Terraplane

Rating:
Summary: A rewarding transtemporal love story
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: A rewarding transtemporal love story
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: This is a promising work indicative of the author's growth.
Review:

Terraplane is the second book in Jack Womack's Dryco series. While it contains elements of a fairly straightforward sci-fi adventure, it also contains the seeds for Womack's subsequent, more fully developed works. On the surface, Terraplane is an above average time/dimensional travel novel. It begins in near future Russia, which, like most of the rest of the world, is run by huge multinational corporations. A swift combination of espionage, adventure, and intrigue draws our heroes- an American executive, his bodyguard, and a renegade Russian scientist- into an alternate past. They find themselves in a New York City, circa 1930's, where the city borders are tightly controlled, and African Americans live as second class citizens who need special papers to cross into neighboring areas. From here, the novel quickly becmes a quest to return intact, to their future.

Womack fleshes out the novel with believable characters and sharp pacing. The novel is filled with a convincing future lingo, similar to that used in Gibson's Sprawl series, that adds another layer of reality. His future and past contain enough detail to make them quite believable. This is all used to greater effect in Womack's later novels in this series, Heathern, and, in particular, Elvissey. Despite the presence of many sci fi cliches, and a fairly predictable plot, Terraplane is an improvement on its predecessor, Ambient. Womack's innovative use of language and his fresh approach to time travel show great promise, which is fulfilled in his later, genre-transcending novels like Elvissey and Random Acts of Senseless Violence (one of Publisher's Weekly's selections for Best Books of 1994).

Rating:
Summary: Left me wanting more...
Review: I was enjoying the heck out of this novel, and all the sudden it was over! Womack creates a dark and detailed alternate past, drops in some interesting characters from an equally dark future, makes up an original lanquage, throws in some ultra-violence and a famous Blues musician, then seems to have given up on it all tacked on a Deus Ex Machina ending. Did his deadline come up, or what? There was so much more that could have been done with the story. Personally, I thought we were going to the Worlds Fair to consult Tesla on time travel. Womack seemed to have it all set up and it could have been really interesting, but then...nothing. I still recommend this book for its rich texture and some nice surprises, but it should be twice as long as it is.

Rating:
Summary: One of my very, very favourite books.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Black Ship to Hell
Review: The buzzsaw prose, the narrative dash, the pure killing purpose, everything that made Womack's promising debut *Ambient* a terrific read and yet somehow...less, somewhat...rushed; too sloshed and unwieldy, scatterbrain and pretzel-plotted, with the jittery sense of a novel written under deadline. The book opens brilliantly, a near-future capitalist Moscow (*Terraplane* was written on the eve of Yeltsin's coup) blazing red neon like an outdoor casino (the fruits of *sozializtkapitalizm*), a wrathweary American general and his enforcer contracted for a zany bit of industrial-espionage, a Fourth World romp in search of bizarre and unlikely Teknologische. The narrative quickly snaps through its first of many tripwires, lurching from one burst of surreal violence to another, the meta-urban swagger hemmed in by some of the most pretzelled and overreaching dialogue we've seen in a "genre" novel since *Riddley Walker*. The time-travel premise, however shakily postmodern, has infinite promise. (The book is brilliantly subtitled A Futuristic Novel of New York, 1939.) The reader can already feel pangs of daguerreotype-laden nostalgia (the TB-infected annals of Old New York, so luridly sado-picturesque when you don't have to actually live through it) just by reading the jacket blurbs. But somehow the story rarely exceeds the narratological Rube Goldberg contraption of hack-and-slash plotting, a breakneck Shadow Run of brass-knucks humor steering jerkily through the cartoon planet of Womack's novelistic sound-stage. It must have been a hoot for the author to *conceive* of such a storyline, the imagineering triumph of actually making it work as a novel...an entirely different story. (If one were perverse enough to produce, market, and release "The Making of *Terraplane*: Behind the Scenes of Womack's Retro Timescape", we might imagine Mighty Jack slapping furiously at his laptop, multiple ceiling-mounted televisions tuned vicariously to CNN, the History Channel, Bravo, IFC, MTV, BET, and PBS, working the flows of these projections into the preposterous schizo-text we have before us.) What remains is some of the most robust, zestfully obscure syntax this side of Thunderdome, odd bits of futureal rhetoric that transcend the amateurishly calibrated narrative clockwork, as in this tidbit, relating the Russian new world order of forcefed consumerism: "Citizens passed as if on forced parade, many pushing red carts topful with freezers, washers, TVCs, copiers; all manner of technological flotsam. Staring into their puffy, bloodshot eyes disconcerted. Refugees' faces held similar looks in every land I'd troubled; the look of these fit naught but for breathing and running, forced by us to abandon home and race the roads before the other team, purposeful and timeshort, landed to steal their days away"(14).

It was, in fact, Bruce Sterling himself who wrote the first and most influential review of *Terraplane*(NYRSF, #3, Nov.'88), applauding the brave gamble of Womack's vast and promising sensibility, yet equally peeved by the matte-black two-dimensional futurity of the book's postindustrial trappings. "It bores Womack to see people cope, even if they do it cleverly. In *Terraplane*, prosperity and security of any kind is essentially unthinkable. There are divorces but no weddings; sex but no children; laws but no justice; politics but no hope for change"(3). The human relationships which thread and splint this violent text seem ridiculous against the forced backdrop of bloodspattered concrete pillars, characters raging and storming through this black-toothed libretto of futuristic Gallows Opera, the narrative snags universally resolved with a pre-Tarantino passion for machine-pistols and assault weapons, jargonautical dialogue leading up to the Big Splatter. Sterling perceived Womack's narrative voice as symptomatic of science-fiction's long-standing disruption of dramatic authenticity (i.e. a moving "human" story) with its over-the-top ecophilosophical speculations (i.e. balderdash SF cartooning). "There's a general genre difficulty in mounting the pulpit to denounce the iniquities of an imaginary world. It's hard to make this carry any serious moral authority.... One cannot join Amnesty International to defend the human rights of hobbits....[!] Concentration camps happened; concentration camps for Martians are not compelling emotional realities, but merely unpleasant conceits"(3). Caught in the sticky clutches of this old-school genre Catch-22, Womack's characters are gasping for life, for a humanistic depth beyond the plastic of the postmodern. Meanwhile, the reader is forced to treat the text as just another clever piece of Mall Mythology, a tongue-in-cheek post-Pynchonian "black comedy" chewing the ashes of literary belatedness.

But despite all obstacles and shortcomings, I am fascinated enough to continue reading Womack, to see whether the demonry of this confused little book finds a tighter and more credible narrative weave in the Dryco novels to come.... If the rumors are true, I will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Black Ship to Hell
Review: The buzzsaw prose, the narrative dash, the pure killing purpose, everything that made Womack's promising debut *Ambient* a terrific read and yet somehow...less, somewhat...rushed; too sloshed and unwieldy, scatterbrain and pretzel-plotted, with the jittery sense of a novel written under deadline. The book opens brilliantly, a near-future capitalist Moscow (*Terraplane* was written on the eve of Yeltsin's coup) blazing red neon like an outdoor casino (the fruits of *sozializtkapitalizm*), a wrathweary American general and his enforcer contracted for a zany bit of industrial-espionage, a Fourth World romp in search of bizarre and unlikely Teknologische. The narrative quickly snaps through its first of many tripwires, lurching from one burst of surreal violence to another, the meta-urban swagger hemmed in by some of the most pretzelled and overreaching dialogue we've seen in a "genre" novel since *Riddley Walker*. The time-travel premise, however shakily postmodern, has infinite promise. (The book is brilliantly subtitled A Futuristic Novel of New York, 1939.) The reader can already feel pangs of daguerreotype-laden nostalgia (the TB-infected annals of Old New York, so luridly sado-picturesque when you don't have to actually live through it) just by reading the jacket blurbs. But somehow the story rarely exceeds the narratological Rube Goldberg contraption of hack-and-slash plotting, a breakneck Shadow Run of brass-knucks humor steering jerkily through the cartoon planet of Womack's novelistic sound-stage. It must have been a hoot for the author to *conceive* of such a storyline, the imagineering triumph of actually making it work as a novel...an entirely different story. (If one were perverse enough to produce, market, and release "The Making of *Terraplane*: Behind the Scenes of Womack's Retro Timescape", we might imagine Mighty Jack slapping furiously at his laptop, multiple ceiling-mounted televisions tuned vicariously to CNN, the History Channel, Bravo, IFC, MTV, BET, and PBS, working the flows of these projections into the preposterous schizo-text we have before us.) What remains is some of the most robust, zestfully obscure syntax this side of Thunderdome, odd bits of futureal rhetoric that transcend the amateurishly calibrated narrative clockwork, as in this tidbit, relating the Russian new world order of forcefed consumerism: "Citizens passed as if on forced parade, many pushing red carts topful with freezers, washers, TVCs, copiers; all manner of technological flotsam. Staring into their puffy, bloodshot eyes disconcerted. Refugees' faces held similar looks in every land I'd troubled; the look of these fit naught but for breathing and running, forced by us to abandon home and race the roads before the other team, purposeful and timeshort, landed to steal their days away"(14).

It was, in fact, Bruce Sterling himself who wrote the first and most influential review of *Terraplane*(NYRSF, #3, Nov.'88), applauding the brave gamble of Womack's vast and promising sensibility, yet equally peeved by the matte-black two-dimensional futurity of the book's postindustrial trappings. "It bores Womack to see people cope, even if they do it cleverly. In *Terraplane*, prosperity and security of any kind is essentially unthinkable. There are divorces but no weddings; sex but no children; laws but no justice; politics but no hope for change"(3). The human relationships which thread and splint this violent text seem ridiculous against the forced backdrop of bloodspattered concrete pillars, characters raging and storming through this black-toothed libretto of futuristic Gallows Opera, the narrative snags universally resolved with a pre-Tarantino passion for machine-pistols and assault weapons, jargonautical dialogue leading up to the Big Splatter. Sterling perceived Womack's narrative voice as symptomatic of science-fiction's long-standing disruption of dramatic authenticity (i.e. a moving "human" story) with its over-the-top ecophilosophical speculations (i.e. balderdash SF cartooning). "There's a general genre difficulty in mounting the pulpit to denounce the iniquities of an imaginary world. It's hard to make this carry any serious moral authority.... One cannot join Amnesty International to defend the human rights of hobbits....[!] Concentration camps happened; concentration camps for Martians are not compelling emotional realities, but merely unpleasant conceits"(3). Caught in the sticky clutches of this old-school genre Catch-22, Womack's characters are gasping for life, for a humanistic depth beyond the plastic of the postmodern. Meanwhile, the reader is forced to treat the text as just another clever piece of Mall Mythology, a tongue-in-cheek post-Pynchonian "black comedy" chewing the ashes of literary belatedness.

But despite all obstacles and shortcomings, I am fascinated enough to continue reading Womack, to see whether the demonry of this confused little book finds a tighter and more credible narrative weave in the Dryco novels to come.... If the rumors are true, I will not be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Like Maus?
Review: 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.