Terraplane

Dryco

by Jack Womack

Terraplane, the second in Jack Womack's acclaimed Ambient series, is a vision of alternate reality -- New York in 1939, as experienced by travelers from the twenty-first century. Retired general-turned-corporate-spy Luther Biggerstaff and his hit man Jake are on a covert mission to kidnap Soviet superscientist Alekhine for their boss, the head of the multinational corporation Dryco. But Alekhine has disappeared, and they must be content with his genius assistant Oktobriana and a device he left behind -- which catapults them headlong into the past. But this 1939 is different -- slavery was not abolished until 1907, F.D.R. has been assassinated, and the Great Depression has cut even deeper; Churchill has died in a street accident, and the world is at Hitler's mercy. The only hope Luther and Jake have of getting home again depends on an unlikely conjunction of the New York World's Fair, the blues tunes of Robert Johnson, and the avant-garde physics of Nikola Tesla. Terraplane is a surreal, darkly comic, and gripping journey into the twilight zone of history gone mad.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cyberpunk, Dystopia, Time Travel, Alternate History, Speculative Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

About the author

"Womack's fiction may be determinedly non-cyber, but, with its commitment to using SF as a vehicle for social critique, it definitely has a punky edge. William Gibson once said that he thought he was more interested in basic economics and politics than the average blue sky SF writer. That counts double for Womack, whose fiction is packed with grimly amusing social satire and powerful little allegories exploring urban breakdown, class war and racial tensions".
--Jim McClellan (from an interview with Jack Womack, 1995).

Reviews

[fonz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Después de releerla me inclino por esta como peor de la serie, por debajo de "Heathern". Sencillamente, hay poco a lo que hincarle el diente. Una historia aburridísima de seguir pero no por un plot apenas existente, que también, sino porque tras la interesante introducción en la URSS del futuro, la trama se convierte en pesado deambular según lo primero que le iba viniendo a Womack a la cabeza siguiendo el sobadísimo mcguffin de "persigamos la cosa mágica que nos devuelva a nuestro mundo", unos personajes sosísimos liderados por un tópico ex-militar con sus traumitas bélicos, unas descripciones interminables del paisaje urbano del NY alternativo de 1939 en plan GPS, una historia de amor que no hay por donde cogerla... En fin, se salva la sátira de la URSS del futuro convertida al hiperconsumismo de estado, la cuestión racial norteamericana tratada con extrema crudeza en una novela de cf de 1988, una pincelada sobre la mentira del progreso y la inútil confianza en que el futuro será mejor como prometía la cf heredera del espíritu Gernsback, y la continuación del análisis de los Estados Unidos considerados como una nación psicótica, ahora hurgando en el pasado, en el origen de una neurosis nacida de una violencia colonial ejercida sobre la población indígena y esclava en su propio territorio.

[Bill Krieger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read a few of Womack's dystopian future/DryCo books. The very first one I read, Random Acts of Senseless Violence, was an amazing 5 star romp (williamt review). But Terraplane is the least of this bunch.

Terraplane is put at an immediate disadvantage: people in the future are somewhat unemotional and disaffected. In other words, they're pretty boring. The action in the plot comes out in dribs and drabs. Time travel. Ugh. A lot of it feels repetitive as well. A lot of it feels repetitive as well.

In Womack's future they speak a kind of pidgin English. Even the first person's narration is in this dialect. Woof... it's a tough slog, for sure. I recognize that it's a really difficult thing to do as an author... create your own language/dialect. The best ever is Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange. Genius! But if you're not genius and it doesn't work out, then it's awfully painful to read.

I like this description comparing time travel to drinking vodka.

QOTD

"We're not in the past, are we?" I said. "Not truly."

"Certainly we are not in past," she said. "How many times I tell you causality prohibits? You cannot drink vodka already drunk."

- Terraplane, discussing time/world travel

Oh well... Next!
Courtesy this story, I think I'll try something more popular and current: The Fastest-Selling Adult Novel in History: Paula Hawkins’ ‘The Girl On The Train’. We shall see.
yow, bill

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this. We have the same ornate, twisted language of the near-future world that Womack gave us in Ambient, not just in dialogue but in the story's prose too. Like it or not, Womack has really tried to come up with a new futuristic slang that's sometimes impenetrable, which is maybe as it should be in more SF. That's both the most original thing about Terraplane and its biggest stumbling block. What we don't have here is the leaden, faux-Shakespeare, clever-clever dialogue of the Ambients themselves, which was the most annoying thing about the first book to me.

As with the previous book in the series, Terraplane takes a little while to get started but gives us a pulpy, fast-paced action plot once things are established. We start in the same near-future, truly-fucked world as Ambient, but in post-collapse Russia rather than post-collapse New York. Two Dryco workers have been sent to meet with a genius scientist thought to be missing. Things go wrong, of course, but even more drastically than you might expect in a cyberpunk book. When the smoke clears, they're trapped with a wounded Russian scientist in an alternate-reality 1939 distinct from the 'past' they're familiar with. They'll have to navigate this darker, crueler alternate America if they have any hope of getting home.

Another good thing about this book is that in the people in past America actually talk normally and are nonplussed by Luther and Jake's future-lingo. That means they have to make their speech a little more clear, which benefits us, the reader. It makes up for a lot of the Russia stuff being written from, well, the perspective of an American who has known nothing but the Cold War his whole life. I think mostly well meaning, but perhaps the most dated part of the book.

I'm getting a sense that 'Dryco' is more a setting than a series, with Womack writing multiple books in the same 'universe' but rarely bringing back a main character once their book is done - as far as I can see. This was a fun read and I think I preferred it to Ambient.

7.5/10

[Rus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sin haber leído la primera entrega de la saga, cosa que da igual porque se pueden leer independiente, tengo que decir que no está mal. La trama regulara pero el world building y la historia alternativa molan, pero lo veo pobretón en general.

[Clio · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are lots of science fiction stories that focus on showing the reader the future, another planet/society, or an alternate history. Orson Scott Card calls them "milieu stories". The problem with milieu stories is that the setting usually carries most of the story, so any readers who aren't interested in this particular setting probably won't care for the story. In Terraplane, the main setting is an alternate history of 1932 New York in which the civil war never happened and slavery went on until 1907. This is a interesting idea, but in this story I never found it very engaging.

I might have been more interested in the alternate history New York if I were interested or invested in the characters exploring it. I wasn't, though. I'm trying now to think of things that make them unique, but most of them were pretty average and boring as far as characters go. I didn't really care what was going to happen to them.

What I took out of this story, in the end, was that the 1930's could be even worse if they happened during an alternate history. The 1930's were pretty bad already, what with the Great Depression and terrible racism and sexism going on. But they could be worse. And speaking of sexism, there were only two female characters in the entire story and one of them conveniently gets Stockholm syndrome after being kidnapped for a couple of hours and then falls in love with one of the other characters out of nowhere. I didn't think her character was the sort to do that, but she wasn't that well-defined anyway. The only non-heterosexual character in the entire book coerces someone into doing sex stuff with them, which wasn't really necessary for the plot. What was up with that?

In the end, reading this story always felt like a chore. Other people like it more, so that, at least, is a good thing.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second excursion into the Dryco world. Like the first one, Ambient, the reader is dropped into the future world without much explication. I'm not sure that reading this as a standalone would be much fun as a lot of the background of the Dryco world is slantly alluded to and is not explained at all.

But, sticking with it until about a third of the way in, I finally got my bearings. The tale ends up being a time-travel/alternate history story with definitive predictions on the continuance of the Reagan's "Age of Cruelty" will mean deep into the 21st Century. The twist on the alternate history trope is a nice one - I won't spoil it as it was interesting to figure out what the event was where our and the alternate history diverged.

[Julie Sandel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The books in the Ambient series are so vibrantly awful and hopeful, with gorgeous language to describe an alternate future America that is a logical progression of today's political views and behavior. This book in the series jumps ahead 10 - 15 years from Ambient, and describes a scientific experiment that catapults the protagonists into an alternate past America with horrible, yet completely different problems. Thought provoking and very timely, even though these books were all published from the beginning to the end of the 1980's. This is the 3rd time I have read these books, the last in 2010 (I found a dated bookmark) and they illuminate the problems of our current time in bright and shining terribleness.

[Alien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zwei amerikanische Agenten der Zukunft und eine russische Wissenschaftlerin werden in eine Parallelweltvergangenheit versetzt, wo die Sklaverei erst um 1900 abgeschafft wurde.
Sie finden Unterkunft bei einem schwarzen Arzt. Die Russin wird von einem Virus infiziert.

Sprachlich sehr seltsam. Genervt hat mich der offenbar unfähige Übersetzer Walter Brumm, der viele englische Redewendungen nicht kannte und sie einfach wörtlich übersetzte, egal ob es Sinn machte. z.B. "think twice" -> "denk zweimal"; "why are you packing so much heat?" -> warum hast du soviel Hitze eingepackt? Burning the midnight Oil -> verbrennst du das Mitternachtsöl. Aua

[Janusz · Rating 5 out of 5]

kept worrying that i wouldn't get into it because of the short length... completely unfounded worry. i'm still gobsmacked that not only did the author manage to get me interested in all of the players, but i am not even left with hunger for a prequel about any of them. i will definitely remember the names R. Luther Biggerstaff and Oktobriana Osipova for a long time.
also, i managed to lose a paycheck for the only time in 23 years while it and this book were tightly held and directly in front of me for the entire trip from home to deposit-machine. figure that one out.

[Nicholas Barone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terraplane is Womack's second novel, and is set in the same universe as Ambient, his first. I found it to be a much more enjoyable than Ambient, however. It maintained what I loved about the first book (the dialect they speak), but had much richer characters and a more intriguing plot. Furthermore, the plot is an alternate history/world plot, which I love.

Based on the occasional reference made about O'Malley, this story seems to begin several years after the events in Ambient. It's not very specific however, and not terribly relevant as the story quickly leaves the world entirely.

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite novel of the Dryco series. Womack's language — so interesting in the other novels — proved to be more of an impediment to comprehension in Terraplane. It really was a struggle to keep track of what was happening in the plot. The alternate world depicted by Womack is intriguing, but ultimately I'm interested in the fate of the ruined world of the earlier novels.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of hard to read because he attempts to update language to a future dialog. Sounded kind of Russian in it's syntax, not that I know Russian. Great ideas, great world building. I'm going to read some more of his stuff.

[The Boogerhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk fan, and haven't read Womack, you're doing it wrong. This particular nodal point in the DryCo multiverse is overwhelmingly surreal and totally believable. Mr. Womack is the very definition of "Eccentric Genius".

[Liam O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Womack mashed dystopia with time travel nearly 20 years ago and knocked it out of the park with a big bad bat. Check this one out, along with Ambient to read one of the most under-rated scifi authors writing today.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second reading for this very strange SF book.

[Zepp · Rating 3 out of 5]

fun and futuristic!
pop culture like we haven't seen since Shonen KNife!
Rather listen to the record...

[Treplovski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, I admit it's been at least 10 years since I read this. But it's got to be the best time-travel story I've ever seen.

[Velvetink]

*note to self. (copy from Al).

1989 ed. Unwin paperbacks. different cover.

[Gina W Fischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jack Womack . Is. The. man. How come he hasn't written anything in so long? Just like Patricia Anthony..what up? Sci-fi is diminished without them.