"Little Heroes" suffers big-time from Spinrad's habit of letting his plot get away from him and romp through fifteen or sixteen chapters while restating the same precepts over and over again. Fortunately, his characterization and dialogue are such that you don't care.

It's the near-future, and the music industry is tanking. They're looking to cut costs and a big one is the overhead for the actual musicians. Obvious answer: eliminate them. The technology is good enough that a perfect human-looking star can be synthesized, but so far they haven't created one with any juice. Enter Gloriana O'Toole, the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll, and the two techno-dweebs they assigned to her, Bobby and Sally. Together -- with the help of some wizard wire that gives them the equivalent of safe and controllable acid trips -- they manufacture a rock and rol star. Problem is, the best rock and roll stars tend to attack authority. Like, say, the music industry...

And, this being a Norman Spinrad novel, that's the smallest part of the plot. There's also Paco and Karen and Larry and the Reality Liberation Front and Dojo and a lot of wheeling and dealing and an uprising of the newly wired drug culture and... there's a lot, and it all mixes together. The characters zoom back and forth into each other and much philosophy, sex, and rock and roll occurs.

I think the book would have been improved greatly with about sixty pages trimmed out, but it still remains one of the ones I reread every few years, and like his other books Spinrads speculative predictions are scary-close. ( )