Scholars, authors and artists are attending a ‘sum poasyum’ at Canterbury today (24^th October 2020) in honour of the 40^th anniversary of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker.

In the previous article, we looked at how Anthony Burgess, himself the author of a number of novels in invented languages, rated it so highly. His novella, A Clockwork Orange, is often compared to Riddley Walker, or proposed as an influence upon Hoban’s novel. But to what extent are the invented languages of Nadsat and Riddleyspeak similar? And is it possible to assess whether Burgess was a significant influence upon Hoban?

It is forty years since Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker was first published. The post-apocalyptic dystopia, set in a Kent thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust, has been a lowkey but pervasive influence on SF ever since its publication. The novel, which is written in the idiosyncratic dialect of eponymous protagonist Riddley Walker, has enjoyed a cult following for some four decades. Now academics, artists and writers are celebrating that fact with a series of events in Canterbury, where many of the events of Riddley’s story are set some centuries in the future.