Some Books about Riddley - Happy Riddley Reading!

A brilliant, unique, and completely realized work of fiction, "Riddley Walker"--first published in 1980--is set in a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England (Inland), where humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semi-literate state, represented by a language created especially by Hoban for the book..
Price: $10.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya. A book cover with a far more accurate depiction of the novelette. The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the "Elder Things". When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject, and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Dyer elects, then, to close off the area from which they took their samples. .
Price: $0.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Utopian Studies, published by Society for Utopian Studies on March 22, 1999. The length of the article is 1066 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Riddley Walker.(Review) (book review)
Author: Peter Ruppert
Publication:Utopian Studies (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 1999
Publisher: Society for Utopian Studies
Volume: 10 Issue: 2 Page: 254

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]