Talk:Riddley Walker
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I took out the reference to "ergodic literature." I don't think this is a good example of ergodic literature as Espen Aarseth defines it -- just reading an accent doesn't require physical interaction from the reader, the way HTML text or video games do. That ok? Is there some definition of ergodic I'm missing? --Gus andrews (talk) 21:30, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
"at least 2000 years from the present": this isn't necessarily true, is it? Given the variation in language is more like 300 years, I assumed that Goodparley is wrong and "Our Count" is in fact simply A.D. and not a restart. —Ashley Y 06:47, 2004 Nov 12 (UTC)
- Could be - but the cultural distance, in terms of how much has been lost and made up, seems like a lot more than a dozen generations. And it sounded to me like the Mincery had kept pretty meticulous records since it got started, being the only group of literate people in England. But I've edited to hedge that claim a little. ←Hob 14:31, 2004 Nov 12 (UTC)
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- I think the Mincery count is accurate--the idea of the novel is that something has gone wrong and stalled human development and enough time (thousands of years) has passed that humans SHOULD have begun to have pictures on the wind and boats in the sky again, yet (as Riddley says) they're still diggging in the muck. ←Waxwing slain 12:53, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
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- Well... that's Goodparley's idea, but then again, Goodparley has also confused gunpowder with nuclear fission and has a number of other wrong ideas about the ancient world, and I'm not sure the author means for us to take his judgment literally. Thousands of years did pass between our own Stone Age and Iron Age (the timing varied from one part of the world to another—note that we never hear anything about the world outside Inland); depending on how thoroughly civilization was smashed in Mr. Clevver's war, Riddley's society may be repeating our own timeline pretty closely, as iron smelting and agriculture are just starting to displace hunter-gatherers. In effect, they didn't start over from one A.D., but from several thousand B.C. But I'm sure some of this ambiguity is intentional—after all, the Eusa story gets retold several different ways and a major theme of the novel is the ways in which history and mythology are adapted for different purposes. "We're not as good as those before us" is a fairly timeless refrain. ←Hob 23:02, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
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We do hear a little bit about the world beyond Inland. Doesn't Riddley find the Yellowstone on the corpse of a courier from the continent washed up on the seashore? The inference is that everything beyond Inland is pretty much the same. Maybe someone should write piece in the Riddley Walker universe dealing with life in Outland. ThePeg 16:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
- Riddley could tell by his boots that the dead sailor was from "the other side," presumably of the Channel, so there may have been some contact with, and awareness of "foreigners." If memory serves, the Ram propaganda blamed Outland raiders for the demise of the community at Littl Salting. __Just plain Bill (talk) 13:48, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
I removed this paragraph, which was added for some reason under "external links"--
- The date of the story is in fact given in chapter 14, when Goodparley tells Riddley that it is now 2347 O.C.(Our Count), a new counting system which began an unspecified "long time" after the Bad Times of the nuclear apocalypse.
--because it isn't true: "2347 O.C." doesn't tell us the date of the story at all, precisely because they started counting after an unspecified long time. But I will fix the phrase "hundreds or even thousands of years" to simply "thousands of years", since it's been at least 2347 years....nah, on second thought there's no proof that they started over at zero. Leaving it as ambiguous as Hoban seems to have intended. ←Hob 07:33, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Trivia
I think I rememeber reading somewhere, possibly in the foreword to one of the newer editions that Russell Hoban said his English or specifically his spelling suffered due to writing this book. If this could be confirmed, it should be added to the article IMHO Nil Einne 18:39, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
- Yes, it's either in the foreword or in an interview and I think I can locate it. Thanks for the reminder. ←Hob 01:03, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Timing
One of the things that always struck me with this book was the timing. It all takes place (from memory) over a couple of days, with Riddley walking all over Kent in a matter of a few hours. Does that ring a bell with anyone else? --Mat Hardy (Affentitten) 05:48, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Aunty
Death in Norse paganism#Death and eroticism just got mentioned on the Main Page and the first thing that popped to mind was the various stories told in Riddley Walker regarding "doing it with Aunty." Anybody think this deserves mention in the article? __Just plain Bill (talk) 13:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
