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. 

Jack Womack's ELVISSEY

I, too had been cut loose, bereft of work, of friendship, of love, allowed only to devote life and time to readying one in whom I didn't believe for one I couldn't believe to lull those who, against reason, did believe.

I'm going to noodle a lot about language and weird little questions this book inspired, but please don't think that because I do so means this book is not an exciting or eventful read. It is that and more. So much more!

I was last December years old when I realized that Jack Womack's amazing Random Acts of Senseless Violence was part of a series. Or at least a grouping of novels set in a shared Dryco Cinematic Universe. And that there are more than a handful of these Dryco books. Yippee!

The first-for-me* of these other books, Elvissey, is more or less a direct sequel to RAoSV, which I re-read at the beginning of this year. And, if possible, it packs some even bigger emotional wallops than its predecessor. As in buckle up. But also...

The characters in the Dryco universe speak an argot that is easy to understand if you don't try to do so, but gets more difficult to grasp the more you think about it. It's beyond how Lola Harte, the heroine of RAoSV, wrote in her diary that formed that novel, but not in the way I had figured it would be; the overlapping characters, Iz and Judy, are all grown up now but instead of speaking something more like the modern American English that we know, betokening the greater sophistication of adulthood in contrast to 12-year-old Lola's schoolgirl prose, Iz, Judy and all their colleagues sound like they come from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants world by way of Darmok's planet, with a lot of corporate jargon and buzzwords thrown in. Nouns are verbed, verbs are nouned, aphorisms are condensed (my favorite phrase: "You're mountaining this molehill" with "an exaltation of interpreters" a close second - in which "interpreters" is used in the sense of those who embody and act rather than render speech from one language into another, as a close second. The "exaltation" is one of Elvis impersonators!), all manner of portmanteaus and inherited malapropisms appear, and some terminology is so opaque as to constitute a mystery at least as compelling as any mechanisms of plot or character. "Regooding," for instance. How creepy and Orwellian is this neologism, really? It's baffling as the story starts, and we're left to soak up its meaning via context.**

This would be maddening and even a reason to DNF a novel if a lesser writer than Jack Womack were the author.

But so, what's Elvis got to do, got to do with it? I'll get to that, but first let's enjoy all the different things this title could mean. Perhaps it is an epic journey undertaken, not by Odysseus but by Elvis? Or maybe "Elvissey" denotes a thing or things associated with Elvis, as we might call, say, Graceland or a Las Vegas wedding chapel an Elvissey (like an abbey)? Though I at least would probably wind up sticking an "R" in there to make the stand-alone noun, as in an "Elvisry." Then again, maybe it's an adjective. Hey, that was Elvissey. How Elvissey? A little Elvissey? A lot Elvissey? The Elvisseyest thing ever? We eventually learn that it is none of these things but a completely legit other, proving that Womack thought about this even more than I did. 

See what you've done to my brain this time, Mr. Womack? I hope you happy. Happify?

"All Elvii bewail their lot... Digging oases of pain in deserts of comfort... Such jabbernowling frets and hinders," a character observes early in the story. This little speech is a perfect example of how this argot is both breezily simple and fiendishly complex. Leaving aside what the "Elvii" are for a moment, he's basically rephrasing our contemporary aphorism "some people'd bitch if their water's too wet" (or a yet more contemporary "now and then it's important to stop and bitch about the roses"), and we nod along because ain't that the truth, these Elvii have it great and they're still complaining but then what the hell is "jabbernowling" and is it something that frets, as in performs the act of fretting, or has the argot of Elvissey transformed the simple verb "fret," meaning something like "to fuss or worry about something" into a transitive verb, requiring an object, meaning something like "to cause someone to fuss or worry about something?"

I still haven't parsed what "jabbernowling" is, though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with pointless verbalizing, as in "jabber."

With all this extra musing on language waiting to pounce from every page, Elvissey is a very demanding book for its length and its pulpy plot. 

Because oh yeah, the plot. For there is indeed a plot taking place amid all the Fun With Language.

It's even easy to summarize: Iz, Lola's closest girlfriend from the harrowing second half of RAoSV, survived their teenage years as New York City fell apart and has married a wonderful but troubled man and the two of them have been "Regooded" by Dryco (the only corporate overlord you'll ever need, who have taken over most, if not all, of the functions of government, including the enormous project of rehabilitating New York City with an eye toward making it a utopian City of the Future... for a million inhabitants and no more) as a field team the company sends on vitally important but seemingly impossible missions, though ordinarily she is the administrative assistant to DryCo's second-in-command that being Judy) and her husband is a high-level security guard. 

In this case, Iz and husband John are to travel back in time/ visit a parallel universe and abduct one Elvis Aaron Presley from when he was at the height of his youth and beauty, and thus his value to Dryco... and bring him back to their post-collapse New New York to be the messiah for a cult that already exists (these are the Elvii mentioned above, so no, there are not multiple Elvises Presley running around. Or are there?).

This poses another interesting question, of course. This novel was originally published in 1993, when Elvis had only been dead for 16 years or so. I remember occasionally encountering people back then who staunchly believed that Elvis was still alive, had faked his death so he could be just another guy in the world who just had to deal with being made by his devotees every once in a while, but who had the whole publicity-industrial complex on his side to keep his secret. His fans who "knew better" were just harmless and amusing kooks, back then, decades before Q-Anon had people camping out at Dealy Plaza awaiting the second coming of JFK and JFK Jr. We didn't know how good we had it. 

But anyway, now in our own 2023, 30 years since the publication of Elvissey and some 45 years since Elvis died, with Elvis so long gone that even his only daughter has passed on, if Q-Anon had never happened, would there still be people running around who disbelieve in Elvis' death? Given that he would be 88 years old now and wasn't really looking too good at age 42, would his cult have persisted in our world? I would expect it to be much diminished at the very least, in a world without Q-Anon and all of its weird cultural baggage, but, would there be, or are there, many people in 2023 who are still fanatically devoted to the erstwhile King of Rock'n'Roll?

In Iz's contemporary universe of 2033, the answer to that question is enough to cause problems for John's and her employer, Dryco. Meaning its CEO, Mr. O'Malley is a god-king of a kind we found amusingly improbable back in 1993 but now, well, *gestures at universe*. I mean, people like to argue about whether we live in Huxley's dystopia or Orwell's, etc but a case sure could be made for it really being Womack's.

Anyway, O'Malley's fee-fees are hurt because so many Elvii worship the wrong god-king and thank Elvis for all the good (?) that O'Malley has done for them.

So obviously the solution is to kidnap alt-universe Elvis and let him deal with the Elvii -- but only after he agrees to promote O'Malley's aims and goals and ego. And tell them O'Malley has massive, manly hands, really. 

But then Iz and John cross over -- in a simply amazing car you're going to have to read the book to get to appreciate -- and find just how alternate this other universe is; the culture shock isn't merely that it's 1954. In this universe there was never a U.S. Civil War and slaves weren't freed until 1905, and while we think car culture is bad in our world, the interstate highway system in alt world has massive elevated 20-lane behemoths all over the place; even bigger swaths of the neighborhoods that were sacrificed to the Eisenhower system in our world were obliterated to the point of many of them just not existing anymore. And as for the culture off those highways, it's a gross QOP wet-dream of segregation, sexual harassment, revisionist historical interpretations even of stuff that it shares with Iz's universe, etc.

And so, its Elvis is nothing like what Iz and her people have expected to find. This Elvis is downtrodden and not at all famous (nobody in white supremacy Disneyland wants to listen to a kid who wants to sing blues instead of oom pa pa), more than a bit violent and entitled and wholly unready for what they're going to ask of him. He winds up complicating every aspect of the plot, from Dryco corporate dynamics to Iz's marriage to John, and sends it all spiraling off in unexpected but wholly satisfying directions. 

In other words, holy shit, this book is good!

*There doesn't seem to be a definitive order in which these books are to be read; they're cataloged like a series but without ordinal numbers. I thought of going in publication order but then I saw that this book tells of the adulthood of some characters from RAoSV so I chose this as my first deliberate read in the Dryco universe. 

**"Regooding" as a concept gets increasingly problematic as the Dryco world unfolds. At first it simply seems to mean something like "rescued from bad circumstances" or "rehabilitated" as a neighborhood might be gentrified or a person lifted out of poverty/ignorance/illness, but then a truly icky aspect kicks in: the existence of a drug called Melaway. The "mel" being the same prefix for darkness/blackness as appears in "melanin." As in this drug turns dark skin light, black hair blonde. Add in some blue contact lenses and Iz, a dark-skinned black girl from the meanest pre-Dryco streets, can pass as a white woman on her mission,  to the alternate universe which is, she is repeatedly told, way more racist than her own. But then, on the eve of her journey, she "concludes her bleach" and admires her naked self in the mirror: "Venus atremble at seaside, another regooded resident to best suit our eternal city." While some later language tries to imply that it is not a purely White ideal that is sought but rather a golden-toned racelessness but one is not sure whether that is the sincere aim and context of "regooding" or just lip-service to a less racist goal, you know?

Jack Womack is a brave writer. 

Jack Womack's RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE

I am fairly certain that Jack Womack is not now nor ever has been a twelve-year-old girl, but Random Acts of Senseless Violence could not be used as evidence to prove this. Indeed, it is the finest literary drag act -- not just in gender, but also in generational drag, actually* -- that I have seen since Gene Wolfe's Pandora by Holly Hollander. And really, in terms of the genius of the narrative voice, these two novels are comparable.

But whereas Wolfe's protagonist-narrator confounds and misleads and imposes her own perceptions on the reader, Womack's Lola Hart feels like an fairly trustworthy and rational guide to her disintegrating world, down whose socio-economic rungs she and her privileged bourgeois-bohemian family plunge even as the rest of society comes apart in a near-future Manhattan that surely feels more plausible now than it did in the 1990s when this book was first published. This even as she herself degenerates, as I'll discuss some more below.

The reader is meant to assume the role of Lola's diary, whom Lola addresses as Anne, thus evoking thoughts of Anne Frank, who addressed her own diary as Kitty and treated it as a person much the way Lola does here; in fact Random Acts of Senseless Violence could, weirdly enough, be thought of as the offspring of Diary of a Young Girl and A Clockwork Orange, as much as it can a punk Pandora by Holly Hollander horrifying as that thought might seem. This is because while the early pages and the general premise seem to be more or less setting up our heroine as a victim the way Anne Frank was a victim, this is not a narrative of hope and perseverance through adversity. Rather, it's a sort of precursor to Breaking Bad in that we are watching a good character degenerate right along with her society; the violent acts to come are mostly going be perpetuated by, rather than on, Lola. That she is left with little choice is abundantly clear. Lola is still a victim, but not a blameless one.

But then again, maybe if Anne Frank met up with some toughs like Lola's friends in the slummy new neighborhood to which Lola's family is forced to move, Anne might have wound up going on the odd Nazi-beatin' rampage and going out in a blaze of gory (no, that is not a typo) instead of dying of Typhus in a concentration camp? Who knows?

At any rate, watching Lola transform from bright, friendly private school student to slang-slinging little thug is horrifying and fascinating and feels woefully inevitable once she's adjusted to her new surroundings. It's also horrifyingly plausible, given how prescient the novel's near-future setting turns out to have been; I had to remind myself often that this book was written before 9/11, before the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis, before the Occupy movement and the latest national debt brinksmanship and federal government shutdown. Like John Brunner before him, Jack Womack has a scary crystal ball sitting in front of him -- only his prophecies have yet to manifest as self-denying ones.

But this isn't just a descent into the titular violence; Lola is on the verge of womanhood with all of the issues that can bring, including those of sexuality and potential homosexuality; Lola spends a fair amount of the novel wrestling with these issues and her sexual attraction to some of her girl friends, giving us just the odd glimpse into the rest of society's doings -- Presidential assassinations, Army mobilizations in urban areas, recoinage, minor stuff like that -- as a mere backdrop to her struggles. As any tweenage girl might, when confiding in her diary. The reader thus struggles between annoyance at and sympathy for her self-absorption as the reader tries to see around Lola to the world beyond in all its decay and violence.

Which is, of course, the point.

The result is, like a John Brunner novel, anything but a comfortable read, but it's a powerful one, and not one to be missed, deadhead.

*Regarding this, see the below Twitter exchange between the author and I (the day I'm not thrilled to pieces when an author I admire engages me on Twitter, I'll know I'm done with the internet):

@KateSherrod actually none: imagined the voice of mid-20s friend at younger age. Wrote 1st 15 p, she read. Unnervingly close, she said.
— Jack Womack (@jwomack) October 19, 2013

@KateSherrod Once I had the voice down it came natural. Did an entry a day for six months, then continuity revisions, and done.
— Jack Womack (@jwomack) October 19, 2013

 So what he's saying, in his pleasantly modest way, is that he's actually just a freaking genius. Which I totally believe.