Special Guests: Speculative Fiction

A Remembrance of Russell Hoban 1925-2011

While I lived in Spain I adopted the flag of convenience when it came to superstition about the 13^th day of the month.  If it fell on a Friday, I would adopt the Spanish custom of fearing Tuesday the 13^th and if a Tuesday the 13^th came along I could take refuge in the Anglophone superstition of Fridays.  This past December 13th was a Tuesday and one that was indisputably ill-starred as it saw the passing of one of the most imaginative writers I have ever read. 

Russell Hoban, who died in London on Tuesday December 13, 2011 at the age of eighty-six, was variously described as a “cult writer,” a “maverick writer,” a “science-fiction writer” but those phrases do not come close to doing justice to the strange breadth of his craft.  Along his way he served in the US Army in World War II, worked as an illustrator, wrote advertising copy and was, strikingly, a successful writer of books for both children and adults that are sui generis.  His best known children’s books concern the eponymous Frances, a young badger who behaves refreshingly like a real kid.  She employs every possible delaying tactic when going to bed, gets jealous and nasty when her little sister has a birthday and exasperates her parents by restricting her diet to nothing but bread and jam.  These are not didactic books that try to teach some received idea of model or moral behaviour.  Instead they celebrate the wholeness of childhood just as Mr. Hoban’s books for adults also capture a magical oddness that always percolates just under the surface of perceived reality, something he called the “unwordable.”  Even in the guise of more conventional Science Fiction like Fremder, his writing stretches the limits of genre. 

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