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SCMP Reporter

Science fiction writer Jack Womack, author of Let's Put The Future Behind Us and Random Acts Of Senseless Violence, owns one of the largest collections of books on the weird, the fringe and the paranormal. His interests includes everything from JFK assassination theories to UFO abduction to sea serpents to spirit photography

Describe your latest book Going Going Gone (Voyager).

Concluding work of my six-volume science fiction series, the story of a hep cat who finally gets a break.

What are you reading now?

Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Non-Fiction and Mel Gordon's Voluptuous Panic, which documents the sexual underworld in Weimar Germany.

Name three buzzwords you hate.

Skillset. Grow the economy. Chad.

Which living author do you most admire?

Admire's a pretty strong word. I like Cormac McCarthy's earlier works. Also Don deLillo's.

If you could chat with any writer in history, who would it be?

Charles Fort. We see the world in the same way.

Which character in a book would you most like to be?

Satan, [in John Milton's] Paradise Lost, has all the good lines.

Which character in a book would you most like to sleep with?

Molly Bloom. She's tres groovitudina and has, clearly, a charming posterior.

Which book(s) do you wish you'd written?

Low Life by Luc Sante (nonfiction); We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson (nonfiction).

What was the last book you couldn't finish?

Extraterrestrial Physics 101: Gravity is the Fourth Dimension. Heavens knows I tried, but the incomprehensibility finally got the better of me.

What do you do when you have writer's block?

Come down with tuberculosis, if experience is anything to go by. Luckily I have neither any longer.



Q & A