After the Bomb

Abstract This chapter focuses on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), a novel that confronts the necessarily fictional nature of future generations. Hoban explores how historical rupture caused by nuclear war and the passage of vast amounts of time disrupts plans to protect the future from the harms created in the present. Unlike novels that juxtapose the contemporary world with the distant future in order to fantasize the recovery of what has been lost or destroyed (including Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Will Self’s The Book of Dave, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods), Riddley Walker suggests that the gulf created by the chronological flow of time is finally unbridgeable.