Jack Womack returns to the present in his sly, humorous tale set in contemporary Russia. Only a writer of Womack's prodigious literary gifts could pull off a great novel about Russia that isn't written by a native. He's done an excellent job examining both the business and political elites of Boris Yeltsin's Russia; every word sounds as though it could be written by a distinguished Russian author. His dense, descriptive prose runs wild through this well written tale of business intrigue and corruption, taking us on a mesmerizing literary joy ride laced with ample doses of black humor. At times I found the passages so funny that I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. "Let's Put The Future Behind Us" is yet another excellent novel by this underrated writer; one who deserves a broad readership beyond science fiction fandom.

Snappy prose, well-paced narrative, sharp humor (a few actual 'I-laughed-out-loud-while-reading' sequences).

I think the book really caught a unique time and place in russia's history. The book would have a more topical impact to the reader of 1996-97 but it is still a great read from a talented writer.

I have got to read Womack's other works! I have a friend who big into Russia and he was amazed by the accuracy (he noted especially the description of the Russian concept of "poshloi"), all from a writer who spent little time in the New Russia. This book is well-paced and full of intriguing characters (especially Max)--a must read for...well, anyone! Words fail to describe it; Just read it!

This is one of the finest novels of near-future America ever written. That may sound like a sweeping statement, but Womack's terrifying vision of the final years of a 20th century where an adolescent army exerts a brutal discipline on New York, global warming and pollution have turned summers into poisonous nightmares and the country's economy is disintegrating almost as fast as accepted social values has no sharper, keener rival in contemporary fiction.
I first read this book in 1995 after being sucked into Womack's twisted universe through Elvissey, still one of my favourite sci-fi novels. And though the science fiction genre has broadened vastly since the days of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, Random Acts still defies simple categorisation. There's no doubt it has sci-fi elements, but Like Orwell's 1984, I feel that Womack has tried not only to illustrate a nightmare portrayal of the near-future, but grasp the zeitgeist of mid-90s American society and break it down into its basest elements, shaping it and containing it in the most ideal setting in which to maximise its sense of claustrophobia, paranoia and arrogance - Manhattan Island.
The rapid urban decay of a world where presidents are assassinated like flies, police and soldiers wield their power like medieval tyrants, poorer neighbourhoods have reverted to tribal warzones and an inherent culture of hate, fear and anger permeate daily life is presented superbly through the diary of 12-year-old Lola. Womack's keen sense of Lola's pre-adolescent mind coming to terms not only with the crumbling world around her but also deeper, personal issues such as the disintegration of her family network and her own blossoming sexuality always remains evocative and concise. The first-person narrative moves flawlessly, and the decay of the world around Lola is mirrored brilliantly with her descent from conservative, middle-class comfort to an immersion in the angry and violent street life of Manhattan.
The most impressive vehicle Womack uses to describe this descent is the rapidly mutating form of Lola's narrative - in her first diary entries, the language she uses is that of a sheltered and innocent young, white Anglo-Saxon; by the story's end, it has transformed into the bizarre, poetic concoction of Latino, ghetto slang and bastardised English that constitutes gang dialect. Womack further develops his concept of future-speak in Elvissey, Ambient and his other novels with astounding creativity, and his linguistic capabilities are equally as clever as Burgess in A Clockwork Orange or anything by William Gibson.
It's a frightening microcosm that Womack depicts in Random Acts, and only the precursor to a world that grows more warped and hostile through the five other novels that succeed it chronologically. If you've never read Womack's work before, start here, and get ready for the ride of your life.

I first read this book back in '95 when I was an employee at Tower books in Seattle. I'd read the back and the inside flap and was skeptical that I'd like it. The format of 1st person and diary form are two things I normally don't care for. I could not have been more wrong. It's 6 years later and I am still raving about this brilliant and horrifying tale, I have a signed 1st edition copy and a reading copy to loan out to everyone I can.The disarming narrative of 12 year old Lola Hart lulls you into her adolescent world of friends and budding sexuality only to turn her world and Manhattan upside down with sadistic entusiasm. This story is not for the faint of heart. The transformation of Lola after her family circumstances turn from prosperous to dire is sheer literary genius in it's insidious simplicity. Not only is Lola's character so compelling but Womack never misses an opportunity to saterize society with sharp painful jabs of scathing observation and wit. This book works on so many LEVELS!!!!
You cannot put it down and after you've read it you will never forget it. The last sentence (and don't you dare skip ahead and read it) knocked the wind out of me. I stared at it for a long time. This book is on par with such classics as Perfume, Johhny Got His Gun, Catcher in the Rye, and A Clockwork Orange. I even named my dog after Lola. Everyone should read this book.

Random Acts was a great book. The way Womack gradually changed Lola's dialect was pretty interesting. I also liked the way he wrote from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old girl without resorting to cliches. As for setting, that was brilliant. He didn't dump in chunks of exposition or leave too much unsaid, but included just enough background. Last but not least, the transition in Lola's character, from rich sheltered lesbian girl to poor gangster lesbian girl, was very well-done and definitely not contrived (despite another review here, it was pretty obvious in the book that Lola liked girls romantically at the beginning when her family was happy and secure).

I've fallen in deep intellectual love with this series, and this is my favourite of the lot (I've not yet bought Elvissey, but won't be long 'til I do.) It's the language style that makes this stuff so indescribably charming - and though the source gets all too little recognition, the Womack trademark "nouns-to-verbs" style of speech seems to actually be becoming a realworld phenomena here and there.

The story is - in a word - cinematic. This really should be a movie, hopefully with narration here and there to capture the lingo. I could see the people, places and changes of time's evanescent scenery through Luther's eyes and mind. Hollywood? Knock off the remakes and sequels and look to this man for a great movie book that's a great reading experience as well. Few cinematic stories touch me this way. This touched, shook, slapped, embraced and knocked me upside the head a few times in the process.

"Terraplane," Womack's earlier novel, is a rewarding transtemporal love story that shares a great deal of its plot with "Elvissey": visitors from our future go back in time--not to 1950s Memphis, but to a deranged alternate 1930s where slavery was only recently abolished and the AIDS epidemic has been prefigured by an extraterrestrial virus that causes heightened dexterity, intelligence--and certain death. Womack's skewed look at our past is as frightening as any imagined future. "Terraplane" is a haunted examination of what it is to be human, laced with wit and sad romance. Definitely a trip worth taking.

The complaints raised against this compelling and important work are meaningless. This novel is masterpiece, and the comments it makes about race history in America and slavery as part of our nation's serious underside are profound, important, and impossible for 99% of SF nerds to understand. Let them go back to the easy answers in Heinlein. For many people, "Maus" by Art Spiegleman brought home the horrors of the Holocaust. This novel did the same thing for slavery that Maus did for 1940's Poland.

Great SF is not writing about the future, it is a way to get us to start thinking about the present. For those with the courage to challenge themselves and their thinking, few books are going to go as far as this one. Like PKD and Orwell, Womack is a master who writes literature, not SF. Not sure of where genre ends and literature begins? Grow up and buy this book.

This novel demonstrates again Jack Womack's amazing talents, especially with language. One of the strongest aspects of the novel is the clash of the protagonist's hip talk with the Dryco-speak of his visitors.

However, I did not quite like this novel as much as the others in the series, and I definitely would ot recommend it as the first Womack novel to read.

Sort of...

Womack's style is so unique, I might suggest re-reading each book upon completion. His "vernacular" is so compelling, I actually find myself emulating it in e-mails to my friends (and perhaps his prophetic truncated style of speaking is an extrapolation of "e-mail-speak"). This book (or any of the books in the series, for that matter) are not suggested reading for the optimistic sort. He has as bleak an outlook of post-apocolyptic Earth as any author I've read, yet his vision also seems to be the most realistic. His works reap the seeds that our society is presently sowing, and he does it with STYLE.

While our government was fooling around with MK Ultra, Womack's more perverse parallel universe finds an accelerated plan far more sinister, even if it isn't fully explained. No need! He leaves enough room for you to plug in your own worst fears.

Sadly, I picked up "Random Acts" for a buck at a book surplus store (It was also, incidentally, an ideal place to start the Ambient series). While it was a great value for me, I find it unfathomable that Womack isn't as widely accepted as Frank Herbert. His vision is just as lucid, and, like Herbert's "Dune" series, I envy anyone who gets to experience it for the first time themselves...

I never would have thought that I would enjoy a book that contains abundant drug use to the degree that I enjoyed Jack Womack's newest novel. _Going, Going, Gone_ is a witty and psychedelic alternate history/time travel/parallel universe/ghost story all-in-one. The narrative flows easily once the reader becomes accustomed to Womack's out-there jargon.

The protagonist, Walter, is a counterculture government freelancer who's hired by the Kennedy family (indirectly) to convince Jim Kennedy to assassinate Bobby. Walter is perplexed by the ghosts floating in his living room and moaning his name. And he's not quite sure what to make of the gorgeous woman and her muscular companion that speak in bizarrely mangled English and who appear and disappear with regularity.

As the story progresses the various threads weave together in a surprisingly coherent (given the disparate threads)narrative. This is Book 5 in Womack's 'Ambient' series. It's not necessary to have read the previous 4 to enjoy this one but you'll soon find yourself searching for the other books in the series. Highly enjoyable throughout. Recommended.

Its pretty rare that I don't finish a book, unfortunately this was one of those cases. If I missed anything like a dramatic change in prose style (I stopped halfway through the book) then I apologise.

I found the positioning of 'Ambient' to be (as other reviewers have mentioned) an attempt at lying somewhere between cyberpunk and Burgess's classic Clockwork Orange. However in terms of actual implementation, the prose irritated me beyond all belief. The characters speak like drunken yodas. Don't get me wrong I'm fully in favour of taking dialects to the extreme to make a point in literature (Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh being an exemplary example) but I found page after page of this annoying doublespeak too much to bear.

When other reviewers say "this is a hard book to read" they are damn right. For me the return on investment wasn't worth it.

In a world that sleeps as soundly as this one, Womack assails the capitalist *carnivora* with a feral eye and acid pen, beating on the reader's sensibilities as one would a Hitler pin'ata. Jack the world! Jack it up, hombre! Let's see, how to describe Womack's prose style.... A bomb laced with nails? A mechanosphere of vision-forming events? A neuro-syphilitic bundle of cliches? How about crash-compatible? Or a blast of heat from the pavement grate? Or a purling sewer rich with the gastric sludge of readerly motion-illness? "Experimental" is perhaps the wrong word here. Gamblers don't gamble, after all, and Womack knows the stakes of writing a novel in "Ambientspeak" this late in literary history (after Burgess, after Russell Hoban, et al.), as the bathos of dialogic exchange in the Dryco universe runs through its formulae, a dismal screech of hackneyed argot like fingernail on slate. I swear that once Mr. Womack learns how to balance his jargonautical neologisms with a subtler knowledge of myth and narrative (like a Hollywood with better acting), he may very well attain the eminence of a Don DeLillo, or a Cormac McCarthy, both key influences on the Dryco novels.... Yet out of all the writers who've made a habit of predicting and inventing the future, Womack is certainly the most charming, possessing a dashing narrative charisma that generates moments, images, elbow-nudging good times, on nearly every page. Very reassuring when we take into account his inevitable subject matter, the madnesses of socioeconomic inequality and exploitation.... Capitalism's predatory agenda to protect corporate interests at all costs, ambitions which entail the humiliation of the underclass (a group that is easy to identify, dislike, and control), cash cows that never see the light of day and are fed on gov't distillery slops; a society terrorized into stupidity by the commodified and the superficial. When Womack informs us that our corporate-owned U.S. Army has been waging a 20-year campaign against the citizenry of Long Island, the reader is compelled to chuckle, then sigh, then consider, then shudder. To what length would our gov't go to protect its commercial interests, whether they involve petroleum, narcotics, arms, or the minds, souls, and yoked bio-power of its starved-out citizenry? "It's true, do you think?" "Only the craziest parts." We let a world like this happen.... Add this novel to your shopping cart, friends, savor and enjoy it, all the while praying for Womack's future development, that he may one day stand in the square where martyrs are made.

"Ambient" is William Gibson's cyberpunk vision cloaked in a future English quite akin to Burgess' in "A Clockwork Orange". Womack's daring, original prose is coupled with his stark, bleak vision of a future United States in which New York City has virtually succumbed to urban rot and environmental degradation, resembling a vast maximum security prison under martial law by the United States Army. Overseeing most of the economy is Dryco, a private firm run by Thatcher Dryden, an avaricious, insane version of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. The story is narrated by Seamus O'Malley, Dryden's security guard, who lusts after Avalon, Dryden's girl Friday. This is a provocative, difficult novel to read, but one which brilliantly shows Womack's ample literary talents.

Dare we remember Katherine Anne Porter's polite scorn for E. M. Forster? 'The kettle is warm, but there ain't going to be no tea.' As a wary admirer of Womack's *Ambient* and *Terraplane*, I had high hopes for this one, even as I found myself gravely putting my tea-set back into its hoary cupboard, piece by disappointed piece.

Womack has a strong, passionate literary intelligence. He is a crank and a bookworm, a polymath and a blowhard, he strives for the comedy gauntlet in every paragraph. His characters lock horns and break heads in the now-familiar backalleys of dystopian urban burlesque, and if his punchlines often seem forced and artificial, we feel honor-bound (given the massive potential of his two previous novels) to let the artist experiment with this new, plastic genre. He tries his darnedest to suspend our disbelief, to make this surreal 'picnic in a graveyard' something worth caring about, something human. We know him as a invert -- yet one striving for the more conventional pleasures of readerly transport.

But *Heathern* (clearly written under deadline to fulfill a publishing contract) disappoints on too many levels. The liberties we were willing to grant him have gone stale in the interim. As a prequel to the Dryco Chronicles, Womack has seen fit to ease the throttle of his abounding, gutter-mouthed blarney (Ambientspeak has yet to dominate the Dryco universe), and the resulting text, cleansed of all overflow, is a cold naked testament to his limitations as a novelist, his faltering ability to make the surreal *real*.

You could say that Womack overloads the dice. His characters are no more or less plastic than those in early DeLillo, in Pynchon at his worst, in most award-winning science-fiction for that matter. But once the pyrotechnic distraction of his top-heavy prose-style is snuffed out, we realize that the book's foundations are wormy, its characters hollow at the core, its engine of suspense unable to inject fuel, and what was once an opulent Style becomes a cloying distraction.

The reader's syntactic eye is strained by the torsional buckling of his modifiers, the bulwarks, breakwaters, and stumbling blocks of his flexural, haphazard style. Womack strives to be 'lapidary,' to push the linguistic envelope, to make his surreal narrative believable in the throes of gushing, mellifluent overabundance. But in *Heathern*, his key does not open the door. His characters are exposed for the tactless straw-effigies they are.

And it sucks. Oh how it sucks.

By concentrating the odium of capitalist villainy into one massive, megalithic metaphor (the Dryco Corporation), Womack simplifies the *real* terrors of our world into a seedy Japanimation serial about the Big Bad Megacorp and the network of mystic underworlders who nibble at its heels. The terrorist subplot seems thrown in as an afterthought, a conversation-piece for the author's trash-talking finger-puppets. The relationships are as stodgy and wooden as a Punch and Judy spectacle trying to be deep and literary, while the villain of the piece (CEO Thatcher Dryden) is a B-movie troglodyte, a failed attempt to satirize the monopolist mindset, whose crimes and immoralities are far more subtle and convoluted than the cyberpunk excesses showcased herein.

And jeez, if you're going to put a Messiah into your novel (yawn), his dialogue must rise above the usual string of crypto-theological sidebars and faux-Biblical irony -- presented in the form of wisecracks and prophetic conundrums, straight out of the 'riddle-me-this-Batman' tradition. Womack doesn't do quite as bad as some, I'll admit. His street preacher Lester Macaffrey has something approaching a 'real' personality, and the author may be attempting to show how Macaffrey's stoical eccentricity, his suavely detached musings on theological issues make him the beacon of posthumanity in a world of protohuman cartoons. But the effect is fleeting, and Macaffrey's sudden, epiphanic relationship with the narrator is hollow, contrived, asinine, as is nearly everything else in this novel. When one of the characters expounds his family's relation to the Jewish Holocaust, the reader finds himself whistling in despair at this vinegary attempt to charge an insipid burlesque with humanistic 'depth'.

I give this one two stars out of sympathy with the author's boredom with conventional SF tropes and motifs, and his rigorous (if rushed and miscalculated) attempt to break onto the genre-scene with all guns blazing. But *Heathern* is Womack taking two steps back after the intriguing forward-tramp of *Ambient* and (parts of) *Terraplane*. Check out those books for Womack working more-or-less successfully in his essence. Leave this one in the remaindered bin.

Heathern is the third installment in the Ambient series. I must admit that I accidentally picked this one up without reading the second, Terraplane, so I can only compare it to the first of the series, Ambient.

Heathern sees Womack showing a bit of restraint. While his story is brutal in its own right, its much more tame compared with Ambient (or Random Acts of Senseless Violence which might be seen as the predecessor to Ambient). Because of his focus on the story, the reader is left guessing about certain developments in this futuristic New York City.

All in all, a good story but its not as strong as the beginning of the series.

Womack's "Heathern," another installment in his brutal near-future satire (collectively known as the "Dryco Chronicles"), hinges on concerns expressed in "Elvissey" and "Terraplane" (and, to a lesser extent, his ultraviolent "Ambient"). When a schoolteacher demonstrates the ability to resurrect the dead, marketing kingpin Thatcher Dryden launches a campaign to exploit his potential as a messiah. The world outside Dryden's corporate corridors has fallen into ecological and social catastrophe: a haunting, utterly dehumanized caricature of late 20th century. Womack's narrative skill lies in his ability to make his future, as well as his characters, seem inevitable. This is the stuff of millennial nightmares.

This is a hard book to read, similar to Clockwork Orange. The language is so abstract that you have to continuously attempt to understand what is being said you know what is going on. I struggled though it and I liked it, but it could have been so much better if it had been simplified. Most people will give up.

Elvissey is my second-least-favorite of the Dryco Chronicles series ( we'll see where it ranks after Going, Going, Gone hits my mailbox ), but not for the reasons you might expect. Allow me to explain.

It was the first Jack Womack book I ever bought - the Gibson blurb on the back sold me - but I couldn't understand a word of it and shelved it. Somehow, a year later, I wound up with a used copy of Terraplane. I had to re-read the first chapter three times to make sense of the language, but eventually I put everything together; now it's probably my favorite. This led me to collect his other books from used bookstores, and then finally to tackle Elvissey.

Elvissey is a remarkable achievement, particularly in its funhouse-mirror distortion of the the 1954 we knew on our planet. Having said that, it's also by far the most depressing of Womack's books. Which is saying something. The odyssey of pregnant security operative Isabel and her psychologically-unraveling husband John leads them to an American South where black people no longer exist and Elvis killed his mother. Their return to 2054, and subsequent attempted conversion of Elvis into a corporate messiah, is utterly heartbreaking. This is the Womack book which I've only re-read once.

First-timers should read Womack's books in this order: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Heathern, Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey. You'll gradually come to understand everything about the strange future Womack paints, and recognize recurring characters.

Enjoy the ride. You won't forget it.

"Elvissey" is the first Jack Womack novel I have read; I eagerly look forward to reading the rest. Without a doubt, Womack is one of the most interesting writers to emerge out of science fiction since William Gibson hit the stage with his brilliant "Sprawl" short stories, culminating with his amazing "Cyberspace" trilogy of novels. He's certainly among the most bizarre stylists I've come across, echoing Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" with his own poetic usage of Dryco's newspeak. "Elvissey" is a brilliant satire of our own obsession with rock and roll stars and other transient entertainment celebrities. It is also a fascinating look at how a psychologically troubled couple from 2054 meet a homicidal Elvis Presley in an alternative 1954. Equally appealing is how Elvis struggles to cope with his new found fame in 2054, after learning he is regarded as a saint by millions of adoring fans. I strongly emphasized with Isabel "Iz" Bonney's struggle to hold onto her sanity as her health and her relationship with John, her psychotic husband, dissolve through the course of the novel. Anyone expecting another excursion into William Gibson's "Cyberspace" future may be disappointed; Womack isn't quite as visionary as Gibson, though his prose is just as poetic. Instead, prepare yourself for a startling fresh, unique view of what a media-dominated future might look like.