Jack Womack

Jack Womack (born 1956) is an American science fiction writer from Lexington, Kentucky, known for the dark satirical Dryco novels charting a near-future, increasingly dystopian America under corporate control. The sequence includes Ambient (1987), Terraplane (1988), Heathern (1990), Elvissey (1993), and Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993), which follows a New York girl's descent through urban collapse in a mutating, argot-heavy prose style. Elvissey, in which corporate agents travel to an alternate timeline to recruit an alternate Elvis Presley, won the Philip K. Dick Award. Womack also wrote Let's Put the Future Behind Us (1996), set amid post-Soviet Russian chaos, and the nonfiction book Flying Saucers Are Real! (2016), on UFO-obsessed print culture. His fiction is noted for its grimly comic social satire, exploring class conflict, racial tension, and the erosion of civic life through richly invented vernacular.