New SF Masterwork: Random Acts of Senseless Violence
‘Simply the coolest writer of his generation . . . Science fiction just doesn’t come any better than this’ ~ Northern Echo
‘Not since Kurt Vonnegut in his SF prime has there been a talent so iconoclastically sparkling as Womack’s ~ Manchester Evening News
Jack Womack has seen SF publishing from both sides, having been a highly respected publicist for American SF publishers such as HarperCollins EOS and Orbit US, as well as an award-winning author of critically acclaimed post-cyberpunk novels. He joins the SF Masterworks programme with Random Acts of Senseless Violence . . .
It’s just a little later than now and Lola Hart is writing her life in a diary. She’s a nice middle-class girl on the verge of her teens who schools at the calm end of town.
A normal, happy, girl.
But in a disintegrating New York she is a dying breed. War is breaking out on Long Island, the army boys are flamethrowing the streets, five Presidents have been assassinated in a year. No one notices any more. Soon Lola and her family must move over to the Lower East side – Loisaida – to the Pit and the new language of violence of the streets.
The metamorphosis of the nice Lola Hart into the new model Lola has begun . . .
Random Acts of Senseless Violence is, in Cory Doctorow‘s words, an ‘underappreciated masterpiece’, and Jo Walton calls it ‘a book that’s brilliant and ought to have been seminal, a book that clearly should have set the world alight’. High praise indeed from two such talented authors. And if that’s still not enough to tempt you to try it, maybe this last word from William Gibson might . . .
‘If you dropped the characters from Neuromancer into Womack’s Manhattan, they’d fall down screaming and have nervous breakdowns’
Random Acts of Senseless Violence is available as an SF Masterworks paperback and an SF Gateway eBook. You can find more of Jack Womack’s work via his author page on the SF Gateway website, and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.