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5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoroughly enjoyable, 22 Oct 1998
By A Customer
The first book by Womack is set in an apocalyptic near future where one corporation dominates the world while the immense majority of the population lives in misery and distress. The world described is believable to a certain extent, but the characters -related to the owners of that corporation- are far better, complex if not completely rounded. They also use a 'modern' version of English which is a lot of fun. Another, more complex, subplot, centers around the Ambients, mutants of a radioactive bombing and their followers, with difficult and profound religious tones. In them lies the hope for a better future and one can't but wonder whether today's youth bears any resemblance to that movement at all.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Everything not 'AO', 3 Oct 2007
I read Jack Womack longtimeways and was mind affected, Womack is a speculative fiction/cyberpunk novelist with unique visions of a `near-future' lateral side stepped a la Phillip K Dick, yet curiously Womack's work hasn't been taken up by Hollywood as the PKD creations (Blade Runner, Minority Report etc.. ) have been,
Womack wields an even more bloodied brush, sketching out a nightmarish evolved vision of a New York future, believably predictable in the immortal words of Frankie Howard ` and so, it came to pass..' His twisted aggressive society is divided into the archetypal ` haves and have-nots', bleak life resembling a gene spliced hybrid of medieval cruelty and third world exploitation and suffering. The world sucks to corporate dynasties who routinely `conference' formally and bloodily (Battle Rollerball style) for control of each other's assets and territories, the loser CEO going out hara-kiri style with close family and all who serve him sure to follow.
The protagonists are a close working group, employed by the top dog Dryco enterprise who own almost everyone who owns everything else. The young Mr Dryden glowers in the shadow of his maniacal ruling father. His motley crew of hired staff live or die on his whims as does anyone who displeases him. The storyteller is OM (O'Malley) the genetically modified Dryco bodyguard protector who harbours a not so secret love for young Mr Dryden's current concubine (Proxy). Avalon is a stunning exhibitionist, minimally dressed sex-on-legs combat-model pleasure companion and has been `indentured' in sexual service since pre teen age (literally, as all proxies' teeth are removed to aid performance and to prevent predictable `revenge' against their owners). Womack's dark tale was written in less neurotic times thus escaped the flak that would erupt nowtimes from a vision in which pre-pubescent girls are company-owned, trained to provide companionship and sexual pleasure as `lalas' before evolving their older `proxy' status. Old Mr Dryden senior's lalas are literally life saving, as one of his matching pair spots a devastating bomb when pleasuring him under his desk. A clear case of `last night a BJ saved my life!' to parody the old disco song. Womack takes you a step or two darkly thru the glass. His world isn't nice but it's the sort we humans could easily still make and so often have done before.
Most of the world near starves, or is fed Soylent Green style while the privileged and power hungry live like corporate kings hurtling thru guarded private traffic lanes. Womack's world is dark crammed, terror tainted and threatening, death is moment's beat away from riot, insurrection, street gangs, corporate displeasure and revenge. His future pulses with dangerous clubs, underground labs, biogenetic adaptations, privilege's war upon the helpless in profit's name. He stretches the present and takes the worst of it and you're mindreeled at the way things could be. Futurewise shock awaits doorway crouched, loaded and menaced. This is the world of hungry street rats, public gang rapes and murders, firebombing and torture burnings, social chaos and an environment of decay and destruction that makes old Beirut look like a holiday camp. The Church of `E' (Elvis) is the only socially binding philosophy. Interspersed amongst this heaving shameful world are the circus-like communities of the Ambient.
Children of the USA's biggest nuclear disaster they are the living `freak show' in dreamstate carving out alternative genetically perverted existence. Deformity becomes art soon street admired. Emulation fashion builds cultwise, `normal' humans surgically identify and `drop out' to join their strange cousins. Womack both advances and warps spoken `American English' to a mish-mash amalgam of patois, jive talk, slang and textspeak. He loses prepositions, squeezes conjunctions, adjectives and adverbs and crushes personal pronouns until the mere essence of minimal factual speak remains like Homer Simpson's plaintive `beer me!'. Ambient speech is florid, a silken adaptation of romantic Shakespearean poetic. It's masterfully intertwined with the stripped down `fastspeech' into a bewildering, confusing yet heart rendering amalgam of staccato impact, immersed in swirling poetic phrasing and touching emotional memory pictures, encapsulated into verbal constructs.
The novel follows the rivalries, plots and changing loyalties of a cast of characters as OM and Avalon try to escape the nightmare to find some shared peace of mind, but things do not go well.
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