Jack Womack's AMBIENT

My next read in Jack Womack's Dryco universe, Ambient leads off with a slightly alarming precis of how this world came to be, a series of events that we witnessed peripherally in other novels but is nicely encapsulated here. You'll see right away what made my eyebrows shoot into the stratosphere:

After the Long Island accident and the birth of Ambients; after the revelation of the Q documents in the loss of spirit thereof; after the economic emergency, the resulting currency devaluation, and what was called, by some, the unavoidable regrouping of structures, came the twelve months known by Ambients, and now by most, as the Goblin Year.

Our narrator, Seamus "Shameless" O'Malley, whom we met in Elvissey as the CEO of Dryco, then immediately shares that his mother died in a pro-life riot.

Ambient first saw print in 1987.

I have long maintained that evaluating science fiction on its prescience is the least interesting way to talk about it, and to that notion I still hold, but I couldn't let this bit just float by. What the hell kind of Q documents was Womack thinking about back in 1987?*

Anyway, Ambient. What is specifically meant by the term "Ambient" in this novel is another one of those slippery matters we're left to figure out through context for quite a while, like Elvissey's "regooding" or the still-mysterious-to-me "jabbernowling," but as for the novel bearing Ambient as its title, it is a prequel to Elvissey and but seems again like a sequel to Random Acts of Senseless Violence; an early scene likely even features a counterpart to the father of RAoSV's Lola**, here working a terrible, demaning job as a bookstore clerk in a world that has so devalued literacy that many (including O'Malley as he begins this novel) seem to regard it as an all but unattainable skill. 

In this scene, O'Malley, is a sort of body man to the current CEO of Dryco, Mister Dryden, a casually cruel man who takes pleasure in mistreatment of lesser beings for its own sake. In their encounter with the clerk who reminded me of Lola's father, Dryden throws the books he selects at the poor clerk, who is expected to catch them even as they come to number in the double digits while the clerk scrambles to follow him around the bookstore. When, inevitably, the poor clerk drops one, Dryden complains that it is now slightly scratched and demands that the store manager (whom Lola hates so for his own mistreatment of her father in RAoSV) get him a new and undamaged one, even though the damage is Dryden's fault if it's anyone's. To drive his point home, he smashes the scratched book over the manager's head until its binding splits, so it's truly unsalable. The store manager merely accepts the abuse as his due. We are spared what vengeance he takes on the poor clerk later on. 

O'Malley, like Dryden's sort-of mistress, sort-of hired gladiator, Avalon (who is written as a conventionally attractive, exaggeratedly cis bombshell but I kept imagining as a cute trans girl played by Charlie Jane Anders in the movie adaptation), merely watches as the scene unfolds. Just another shopping trip with the boss...

We know from the jacket copy of Ambient that this is more or less the story of how O'Malley comes to replace Dryden as the head honcho at Dryco, so I reckon it's important that we see that Dryden is a monster and O'Malley a decent guy... except the mature and empowered O'Malley we met in Elvissey wasn't too nice either, so it's hard, going into Ambient, to regard O'Malley as a sympathetic character whose point of view we will gladly share. I wonder how different this experience is for people who read Ambient before Elvissey.

We learn early in the book that there are more three fairly rigid castes in American society in the Dryco universe: owners and their servants (not slave owners as such, but rather what we would now consider oligarchs. What they own are the companies that own everything else), "boozhies" (the old bourgeois) and the Superfluous (what used to be both the working poor and the indigent, now lumped together in one big group "felt to deserve no shielding from the visscitudes of life). 

Womack, by the way, even anticipated the work from home trend, but Dryco at least has not only quashed it but found a way to make required office hours even more hellish than they are now:

A red light flashed over one of the cubicles. One of the office maintenants rolled over and unlocked the stocks that held the young woman's feet. It guided her across the room, toward the lav; her white cane helped her in tapping out the way. The system had flaws; some employees went insane -- they were fired -- and some grew blind -- the ones whose fingers slipped were given Braille keyboards, at cost.

Employees are literally chained to their desks and disabled employees are made to pay for their own accommodations. That last bit didn't surprise me all that much though; at my last job I had to buy my own vertical computer mice and split keyboard. To paraphrase Womack's buddy William Gibson, the dystopia is already here; it's just not evenly distributed yet. It's pretty funny, though, having O'Malley call attention to this detail, knowing as we do what kind of garbage he's going to allow/cause on his own watch in Elvissey. 

The Statue of Liberty's arm was blown off; there was a photo of the amputee, rather resembling an Ambient in her newmade loss.

Which brings us to Ambients, finally revealed as a subculture straight out of Gandahar/Light Years except they don't have blue skin. Originally the label -- which they are very proud to explain as referring to the fact that as disabled human beings in an urban environment, they are both everywhere and seemingly invisible (it just takes lots of effort not to see them, if you know what I mean) -- only referred to a small population of children who were born on Long Island after The Incident -- possibly a nuclear detonation -- there, but over time Ambient society has come to encompass not only anybody born with birth defects or disfigurements but also anybody who, like O'Malley's sister Enid***, have come so to identify with them that they have voluntarily had body parts amputated. The Ambients have developed a society partially encompassing the Ambient music genre (but not as in Brian Eno's airport music; as described it sounds a lot more like some kind of very energetic punk/thrash that just happens to be played by, e.g. one-armed bassists) and partly a characteristic increased agility forced by the need to function in a world that does not accommodate their lacks of arms or other disabilities. It's as hard not to think of Philip K. Dick's Hoppy Harrington as it is not to think of the Prester John-inspired blue mutants of Gandahar, though this novel's group lack those people's psionic abilities. You still don't want to mess with them, though. 

Interestingly, carrying on with a theme I first started really noticing in Elvissey, the Ambients are basically Manichaeans, or at least something close to Gnostics -- alt-universe Elvis from Elvissey was actually a pretty doctrinaire Valentinian Gnostic, which mean that upon learning that Dryco expected him to act as a god, Elvis got very, very upset and really didn't want to. In Valentinian Gnosticism and related doctrines, the creator god/Demiurge is actually evil, having captured countless souls and imprisoned them in the material universe to torture them and keep them ignorant of the real, radiant and beautiful nature of the actual universe beyond their capacities. We don't really get an idea of how widespread this faith might have been in the alt-universe, but it might explain the streak of nihilism that characterizes that nasty place.

I found Ambient interesting in its details but the least interesting in terms of plot an execution of the Dryco books so far. As far as its plotting, Ambient is basically a mob novel with noir flavoring as O'Malley gets drawn into his employer's long-fantasized plan to finally get rid of The Old Man - Dryden's ancient father, who founded Dryco on a drug-smuggling fortune with the help of a Latin American cartel or two, then seized on various opportunities posed by the disintegration of civil society as outlined in the precis with which I started this post. The kind of guy who can do all that (with the help of an equally ruthless and sociopathic wife who is long dead when Ambient gets going) is never a very good father, so nobody is surprised when Dryden drafts O'Malley for his final vengeance and dangles Avalon as bait/reward. There are double-crosses and plenty more random acts of violence and we do get to see more of what's become of New York but I'm running out of steam on these novels. I'm still going to read the rest of them, but I need a break from all of the explosions and gunfire and inhumanity. Woof.

*Actually, I know what kind of Q we're dealing with here, because like our Kipple King, Philip Kindred Dick, before him, Jack Womack seems to enjoy getting lost in the weeds of biblical apocrypha; in this case Q stands for Qumran. And Kipple we shall be if the other Q people latch on to this Q.

**I assumed this was indeed Lola's father while reading that passage, but what can only be Lola herself shows up in an insane scene later in the book, at an age and in a state that puts this story well past the time of her father's demise.

***Who is revealed to have attended the same tony private girls' school, Brearley, as RAoSV's Lola Hart and was likely one of her schoolmates.