From /home/matoh/tmp/sf-rev Fri Aug 22 16:15:00 1997 From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Jul 15 23:06:37 1997 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!news-stkh.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!europa.clark.net!newsfeed.gte.net!eecs-usenet-02.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!news!wex From: "Evelyn C Leeper" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: FREMDER by Russell Hoban Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 14 Jul 1997 18:46:03 GMT Organization: Software Agents Group Lines: 66 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:1419 FREMDER by Russell Hoban Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0-224-04370-6, 1996, 184pp, L14.99 A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1997 Evelyn C. Leeper In the 21st century (a very different 21st century than that of Greg Egan's DISTRESS, though they take place in only three years apart), Fremder Gorn is found floating in space sans space suit, sans helmet, sans everything--everything but life that is. This is considered strange, even in Gorn's universe of spaceports with robot sweepers under noctolux lamps cleaning up under signs saying "Mikhail's Quiksnak" and "Q-Bo Sleep." Fremder Gorn's quest to find out how he came to be floating in space also involves finding out what happened to his mother, a famous inventor, and the almost predictable interaction with mysterious government agencies et al. But Hoban is not so much a novelist as a poet. His classic RIDDLEY WALKER proves he has an eye for language and sounds rarely found in science fiction, and even his narratives written in more standard language (KLEINZEIT, THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ, THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY, PILGERMANN, and TURTLE DIARY are the ones I know of) are more novel-length free verse than prose. I'm sure some lit-crit major will explain that there are strict rules for free verse that this doesn't meet. But to my untutored ear, a sentence like "I've always considered sleep after lovemaking more intimate than the lovemaking: getting through the night together, lying embraced until an arm becomes numb, then lying together like two spoons until sleep doesn't come that way, then turning backs and reverting to aloneness together and the snores, farts, and sleep seemed to have no rest: she mumbled laughed, cursed, quoted from the Bible, sometimes in a voice that seemed different from her own." This is a book that cries out for a reading by the author. Anyone who has read any of Russell Hoban's works will immediately want to know how to get a copy of this, his latest and perhaps most traditional science fiction book. This is not to say that it is traditional by any normal definition of the term, of course. Unfortunately for us USans, this is available only in a British edition, and it will probably be a while before it crosses the Atlantic--assuming it ever does. Why do I latch on to authors who are impossible to find here? Of his other works I mentioned, only RIDDLEY WALKER, a post-holocaust novel, and PILGERMANN, a first-person story by a Jew during the Crusades, perhaps best described as magical realism, have been published in the United States, where Hoban is known primarily as an author of children's books. His others--KLEINZEIT, an eventful and mysterious day in the life of its eponymous hero, THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ, a quest for lions in a country that *seems* to be modern England, THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY, involving the talking head of Orpheus and a Vermeer portrait, and TURTLE DIARY are the ones I know of--seem to be available only in British editions from Picador. Now that I've pulled his other books off the shelf to refer to them, I want to go back and re-read them all. %T Fremder %A Russell Hoban %C London %D 1996 %I Jonathan Cape %O hardback, L14.99 %G ISBN 0-224-04370-6 %P 184pp Evelyn C. Leeper | eleeper@lucent.com +1 732 957 2070 | http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824 Life is not a "brief candle." It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. -- GBS From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Apr 14 12:23:33 1998 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed1.news.luth.se!luth.se!Cabal.CESspool!bofh.vszbr.cz!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!18.24.4.11!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!not-for-mail From: "Evelyn C Leeper" Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books.reviews Subject: Review: MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER by Russell Hoban Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 10 Apr 1998 13:30:47 -0400 Organization: none Lines: 81 Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:1842 rec.arts.books.reviews:2466 [apologies if this is a duplicate; apparently my attempt to post it last week failed. --AW] MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER by Russell Hoban Jonathan Cape, ISBN 0-224-05121-0, 1998, 182pp, L14.99 A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1998 Evelyn C. Leeper There has been much discussion of magical realism in rec.arts.sf.written these days, and I think I would classify this as magical realism. That is, of course, a meaningless statement, since the real question is not what category this fits into, but what this is about, and what it says. The offer in question is the following: Mr Rinyo-Clacton will give Jonathan Fitch a million pounds in exchange for the right to terminate Fitch's life any time after a year has passed. Fitch, who has just lost his girlfriend and his job, agrees. One thing leads to another, and the next morning he wakes up realizing that he may have contracted the HIV virus as well. Now, from a strictly logical standpoint, this makes no sense: if he thinks he's going to die in a year, why worry about a virus which doesn't even show up in a test for three months and would almost definitely not progress from an HIV+ condition to AIDS in a year? I know people who have been HIV+ for many years now, and they have not yet developed AIDS. But people are not rational, particularly about death. One of the cliches about AIDS (and by extension, about the HIV virus) is that those who having it are "living with a death sentence." But we all are. Anyone could be hit by a truck, or choke on a piece of food. It's just that they know it, and we don't. So Fitch's reactions are perfectly reasonable, in a bizarre way: he is more concerned about the HIV virus that he *may* have, than about the agreement he signed selling his death in a year. Something--the media? one hates to blame them for everything, so maybe it's human irrationality as reported and spread by the media--something has convinced Fitch that the *possibility* of death from AIDS at some unspecified future time is a more serious concern than the virtual certainty of death from Mr Rinyo-Clacton at the end of a year. I presume that in mainstream contemporary fiction, AIDS has been dealt with fairly extensively. Since my contemporary reading is more in science fiction, the examples I have seen are somewhat non-standard, and usually involve a plague which has some similarity to AIDS. But Hoban has done the reverse. Instead of looking at AIDS through the mirror of another disease, Hoban looks at death through the mirror of AIDS. Fitch feels that as long as he doesn't have HIV he's safe. We all do this. If we don't have AIDS or don't smoke, or in general don't belong to that other group over there... we're safe. Death happens to other people. So here we have Jonathan Fitch, dealing with his two deaths, the one theoretical but known, the other definite but unknown. And his reactions help us examine our own attitudes toward death. And what of the mysterious Mr Rinyo-Clacton and his gentleman's gentleman whom Fitch describes as having "hands that looked capable of crushing a skull like a walnut. He was also in formal attire and almost invisible in his attendance. Except for the hands. I thought his name might be Igor but it was Desmond." What is his purpose in this contract? Note to fellow Yanks: There is no period in the title, the American title of THE HOUNDS OF ZAROFF is THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, and http://www.bookpages.com is my favorite British Web bookseller. And in passing I'll note that this is at least the second book in which Hoban quotes Rilke's line, "For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror..." ("Denn das Schoene ist niches als des Schrecklichen Anfang..."). %T Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer %A Russell Hoban %C London %D March 1998 %I Jonathan Cape %O hardback, L14.99 %G ISBN 0-224-05121-0 %P 182pp Evelyn C. Leeper | eleeper@lucent.com +1 732 957 2070 | http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824 "What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?" "I'm not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles." From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue May 18 22:29:49 1999 Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!news-ge.switch.ch!news.belnet.be!newsgate.cistron.nl!het.net!newspump.monmouth.com!newspeer.monmouth.com!newshub.northeast.verio.net!logbridge.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!gatech!18.181.0.27.MISMATCH!sipb-server-1.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: ebishop@tempest.com (Eli Bishop) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Expanded Edition) Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 14 May 1999 13:02:23 -0400 Organization: Concentric Internet Services Lines: 249 Sender: wex@tinbergen.media.mit.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: tinbergen.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2301 RIDDLEY WALKER: EXPANDED EDITION by Russell Hoban (RIDDLEY WALKER was originally published in 1980.) Review Copyright 1999 Eli Bishop. Since I'm reviewing a new edition of a novel that's been out of print for quite a while, this article is in two parts. The first is a rambling review of the novel proper, with some thoughts on why it's remained both cherished and obscure. Those who are familiar with it may want to skip to the second part, which describes the differences between this edition and the RIDDLEY WALKER of 1980. There is a very good essay on RW (the only good one I've seen, and there are many bad ones) by David Cowart which can be found on the "Head of Orpheus" pages at http://www.suba.com/~dayvoll/rh/cowart1.html. I'm also sorry for being so wordy, but if you've ever talked to someone who really likes this book, you know that they will not shut up. 1. What It Is The story takes place in England, or the little scrap that's left of it thousands of years after a nuclear war. A shoestring government, the Mincery, uses travelling puppet shows to promote its policies; the puppet hero, Eusa, is also the central figure of the dominant religion, a martyr who was once a nuclear scientist and now represents the suffering of mankind in search of knowledge and security. The Mincery and the population in general have understandably mixed feelings about knowledge; but inevitably, as scraps of old technology are rediscovered, a haphazard Iron Age arms race begins. But the violence and intrigue happen mostly around the edges of the story as it is told to us by Riddley, a twelve-year-old man who flees his provincial job (part preacher, part government go-between) and ends up travelling the circumference of his small country on foot in just a few days. Riddley becomes one of a select few to learn the official remnants of history from Abel Goodparley, the Pry Mincer; from Lorna the shaman and from Lissener the mutant scapegoat, he learns a different, mythic point of view, one in which the line between the physical holocaust and the spiritual condition of mankind is unclear. The knowledge and motives of all of them are suspect; the only sure thing is that synchronicity puts Riddley where he needs to be, to see and reject several competing notions of what humanity is about. There are obvious parallels between RIDDLEY WALKER and Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, another post-holocaust novel and one that in my opinion falls more comfortably within science-fiction traditions (or maybe I should say that it helped to create some traditions which have been too slavishly followed since then). In LEIBOWITZ, Catholic monasteries have preserved scraps of knowledge, a long-dead nuclear scientist is now a religious figure, and as civilization rises from the ashes, war quickly escalates again; the only hope for humanity to break the cycle is an escape to space. There's a device usually not found outside SF, which should probably have a name of its own: deriving irony from the far-future characters' limited knowledge of our present reality. We know, for instance, that Goodparley is wrong to think that mankind went from nothing to nuclear power in only 2000 years (he just doesn't understand what A.D. means). Similarly in LEIBOWITZ, we know that "R.U.R." is a play about robots, but Thon Taddeo thinks it's evidence that the human race was created in the 20th century. In less capable hands, this device degenerates into the kind of thing where a barbarian sings a garbled pop song to fill us with the fear of history; but Hoban and Miller both apply it to things that matter to the characters and to us. More often, though, Hoban doesn't give us this ironic privilege. We don't know what left a "Ring Ditch" around Canterbury -- a weapon? a particle accelerator? a monorail gone bad? We don't know what the mysterious Green Man figure and fertility totems really mean to Riddley's society, and more importantly, Riddley isn't sure either. We know much less about Eusa than we know about Leibowitz, and we don't need to know any more. The monks of Miller's novel are lost in a rote-learned past that has the trappings of mythology; in Riddley's world, the past has really become a myth, by being distilled into metaphors and archetypes that have an ongoing function. History in RW evolves the same way language does: mistakes and false etymologies not only become the new standard usage, but suggest new meaning. By misreading nearly every word of the legend of St. Eustace, Goodparley ends up inventing a new weapon -- so who are we to say he's wrong? In Hoban's world, insight comes not from discovering miraculously preserved documents in an underground vault, but from a mystical process of opening oneself to contradictions. Shortcuts -- either political or psychic -- lead to repeating the mistakes of others. Readers of Hoban's earlier novels will recognize many themes and images that have followed (or obsessed) him in the past. Lions, the frightening eyes of a seagull, words that "fetch" people to enact them, and the severed head of Orpheus -- these are all part of Hoban's territory although, like the language, they behave differently in this book. I saved for last something that's usually mentioned first when people talk about this novel: the language. Hoban never did anything quite like it before or since. To describe it in the simplest terms: there's very little punctuation; the spelling is phonetic, but in a peculiarly English way; many words are broken up into phrases with different meanings, and the puns are both beautiful and functional. This is not at all a gimmick; I don't think the book could have been written without it. But it's easy to miss the point. First, the language has been described as "degenerated," "semi-literate," or "post-apocalyptic" -- all assuming that Hoban meant to show what English might really be like in the future. I think that's an overly literal way of thinking which unfortunately is common in science fiction: if you're describing an unfamiliar time or place, make up some words and customs for it, and it's more real. Too many writers also think that capitalizing words makes them more sociologically convincing; fortunately, Hoban mostly stays away from that. Given that the story is set at least 2300 years in the future, it's very unlikely that people would be speaking anything we could possibly understand. Neither is it the kind of awkward spelling and diction that some writers wrongly think of as "childlike" and use to suggest ignorance -- the classic SF story "Flowers for Algernon" suffers from this, in my opinion. Riddley is a very literate young man, in his culture's terms, and has a way with words reminiscent of, say, Russell Hoban. But the unpunctuated flow of his words does suggest, very convincingly, an oral tradition -- one in which pieces of myths are more like household tools than like sacred objects -- and a desperate need for communication. Unlike the slang of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, or the half-hearted neologisms of many SF writers who just compress a few technical terms, Hoban's word-play runs entirely on the love of English, and has a strong sense of place, although England is not his native country. Meanings merge and split like electron clouds: for instance, "terpitation" means interpretation, but you can't avoid hearing "trepidation" and possibly "turpitude." This book can't and shouldn't be translated; losing the ambiguous words, in this case, would be like losing entire characters from the story. But the double meanings aren't just for the reader; recombining language is something the characters do for themselves and each other. Finally, I think the novelty of how the words look is a clever distraction from the brilliance of how they're arranged. Riddley talks like Huckleberry Finn (I know the book jacket says so, but it's true) rewritten by Faulkner; the images are intensely sensual, while the narrator is entirely practical in his desire to tell us just how it is. Here's Riddley eavesdropping downwind of a conversation: Its very qwyet and small thru the hisper of the rain its like it ben pickt up ever so delkit by the wind the way you myt lif a keepaways egg from a ledge on a clif and clym down with it only this here wind egg it hatches in my ear and littl qwyet words come out of it. And here's an old man preparing charcoal: Them chard coal harts kep him on the hop he wer all ways hanging over them doing 1 thing and a nother hewd be shovveling earf on them or hewd be shiffing his wind screans a bout. He wer all ways scortching his self and his cloes his red jumper wer bernt ful of hoals and the sleaves of it all blackent. He wer looking at it 1 time and he said, 'Im about due for the new red.' It makes sense that Riddley doesn't see much need for commas; the rhythm jumps right out of the text. Reading this book out loud was a unique experience for me and literally changed the way I talked to people for months afterward. I think in the end this is the best explanation for why Hoban wrote it the way he did: because it works, and engages the reader on every level. Only the most bloodless academic could read it and think strictly of how it comments on history and myth and technology and art. It can't be read from a distance. That may be why it's been out of print for years and is now being published by a university press, and why Hoban is still portrayed as "dabbling" in science fiction when he writes a book like FREMDER. By moving into territory staked out by Miller and others, he has set off a special nerve in SF readers that produces an ambiguous reaction -- "oh good / oh no, another post-apocalyptic journey" -- and leads us to expect one of several familiar themes: (a) technology is bad; (b) technology is good if only we would use it correctly; (c) humanity is on the way out; (d) humanity will survive anything; (e) there is nothing new under the sun. Hoban touches on all of these, but isn't interested in satisfying our appetite for any of them; he doesn't even leave the semi-comfort of an ironic lament for human nature, because he suggests that we don't and won't understand human nature at all. 2. What's New Sooner or later, it seems, every film that a reasonable number of people liked will be re-released on video in a "Collector's Edition," with 30 minutes of interviews, outtakes, and commentary to tell you why you like the film so much. If there was disagreement between the director and the studio, or if the director had a change of heart 20 years later about cutting a scene, then we'll get a "Director's Cut" and can argue ad nauseam about the merits of each version (Usenet seems particularly well suited to this). What we have here is the former; Hoban has not pulled a Stephen King. This "expanded edition" consists of RIDDLEY WALKER plus a new author's note, excerpts from early drafts and journals, a very brief glossary of "Riddleyspeak," and a reproduction of "The Legend of St. Eustace" (the painting that plays a key role in the story's mythology) -- only 14 new pages in all. Although I always like to read words I haven't read before from Hoban -- even his grocery list probably has some vivid turns of phrase -- if I had to decide whether these apocrypha are worthy of a new edition, I'd have to say no. But I don't have to decide, because the choice isn't between plain and expanded, but between expanded and nothing at all. Indiana U.P. and/or the author may have thought the extra bits were important, or may just have wanted to make the reprint seem like more of an event; either way, more people will now be exposed to this book, and Hoban fans will not have to worry about their worn-out copies being permanently borrowed by unscrupulous friends. Anyway, in an ideal world, there would be a plain edition of RW for people who just want to read it, and a much more densely annotated edition for people who want to know everything Hoban was thinking. But the glossary in this edition feels mostly like an afterthought, and a way of coaxing along a reader who might be tempted to give up after the first few pages -- most of the words defined are from the first two chapters. Hoban calls it "a sampling to help the reader" but the choices seem very arbitrary ("pirntowt" is here, but not the trickier and funnier "vack your wayt"?). I may be wrong, but I'd guess this part was not the author's idea; there is a sort of crashing obviousness to the way he explains some of the jokes and allusions, a feeling of "Do I really have to do this?" While the glossary may be helpful to some readers, under no circumstances should anyone read the Afterword and Notes sections before reading the novel. Hoban's comments about how he came to write it are fascinating (coming from Pennsylvania too, I appreciated his remark that Riddley's grammar has roots in Philly), but the excerpts from his early drafts (when Riddley spoke modern English, and thought a lot about the past for no good reason) are painfully wrong, and you don't want to have them in your head while you read the real thing. The visual material consists of the map from the original edition, two sketches of Mr. Punch by Hoban, and "The Legend of St. Eustace." Unfortunately, the small black-and-white reproduction of this painting is very hard to decipher -- although this is not inappropriate, since the characters in the novel never get to see it either. Again, I feel bad for complaining about anything, especially since Indiana U.P. are also planning to reprint several of Hoban's earlier novels. Just to have RIDDLEY WALKER and TURTLE DIARY back in the light of day is a good thing for everyone. elib@concentric.net http://www.concentric.net/~Elib %A Russell Hoban %C 601 N. Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 %D 1998 %G 0-253-21234-0 %I Indiana University Press %O U$12.95 1-800-842-6796 %P 235 pp. %T "Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition" -- Eli Bishop / www.concentric.net/~Elib "I been tryin' to put a chicken in the window, to chase away the wolf from the door" - John Prine