Ambient: A Novel

Jack Womack

Ara 2007 · Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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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

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Jack Womack is the author of Ambient, Terraplane, Heathern, Elvissey, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Let’s Put the Future Behind Us, and Going, Going, Gone. Womack’s short stories, have appeared in anthologies edited by Kathryn Cramer (Walls of Fear, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”), Ellen Datlow (A Whisper of Blood, “Lifeblood”) The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Little Deaths, “That Old School Tie,”), and Don Keller, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman (The Horns of Elfland, “Audience”); as well as in Omni (“A Kiss, a Wink, a Grassy Knoll.”). He has published articles or reviews in Spin, the Washington Post Book World, Artbyte, Science Fiction Eye, Fantasy and Science Fiction, New York Review of Science Fiction, and Suddeutche Zeitung (Munich), and was a contributor to Amok: Fifth Dispatch. He is a cowinner of the Philip K. Dick Award, and has taught writing at the Clarion West workshop, in Seattle. He lives in New York City.