Author Russell Hoban died 13 December 2011 in his adopted home of London, England. Born 4 February 1925 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, his 1981 novel Riddley Walker won the John W. Campbell and Ditmar awards, and was a finalist for the Nebula.
After attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1941 and ’42, he served in the US Army during World War II in Italy, and was awarded a Bronze Star. After the war, he worked as a commercial illustrator, storyboard artist, and television art director, going freelance in 1957.
His children’s writing career began with Bedtime for Frances (1960), the first of his Frances the Badger series. He continued writing children’s books for more than a decade. In his Guardian obituary, John Clute writes “The climax was The Mouse and His Child (1968), a full-length novel that may be the most resonant and haunting book for children published in the past half century.”
In the 1970s, he began writing adult novels (though he continued writing for children through the 1990s), the first of which was The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973). This book returned to his frequent theme of “a father and son bound together in a quest for the secret behind the turning of the world.”
Riddley Walker, Clute says, is “the work that established his extremely high reputation as a deeply original novelist. It is an enormously eloquent and demanding science-fiction tale set in the UK perhaps three millennia after a nuclear war has ended civilisation. The survivors inhabit what is often referred to by science-fiction critics as a ‘ruined earth’, a ravaged, resource-poor, constantly threatened world whose inhabitants are unlikely to be literate, or long-lived.” That book was the peak of his career, as Clute says “nothing quite matched [it] in the final 30 years of Hoban’s career, but new novels came so fast—eight of them in his last decade along—that they may not have been properly assimilated. Later tales such as My Tango With Barbara Strozzi (2008), may seem casual, with their exorbitant explorations of sex and the London Underground and the demi-mondaine of Fulham. But they are not. At their most intense moments, they can be understood as a ferocious old man’s mythopoeic indictment of the last years of the western experiment in civilisation. At their less intense, they are fun.”
Several of his works were adapted for film, including The Mouse and His Child (1977, starring Peter Ustinov and Cloris Leachman) and The Marzipan Pig (published in 1986, it was turned into a short narrated by Tim Curry in 1990).
Hoban married Lillian Aberman in 1944. They had three daughters and one son, and moved to London in the late 1960s, where they separated within a year. In 1975, Hoban married Gundula Ahl, with whom he had three sons.