Random Acts of Pseudo-Violence with Jack Womack Tuesday, 29 August 1995
Jack Womack is the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of Elvissey and Random Acts of Violence. He joined us in Head Space to discuss pseudoscience and science fiction - the weird intermingling of psi powers, Dianetics, Forteanism, and perpetual motion devices with a literature devoted to technocratic rationality. Among his other achievements, Womack is one of the foremost collectors of '50s UFO books. He'll also tell us a bit about his next novel, Let's Put the Future Behind Us, which is set in contemporary Russia.
allynb asks: Will there ever be a mass market edition of Elvissey?
Womack: Allyn, at present Tor is taking Elvissey out of print. I hope to resell all the previous works to Grove, who seem to want them.
allynb asks: Do you recall the Hieronymous Machine that Campbell did a feature on?
Womack: Yes. Campbell had such a weakness for pseudoscience.
drdisco asks: You mentioned that you're a fan of Alan Moore, and his favorite mag is The Fortean Times. Do you read it as well?
Womack: Ah yes, never miss an issue of FT.
lethem asks: Jack, you tantalized me by saying that the examples of pseudo-science I'd listed in the promo for tonight were tame compared to your favorites. Do tell us what stimulates your jaded old tastes....
raydavis asks: Yes, do. I have some idea of what pseudo-social-science stirs your mirth (or wrath, it's so hard to tell the difference ...), but the harder stuff?
Womack: Ray, wrath, mirth, no difference, it's all grist for the mill. The sort of things I like are the Zig-Zag and Swirl theory of Suction and Pressure ... Another favorite is George Gillette's bound/rebounding theory of multinotes. Very silly.
lethem asks: What on earth is the Zig-Zag and Swirl theory of Suction and Pressure?
Womack: ZZ&S has to do with the concept of Penetrability. Lawson conceived notion after failing to set up 1st public airline in 1919.
lethem asks: Jack, John Clute says that SF has contributed more to pseudo-science than the reverse? What do you think?
Womack: I think so. A lot of crossover, especially at the low end of the bandwidth
raydavis asks: Are you mostly interested in the eccentrics, or in more "official" bad science as well (à la the aggressive chappies of 1960s anthropology and primate studies)?
Womack: Eccentrics, by and large. They're so much more creative. Every once in a while some real one will come along who'll be of interest, but not that often.
raydavis asks: That would make sense - "popular science" and "science fiction" are fraternal twins, and "popular science" is the form in which the eccentrics have to publish.
Womack: Siamese twins, too often. I'm thinking in particular of those turn of the century utopias.
lethem says: It's easy to imagine some of the great pseudo-scientists (Velikovsky, Wilhelm Reich etc.) restricting themselves to 'fiction' and being merely 3rd-rate SF writers ... sort of the "IRON DREAM" effect. The truly great claim their imaginative material for reality. Hubbard and Strieber figured it out halfway through their careers....
Womack: And made a lot of money doing it, too. Don't forget Ray Palmer.
drdisco asks: The really, really mad scientists are not that prominent in your books. Is that a conscious effort on your part to avoid them?
Womack: Yes, I tend to avoid them - they're hard to satirize.
scamp asks: What about John Mack? What about C. D. B. Bryan?
Womack: John Mack is quite silly. Bryan is fairly dull, considering. He is a good writer but he gives a lot of credence to things which don't really hold up. I like the sort of person who can conceive of evil beings living in the brain and causing bad things to happen.
allynb asks: What about Penrose?
Womack: Penrose? More, more.
allynb asks: Oxford Math maven Penrose of The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind, where he argues, sorta, for a nonalgorithmic consciousness.
Womack: Oh, I know who you're talking about Allyn. Fairly sensible for my sort of thing.
raydavis asks: For real brain-science eccentricity, you have to turn to the Vatican neuroscientists who situate the soul in quantum indeterminancy.
Womack: I do like that. Often though correlating religion w/science leaves much to be desired, no matter the perspective. I do have a delightful book that posits that the 10 Lost tribes of Israel were dinosaurs.
allynb asks: Or sometimes there are proofs that the 10 lost tribes became British, according to the Great Pyramid.
Womack: My favorite of those is Comyns Beaumont, who proposes that all Greek/Biblical/Egyptian events took place in Scotland.
raydavis asks: So dinosaurs were not only warm-blooded, but circumcised?
Womack: They were circumcised, ray, yes, that's what killed them.
drdisco asks: There's a Gnostic theme that resurfaces in your books all the time. Why gnosticism of all things? Is it the "salvation through esoteric knowledge" that appeals to you?
raydavis asks: It seems a reasonable way for US fundamentalism to go if (as Jack assumes in his novels) Christianity falls apart: it lets you keep Satan and Hell....
Womack: The Gnostics got a raw deal, I always thought, particularly the Albingensians.
eyebrown asks: So, for a science to be "pseudo," it must have an element of the "silly?" Which is why quantum mech - slit-besotted photons and all - is not pseudo. It ain't silly enough.
Womack: Exactly, pseudo has to have the creative spark.
lethem says: The great 'pseudo' aspect of quantum mechanics, I think, is the relentless anthropomorphizing. Physics for poets, etc. Spin, charm, strangeness. The way it hopelessly devolves into projections of the human psyche.
Womack: Your friend the Atom, to a degree.
allynb asks: What sort of motivations do you see in pseudoscience, Jack? Reassurance?
Womack: Allyn, I think it's just the miracle of the human mind at work combined with the need to believe.
lethem asks: Jack, let me get you speculating about the rich interface between UFO culture and the history of the SF field, if you please. UFO's as "id," etc. Have you read Ian Watson's MIRACLE VISITORS?
Womack: Yes, I did. I kept thinking what a shame it was he beat me to it. It's not one of the SF books I reread, I'll put it that way.
mrzygote asks: Wasn't there some jive-ass Alien Autopsy show on Fox TV last night?
Womack: Yes, the show was utterly jive-ass.
raydavis asks: Cool. I'm also interested in this UFO as the "folk" substance of SF - though there seems to be much more of a divide between the artists and the substance here than there was between, say, Greek religion and Greek authors.
Womack: I don't know how many SF writers pay much attention to this material, though. Don't they tend to run away from it?
lethem says: I don't know how many SF writers pay much attention to any material outside of the field, to be cynical. But it's a part of the world they live in and (helplessly) write about nonetheless.
grifter says: Lethem: Good point. I don't think SF has any higher percentage of "Ripped from Today's Headline" stories than mainstream fiction does.
allynb says: One notable cross-over was Jane Roberts - she wrote some SF before the Seth material.
Womack: Oh, but she was so appallingly terrible.
scamp asks: So how do UFO books from the 50s differ from those of today????
Womack: The '50s volumes accept the fact of oceans on Venus, for one thing. They're much more innocent. No rectal probes, autopsies, that sort of thing.
eyebrown says: Pseudoscience came of age with the advent of rectal probes.
allynb asks: ... And all those Nordic alien women, instead of little gray men....
scamp asks: I would think they'd be more cold-war threat kind of stuff too.
Womack: It really did. Actually the 1st Nordic alien women date from 1953, and having sex with earth boys since 1957, as per the lit.
allynb asks: Any thoughts on the crop circle stuff?
Womack: Hoaxes, by and large. Don't know about the two or three don't knows.
allynb says: I enjoyed the crop circle in the shape of a Mandelbrot.
Womack: That was particularly inventive, I thought, and drove believers wild for years.
drdisco asks: Are there cultural differences between the stories of alien encounters or do they all look like space monkeys with big eyes all around the world?
Womack: There is some variance , drdisco, but less than you'd think. Of late of course, marketing has caused the little gray guys to win the marketplace.
allynb asks: I suspect the LGM stand in for HMO bureaucrats.
Womack: There's a lot of correlation among UFO/US conspiracy/et. al believers, more than the mass media have yet realized.
allynb asks: Jack, you mean militia types?
Womack: Yes, exactly, Allyn. Those guys have a very ... distinctive weltanschaung going down.
mrzygote asks: Conspiracy believers: my thoughts exactly. Those cats staking out the Black Mailbox at Area 51 are suspiciously militiaesque, prob. equate UFOs with One World Government. Then again, saucer people as friend/foe seems like prob. a 50/50 split, believer-wise.
grifter asks: Actually, I think there was a case u in Michigan where the militia types made an explicit connection between UFOs, UN troops, and "Secret codes" on the backs of freeway signs.
Womack: mrzygote - or lefty/fascist, depending. What gets interesting is when anti-Semitic references become a part of a UFO theory, as has happened more than once of late ... I shouldn't say interesting, horrible is more apt but not surprising.
grifter asks: Has anybody suggested the Lost Tribe is the Grays?
Womack: Not so far as I've noticed, but anything's possible, and I don't see everything, unfortunately.
allynb asks: I liked Brin's story about UFOs as nasty elves.
Womack: Allyn, haven't read it. Did see a post on alt.paranet.ufo today though that proposed that silly autopsied alien of last night was in truth an elf.
grifter asks: Have any of the fundie sects, especially the ones on TV, started talking much about UFOs, or is that still contradictory to their "we're the only ones here" stance?
Womack: Fundies been talking UFO and Satan since the early 50s.
grifter asks: Ah. So they're not aliens, they're devils.
Womack: Exactly.
raydavis says: Since UFO-mania seems to spring from the need to make the divine concrete, they're in competition.
mrzygote asks: Or angels ... Ezekiel's Wheel and all that.
grifter asks: OK, because I think we're starting to get to the point where the New Agey "angel movement" and the alien crowd are probably going to start dovetailing, too. If they haven't already.
raydavis asks: Oh, they have!
Womack: You all probably may not realize my sister channels angels, you know. I don't.
lethem asks: I've recently been thinking that the interesting thing about paranoid theories is the more obvious stuff they enable you to avoid thinking about. That for every conspiracy theory there's a blatant wrong/obvious connection that's too painful to consider....
Womack: Searching for flaws in these theories is like plucking June bugs off a fence.
mrzygote asks: "OOPS! A wacky, wishy-washy bookshelver killed the president ..."
lethem asks: Jack, at the risk of derailing a delightfully batty conversation, let me turn this in the last quarter hour (if others consent) to more Womack-related interview stuff, i.e., what are you working on at the moment?
Womack: Finishing the revisions on Let's Put the Future Behind Us. Pseudobelief plays a role in the book, as well as the infinite flexibility of history and truth.
raydavis asks: Also, Jack, what short fiction have you done besides Out of Sight, Out of Mind - and where would I find it?
Womack: Ray, pick up Datlow, Little Deaths, just out in pb, my best story's in it. Autoerotic asphyxiation and literary deconstruction in one piece.
raydavis asks: Is the Womack muse continuing to spend most of its time in NYC?
Womack: I've been here 18 years, I'm fine.
drdisco asks: What is it about angels (aliens of a different kind) that is so appealing in our world? I've not read all your books, but the ones that I have angels of various sorts appearing in the background.
Womack: drdisco, angels have their purpose.
grifter asks: Angels - on a related note, I thought the idea of a Gnostic Elvis was great. I especially liked that a writer was willing to treat Elvis in a somewhat serious fashion with regard to his spirituality, rather than dismiss it as a joke, even if you did "make it up."
raydavis asks: The appealing thing about Elvis to those of us who worship him is that he was God made Joke: genuinely awe-inspiring and genuinely awful (not to mention genuinely artificial). I also appreciated seeing it handled right for once.
Womack: We Southern boys take such things serious. Thank you both.
peske asks: Does SF limit or enable your writing, Jack?
allynb asks: Do you have an "end time vision?" i.e., a far-future vision?
Womack: I don't know that it does either, peske. My far future vision, Allyn, goes as far as the end of the year.
lethem asks: Jack, what about wrapping up the sequence with a sixth novel? Where does that stand?
Womack: I'll do that eventually, but not any time soon. I know what happens though.
phib says: Re the Elvis icon. I've only read Terraplane (have mercy!) but your treatment of Socialist icons was fresh.
Womack: I'm very fresh in the new Russian book, believe me.
raydavis asks: You mean the new book isn't the sixth novel?
Womack: No no no - completely unrelated but Womackian all the way.
drdisco asks: One final geek question: Do you have email and general net.access?
Womack: Yes I do. jwoma@pipeline.com.


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