Ambient

Rating:
Summary: A Splendid Mix of Anthony Burgess and William Gibson
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: A Splendid Mix of Anthony Burgess and William Gibson
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Ambient puts the PUNK back into cyberpunk!
Review: A shocking and sobering view of urban decay taken the whole way into the future. One of the best Womack books there are! Right up there with 'Random acts of senseless violence'

Rating:
Summary: Circling the Drain
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: I found it irritating
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A wry and confronting future tale about buisness.
Review: Jack Womack's first book is an introduction into his future vision of the United States. In the wake of a massive sharemarket collapse and currency re-valuation most of everything is owned by one massive corporation, Dryco.The position at the top of Dryco is fought over by the Old Man, Thatcher Dryden, who founded the emipre, and his middle-aged son. Family security guard Seamus O'Malley is caught in the middle of their machinations and is hopelessly in love with one of his employer's mistresses.Womack is at his best when he writes casually about the atrocities that are an everyday event on the streets of New York, where all the action takes place. Language, culture and the importance of life itself have all been turned upside down and Womack brings it to life with color and black humour.

Rating:
Summary: post-literate masterpiece
Review: Jack Womack's work is on par with the best of the so-called cyberpunk genre (Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson being the 5 star names that come to mind), reminiscent of PK Dick at times. Ambient kicks off the Dryco series (Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, and Going, Going, Gone) as Seamus O'Malley, bodyguard advisor to Thatcher Dryden, Jr., heir apparent to the Dryco empire falls for his boss's "proxy"- half concubine, half bodyguard herself.

Womack's vision is a blend of laisse faire and Road Warrior- a worst case scenario of big business (The Dryden's, being former drug dealers, are the ultimate capitalists) taking over the world. O'Malley is a somewhat hapless protagonist, a sensitive guy who reluctantly maims people at the behest of his employer, and who is also reluctantly drawn into an assassination plot by his newfound love.

"Ambient" is a term that refers to a generation of victims of a nuclear attack on Long Island, horribly mutated (ala Chernobyl) outcasts and those who willingly join them by self mutilating themselves.

Burgess is almost always mentioned because of the dialogue, a "post-literate" dialect that really isn't developed to perfection until "Random Acts of Senseless Violence."

Read the whole series, in order (though admittedly I didn't at first and still enjoyed them all), then read "Let's Put the Future Behind Us," Womack's novel set in contemporary (circa 2000 anyway) Russia.

Rating:
Summary: Like "Clockwork orange" with a cyberpunk feel.
Review: This is not an easy book to read. It contains a lot of violence, both physical and moral, combined with a very poetic language, which makes it reminiscent at times of mr Burgess great "Clocwork orange". However, you shouldn't expect a copy of that. "Ambient"'s hero is concerned with different subjects to those of Alexander de Large, and this story will be enjoyed by those who feel there's a certain amount of cliches in most cyberpunk novels nowadays and want to read something new. This is a book which makes you think, and that altogether makes it both dangerous and seductive