Jack Womack

Lola Hart is an ordinary girl living a comfortable life in near-future Manhattan, until her family's life falls apart under the pressures of a city and country that is spinning out of control. Faced with the pressures of surviving any way she can, and surrounded by the new language and violence of the streets, Lola metamorphoses into a street-wise hustler.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence

Ex-bureaucrat-turned-successful Moscow businessman Max Borodin confronts the trials and tribulations of post-Soviet Russia as he copes with a nagging wife, exhausting mistress, troublesome brother, and the Russian mafia

Let's Put the Future Behind Us

Ambient

U.S. government freelancer Walter Bullitt tests his new psychotropics on himself and unsuspecting citizens until he becomes involved in a murderous plot to sabotage a presidential campaign.

Going, Going, Gone

AMBIENT ist ein Gleichnis, das den Zerfall der westlichen Zivilisation in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel eines kaputten, verkommenen, von Gewalt und Anarchie zerrissenen New York vor Augen führt. AMBIENT erzählt die Geschichte von Seamus O'Malley, eines Leibwächters und Vertrauten des Multimilliardärs Thatcher Dryden und von Stella, der ständigen Begleiterin und persönlichen Lieblingshure seines Brötchengebers. Was jedoch als einfacher Fall von erwiderter, aber verhinderter Liebe beginnt, entwickelt sich rasch zu einem lebensgefährlichen Balance-Akt zwischen Pflichterfüllung, Geschäftsintrigen, mörderischen Familienrivalitäten, perversen Praktiken eines zur Aufrechterhaltung von Ruhe und Ordnung unfähigen Militärs und dem furchtbaren Geheimnis eines skrupellosen alten Mannes. Hinter alledem lauern – abgesondert von der Gesellschaft – die Ambients, die wahren Kinder dieses chaotischen, moralisch heruntergekommenen Universums, die eine Subkultur mit eigenen Ritualen und eigener Religion auf eigenem Territorium geschaffen haben... Mit AMBIENT legte der US-amerikanische Autor Jack Womack im Jahr 1987 einen grandiosen Erstling vor, der zum Klassiker der Cyberpunk-Literatur wurde und nicht zu Unrecht bis heute mit CLOCKWORK ORANGE von Anthony Burgess verglichen wird. Der Apex-Verlag veröffentlicht sämtliche Romane des DRYCO-Zyklus als z.T. neu übersetzte Neu-Ausgaben sowie den abschließenden Band GOING GOING GONE als deutsche Erstausgabe.

Ein Cyberpunk-Roman

AMBIENT - DRYCO-ZYKLUS 1

Roman

The UFO Library of Jack Womack

Flying Saucers Are Real!

“A remarkable novel” of a post-Communist Russia filled with gangsters and oligarchs, and one man’s shady business deal that could land him in a world of trouble (The Boston Globe). Part speculative fiction, part satire, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us is a romp through 1990s Russia, as the closed society of the Soviet Union morphs into a modern capitalist free-for-all and Max Borodin finds himself, his wife, and his mistress in mortal danger—in “a world of petty bureaucrats, shameless opportunists, and full-blown mafiosi” (Entertainment Weekly). “An absurdist thriller narrated by one Max Borodin, an ex-Communist Party hack who has re-invented himself as a commercial operator with a cynical understanding of how to manipulate the strings of power. Cops are paid off with dollar bills, bureaucrats with phoney documents and racketeers with the consumer opiates of their choice. Max is always up for the main chance, and before long finds himself logged into a drug deal involving psychotic Georgian gangsters, corrupt local entrepreneurs, the investors in a leaky crematorium and a messianic fascist demagogue who wants to build a plastic dome over Russia to secure it against ‘Western sneak attacks.’ At the same time, he has to balance the demands of his irascible wife and voracious mistress while rescuing his gullible brother from the folly of building a ‘Sovietland’ theme park.” —Wired “The grimmest, funniest, and one of the most cannily on-target accounts yet about the helter-skelter fast lane of life in the New Russia.” —The Boston Globe

A Novel

A young Elvis Presley is kidnapped into the future to be the new messiah in this “jarringly potent” novel from the author of Ambient (William Gibson). Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award At once a biting satire and a taut sci-fi thriller, Elvissey is the story of Isabel and John, a troubled couple who are sent through a “window” from the year 2033 to a strangely altered 1954. They are on a desperate mission to kidnap a young Elvis Presley and bring him back to the present day to serve the powerful conglomerate Dryco as a ready-made cult leader. But when Elvis proves to be a reluctant messiah, things do not work out quite as planned. With his distinctive prose, Womack has combined “serious sociological extrapolation, high and low comedy, pulp adventure, pop iconography” and more in this highly original novel (Omni). “Nazi flying saucers over an alternate 1950s Memphis, your basic cross-time godhead abduction of Elvis Presley, and what must surely be one of the flat-out weirdest Fisher King inversions yet perpetrated in American literature. Achingly sad, downright alarmingly funny, and just about as serious as any of us can presently afford to be.” —William Gibson, author of Neuromancer “Jack Womack is another of the heirs of cyberpunk, one of science fiction’s most interesting new writers” —Los Angeles Times “Womack’s book is different in tone and content from anything you may have read.” —Financial Times “Womack astounds and entertains. . . . Though the plot suggests the ridiculous, this is, in fact, a deep, often theological, reflection on love, betrayal and commercially inspired nihilism.” —Publishers Weekly

Elvissey

Comprehensive, illustrated library and history of UFOs and their origins from Jack Womack.

Flying Saucers are Real!

NEW YORK, NEW YORK... Walter Bullitt's New York, 1968. Part-time U.S. government provocateur and full-time hepcat, Walter isn't keen on the assignment his employers are trying to toss him - no need to mix with the Kennedys if you don't have to. ...SO GOOD THEY MADE IT TWICE He also hopes the ghosts he's been talking to lately are only a side-effect of the recreational drugs. Then two women from a different New York show up and tell him they aren't. Now, Walter saw When Worlds Collide but he never thought he'd be starring in the road show, especially when one world is his and the other is invisible - at the moment.

Going Going Gone

Twenty-first-century Moscow. Luther and Jake have a mission - to steal the experimental transferral device from under the nose of the Dream Team. It's a bold and dangerous plan that goes fatally wrong. The New York they return to is not the one they left: it's a nightmare world of violence, paranoia and apartheid on the brink of a devastating war.

Terraplane

New York, 2033. A rebellious populace flocks to join the C of E - Church of Elvis. The Elvii have already formed schismatic groups: among them the Hosts of Memphis and the Shaken, Rattled and Rolled. Global corporation Dryco send their operative, Iz, back to 1954 to bring Elvis home to his adoring millions. But the America she finds is strangely altered, and so too is the King. At the Presley home Elvis - nineteen, acned, never recorded - stands over the blood-spattered body of his ma...

You need to be rich to survive at all. But it's easier to be dead than poor. Twenty-first-century New York. It's a nightmare. Reaganomics has gone mad. There's murder and mutilation on the bombed-out streets and in the corporate conference rooms. Manhattan is a zoo. There's guerrilla war on Long Island. Seamus O'Malley is a bodyguard and assassin in the outrageously powerful Dryco organisation, and he's in deep trouble. Taking the job sounded like a good idea at the time. Falling in love with his employer's mistress, Avalon, probably wasn't so bright. Getting caught up in the Dryden family's crazy rivalries didn't help. Agreeing to murder the Old Man was plain stupid. And getting involved with the Ambients could only complicate matters further. Before long, O'Malley's on the run, and there's nowhere safe to hide.

Terraplane (Womack, Jack)

A troubled couple must make a journey across time to kidnap a young Elvis Presley and transform him into the demigod of a decadent urban future. By the author of Ambient. Original.

Elizabeth Massie

K. W. Jeter

Robert Silverberg

Jonathan Carroll

Kathe Koja

Pat Cadigan

Thomas Ligotti

Rick Wilber

Robert Holdstock

Barry N. Malzberg

Garry Kilworth

Suzy McKee Charnas

Karl Edward Wagner

David J. Schow

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Thomas Tessier

Melissa Mia Hall

Melissa Snodgrass

This “toothy follow-up to Datlow’s first-rate Blood Is Not Enough” offers “admirably inventive variations on vampirism” (Kirkus Reviews). Featuring stories by Jonathan Carroll, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Robert Silverberg, A Whisper of Blood is a “consistently engrossing anthology” from award-winning editor Ellen Datlow (Publishers Weekly). Continuing to expand the boundaries of the concept of vampirism—as she did in her first collection, Blood Is Not Enough—Datlow has assembled eighteen fascinating stories that range from tales of literal vampires to what she calls “metaphorical bloodsuckers,” who can drain another’s life force without ever sinking their teeth into necks. In “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” by Suzy McKee Charnas, an elderly Jewish woman who’s taken her own life has second thoughts and makes a deal to become a vampire to stay immortal, the only condition being she has to drink blood by request only. An amnesiac operative tries to sort out if a secret government agency is trying to help him regain his memory or is wiping it clean in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Kafkaesque “Do I Dare to Eat a Peach?” And in Jonathan Carroll’s “The Moose Church,” a tourist in Sardinia is literally scarred by asking questions of death in his dreams . . . A Whisper of Blood includes contributions by Suzy McKee Charnas, Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Silverberg, Kathe Koja, Elizabeth Massie, Barry N. Malzberg, Rick Wilber, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Ligotti, Melissa Mia Hall, David J. Schow, Jack Womack, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Thomas Tessier, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, K. W. Jeter, Pat Cadigan, and Robert Holdstock and Garry Kilworth.

Stories of Vampirism

A Whisper of Blood

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year: In a dystopian future New York, a girl’s diary chronicles her life as society begins to crumble around her. Until recently, Lola Hart’s biggest problem was her annoying little sister. Now the twelve-year-old girl’s once comfortable life is slowly falling apart. Her mother is a teacher, but she’s lost her job. Her father is a writer, but no one is buying his scripts. It’s gotten so bad that they can no longer afford their Manhattan apartment or the tuition for Lola’s exclusive private school. They move to a small apartment near Harlem, and Lola enrolls in public school—but the Harts aren’t alone in their troubles. Riots, fires, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, and civil unrest have become commonplace, threatening the very fabric of life in New York. In the pages of her diary, Lola documents her family’s attempts to adjust as the city and the country spin out of control. Jack Womack, a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut for his vivid prose and unbridled imagination. In this novel, “Womack’s stark vision of the United States’s decline is an uncompromising satire that, perhaps even more than it did in the mid-1990s, forces us to confront a world instantly recognizable as our own” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “A heartrending coming-of-age story. Flecked with black humor, this is speculative fiction at its eerie best.” —Entertainment Weekly

One man struggles to survive in a dystopian near-future New York City in this acclaimed novel that “performs feats of brilliance on so many levels” (Entertainment Weekly). In a decaying and violent near-future New York, the remnants of civic order are maintained with brute force by the conglomerate Dryco. But even Dryco is falling apart from the inside. Seamus O’Malley is bodyguard and confidant to Mister Dryden, the CEO, and an admirer of Dryden’s personal femme fatale, Avalon. But what begins as a simple case of unrequited love quickly becomes a desperate chance for survival as corporate intrigue, murderous family rivalries, and perverse subcultures take over O’Malley’s life. Drawing comparisons to the nightmarish vision of J. G. Ballard and the linguistic brilliance of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Ambient marked the “wonderfully inventive” debut of Philip K. Dick Award–winning author Jack Womack (The New York Times Book Review). “Bleakly comic . . . A cynical tour de force through the meanest of streets. Ambient is less prophecy than documentary, demonstrating how the best science fiction is about as future-oriented as today’s Daily News.” —The Village Voice “[Womack] succeeds in balancing blistering social commentary with shrewd literary experimentation . . . Flecked with black humor, this is speculative fiction at its eerie best.” —Entertainment Weekly

The year is 1998, and the nightmare is close at hand. The world economy has gone into a mega-crash. Most of the population has been plunged into abject poverty. Anarchy and violence stalk the streets. All power is in the hands of Dryco, headed by paranoid tycoon Thatcher Dryden, and his monstrous wife, Susie. But on the desperate streets of the Lower East Side miracles are happening. A Messiah seems to have risen from the people and is healing the sick, teaching children, raising the dead. Dryco's New Projects Manager, Joanna, is sent to check him out. Thatcher's got a plan for world domination, and a genuine Messiah could be the key he's looking for. And even if he's fake, he may have his uses. But soon, Joanna finds herself trapped in a crisis of conscience, between the relative security of a Dryco job and the dream of healing a sick world.

Jack Womack

Books

Your next favorite book is out there