Customer Reviews

Terraplane: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
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"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.

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.

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.

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.

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).