that stops a huge environmental disaster in Boston Harbor.
I can’t remember the title but it was a pretty good book.
I think you’re talking about Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
Yeah, I forgot the “heroic” part of the OP.
That’s it!
The guy had a Zodiac inflatable boat that he road aroud the bay.
Bruce Dern’s character in the movie Silent Running(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/) undoubtedly qualifies.
It’s even better than that: each book stars the author as the hero, with the others appearing as secondary characters, along with most of their real-life Greenwich Village friends. They were the first books about hippies to appear in the field, although others like Zelazny and Delany had used hippie-like characters in the future. While Stranger in a Strange Land is cited as proto-hippie, Heinlein wasn’t living that kind of life in 1961. These were the real things.
The Butterfly Kid was by far the best, even making the Hugo Award ballot for Best Novel. Anderson was a well-regarded Beat poet and a fine writer. Unfortunately, neither he nor Waters ever wrote much else, although Kurland became a prolific journeyman.
I’m sorely afraid that these books wouldn’t hold up well today, but back in the 60s I absolutely loved them and the world they depicted.
The Brits didn’t do hippies per se, but they dove into psychedelia head-first. Michael Moorcock’s stories about Jerry Cornelius - “failed priest, electric guitarist, ascetic and hedonist” - began in New Wave magazine around 1965 and spun off into a confusing array of novels putting Jerry into various types and guises. Moorcock was associated with - and even played with - the archetypal British psychedelic band Hawkwind.
Another rock connection was made with musician and critic - his Rock and Roll Circus is a classic - Mick Farren. They don’t appear until the mid-1970s, but his DNA Cowboys trilogy - The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, Synaptic Manhunt, and The Neural Atrocity - are psychedelic as all get-out.
The ship commander in Dark Star.
They were all hippies on that ship, but wasn’t he the guy who tried to philosophically argue a bomb out of exploding? That should qualify him.
The Jerry Cornelius stories that I have read rank very high on my list of Incomprehensible, Pretentious Shite.