Heathern, Ambient, by Jack Womack
3.0 Stars
8-20-2022

Two more Womack books, both set deep in his dystopian DryCo universe. This turns out to be a problem, since it's not a very enjoyable universe. Previous to this I'd read *Random Acts of Senseless Violence*, which leads into the DryCo setting, and *Terraplane*, which uses that setting as a bookend for adventures in other spaces. One of the reasons these previous books worked is that they just touch upon the DryCo setting, rather than wallowing in it. It's difficult to make a hellish setting interesting/readable for any length of time, but that is the task that Womack sets up for himself in Heathern and Ambient.

So, more about the setting. It's a sort of post-Jackpot, where the surviving 2 billion live in a strange combination of Idiocracy, 1984, and libertarian heaven. Human life is nearly worthless, and the demographics have reverted to medieval levels where a large fraction of the population is less than 20 years old. It is a society that is deeply death-seeking and that is constantly tearing at itself in myriad ways. For the reader, at times this comes off as cartoonish, at other times affecting, at other times as just very unpleasant. Both of the books are set at the top echelons of DryCo, the company that runs the Western world. In Hearthern, the executives try to tame a Gnostic messiah that has come to the world. A lot of people die. In Ambient, there is a power struggle between the founder of DryCo and his son. A lot of people die. In between, there are roller-derby death matches to determine & finalize corporate mergers, an Elvis cult, the founder of DryCo and his Friedman-esque continual chaining of sayings and metaphors, malformed and super-intelligent mutants that follow the teachings of the new Gnostic Messiah, and the lyrical and oblique speech of the mutants. Of the two books I prefer Ambient, though it does have the downside of introducing like 4 new major ideas and themes in its last 20 pages. Too much, too much. Shot through both books is both the author's brilliant writing and a continual, intelligent, and extreme cruelty towards its characters. You could argue that the cruelty is a midnight-black satire of trends in America, but at a certain point you have to ask if the author is satirizing the stupidity and cruelty or just getting off on them. I'd have difficulty recommending the books to anyone even if parts of both books are beautiful. It *does* make me understand why Womack never achieved any mainstream success with this books, despite their quality and the great recommendations that he gets from famous sci-fi authors.

Neat random bits: learning that the occasionally referenced "mollies" are Molotov cocktails, learning the reason Jake wears white suits, the religious testifying of the mutants, and the fate of 2 of the characters from Senseless Violence. Oh right and Ambient, written in 1997, has as a plot point the "Q Papers", a series of ancient and long hidden documents that completely upend Christianity. Coincidence?