Fremder

by Russell Hoban

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the black sparkle of deep space a figure in a blue overall tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker Clever Daughter disappears. Nobady knows how he did it, and everybody, including Fremder himself, wants to know. Caroline Lovecraft, Head of the Physio/Psycho unit at Newton Centre, Hubble Straits finds that intimacy doesn't lead to answers and Fremder's own memories are resolutely obscure. Fremder's name means stranger, and his story, as one would expect from Russell Hoban, is full of strangeness and brilliant imagery.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, American, Speculative Fiction

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Russell Conwell Hoban was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death. (Wikipedia)

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a straight-up SF piece, filtered through the logoleptic marvellousness of Russell Hoban’s usual style, and staggers around like a drunken novel in search of a less excitable and distracted author. Hoban serves up a dozen SF concepts and words per page (and drops most of them after) and slings literary quotations around like a cashier in a burger bar who has cracked and decides to bring the capitalist empire crashing to its knees by nuking the restaurant in a million squashed cow remnants. The novel is not unlike Douglas Adams’s more infuriating efforts in its refusal to achieve a coherent thread, except Hoban serves up morsels of pristine prose every few pages to prevent the reader from feeling shortchanged, and is less funny. Hoban is incapable of writing a bad or dull sentence, except a string of awesome sentences don’t always make a satisfying novel.

[Nigel McFarlane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird, fragmented, lonely and melancholy. More than a passing resemblance to Philip K Dick. Not sure if my rating does it justice: I suspect it has depths which I have totally failed to appreciate.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is nothing quite like Russell Hoban's writing; it has the rare distinction of resembling a strange and intricate dream. It's a pity that his protagonists are almost always tedious horny straight men, but nobody's perfect. The titular Fremder is certainly one of these. The setting is 2052, which must have seemed far distant back in 1996. Despite being a mid-90s sci-fi novel, the world-building read to me as distinctly 70s, reminiscent of The Jagged Orbit, Nova, and The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Faster than light travel is easy and cheap thanks to the flicker drive. Space has been commercialised and the bits of Earth shown (notably London) are a polluted and violent mess. Fremder somehow survives the sudden disappearance of the ship he was travelling in, despite floating in vacuum with no spacesuit. This mystery understandably makes shadowy authorities keen to investigate. The plot follows him bumbling around, sleeping with various women, being asked questions he can't answer, and attempting to make sense of his survival. Perhaps that doesn't sound like a particularly appealing premise, but Hoban elevates it with his usual literary nous. I don't read his fiction for the plots or world-building; it is his writing that is memorable. Fremder includes many arresting moments of this nature:

There's an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 - it hasn't even got a name, just a number. It's a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There's an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she's donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven't named her but I call her Pearl. She's strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there's no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble - she doesn't need air - and you just tell her what you want to hear.

I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke's Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse.

In addition to such scenes of serene beauty (which included the entire first Duino Elegy in German and English), there is a vein of deadpan humour more akin to noir fiction:

Corporation flickered me home with a couple of ViTech 8s minding me. One of them was very tall and the other was very short. The tall one's working name was Mojo; the short one's was High John and he didn't smile when he said it. When we reassembled at Nova Central they cleared me through Quarantine with Red 1 Priority, got us into a waiting hopper, and took me to the Ziggurat in London Central for the Phythia session. It was a grey and rainy end-of-November day, I was glad for that; I hate those hard sunny days that break your teeth. This one was gentle, there was a little mercy coming down with the rain; the colours of everything were heightened by the rainlight; except for the holes of bright emptiness it was a day you could work with.

Fremder is stuffed with discussion of classic literature and the plot becomes positively Sophoclean at the end. Very few writers can get away with including so many quotations; it easily ends up casting a negative light on their own writing. Hoban gets away with this hubris because his prose is stunning. Do not expect anything like conventional sci-fi from Fremder, just let its playful literary brilliance wash over you. I can never recall the substance of Hoban's novels, just my enjoyment of how he uses words.

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

'This is the real thing,' said Caroline. 'It's the deepest, the profoundist. It's the big bazonga, it's really existential.'

"OK," I said, watching a distant sweeper with a faulty program banging again and again into the information kiosk, 'just don't tell me it's a metaphor, OK?"

A beautiful short science fiction novel, from a Master of the art of the difficult, the arcane, the mythic, the timeless ... and the metaphor. In 180-odd pages (some of them, be warned, very odd pages), Hoban weaves the story of Fremder Gorn, sole survivor of a "flicker drive" accident that resulted in the disappearance of the deep space transport Clever Daughter and seven of its crew. The eighth, Fremder, is left tumbling in the vacuum of space, with no space suit, no oxygen -- and he survives. This alone would be enough to pique the interest of Sheela-na-Gig, the Corporation responsible for flicker drive, which has opened up deep space for human colonists, entrepreneurs, and a lot of profit. When we learn that Fremder is the son of Helen Gorn, the troubled young woman who (long story short) invented flicker drive -- well, let's just say, the plot thickens.

"Fremder" means "stranger" in German. And "Gorn" is an abbreviation of grandfather Elias' original name, adopted to disguise the family's Jewish heritage when he escaped to London from Nazi Germany. "'Gorn today, here tomorrow,' he's quoted as saying ..."

The novel is dense with word play, allusions to Jewish mythology, Biblical references and a stream of musical and poetical hooks. (A mix tape of the music Hoban refers to, both in-text, as as chapter headings, would have been very interesting.)

Beautifully written. Just a random example: "Lots of noise but behind the hiss of purple rain the silence is cruising like a shark." Now, that's a sentence.

The dystopian world of the 2020-2050s that Hoban uses as the background to Fremder's search for answers feels frighteningly plausible, and darkly funny.

Short as it is, it's not an easy read -- I am looking forward to reading it again, one day, after giving it time to mature in my mind. How many SF novels can you say that about? (There are a few. This is one of them.) Perhaps on a future reading, I'll understand some of the physics. Perhaps I'll make that mix tape, and listen as I read.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't decide whether this is a work of visionary genius, or a virtually incoherent shambles.

[Francisco Barrios · Rating 4 out of 5]

El 4 de noviembre de 2052, Fremder Elías Gorn es encontrado a la deriva en el espacio exterior, sin traje espacial, casco, ni oxígeno. Sin embargo, está vivo; no así el resto de la tripulación de la Clever Daughter que se ha desvanecido sin dejar huella.

Este es el escenario inicial de Fremder. Lo que sigue constituye una de las novelas más delirantes de la ciencia ficción inglesa, con brillantes giros narrativos y una sátira velada a los poderes fácticos que están reconfigurando nuestro mundo.

Una grata sorpresa haber descubierto la narrativa ”para adultos” de Russell Hoban, cuyo talento se consagró principalmente a la literatura infantil.

[Romulo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Marc Sebastian Head · Rating 4 out of 5]

At this point I'm happy to name Russell Hoban as one of my favourite authors, and I feel I crack open each new story with such glee that it does not have to earn a good rating from me, it starts with a solid four stars and usually the only way is up.

This was the first time it struck me just how recursive not just his books are within themselves, but also Hoban is as a writer. In this story there are themes and images that have popped up to a greater or lesser extent in his other works I've read, including but not limited to many allusions to Greek mythology in the Kraken, Orpheus, Hermes and Medusa; questions about the blank space between pictures in cinema projections and how those blanks exist in reality too; even references to past characters like the film director from The Medusa Frequency. The Vermeer girl also features prominently in both books. Is there in fact a Russell Hoban literary universe, wherein all these characters and stories coexist?

More to the point, Hoban seems to return to these images and themes again and again, filtered through whatever story or genre he is working on at the time. He is evidently fully aware of this, referencing his own recursiveness with images like the many growing eyes or the expanding circles of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. It actually makes me appreciate Hoban even more, as his works become variations on deeper, almost invisible themes, and provide insight into what occupies his mind both during and between writing his novels.

The story itself is fun, like Arthur C. Clarke on LSD. It careens around from a sci-fi mystery into a metaphysical, existential, quasi-religious roller-coaster, and you are just barely holding on and thrilling all the while. The writing too is full of his usual dry dark humour, and his love for odd words is still present. I don't mind his logoleptia the way I do in, say, Cormac McCarthy's work. There it always seems pretentious and deliberately obfuscating, but Hoban's is a lot more playful. I had a grand old time reading this one, and feel I need to ration out the remaining Hoban books on my shelf, as I know he is gone and there won't be more coming.

[Justin Howe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A science fiction novel where the spaceships are powered by Existentialism, Beat poetry, and the Old Testament (in particular the Book of Kings). Fragments a bit at the end, but I loved it. Mythic, comic, and full of wonderful prose, it's also short, only 190 pages.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Existentialist science fiction, with a funny touch and a bit of Old Testament philosophizing. Which doesn't really describe the book very well, since it's really about a lost man discovering small truths about his strange and broken family.

[Lewis Carnelian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoban's dystopian science fiction novel has/is a number of things. Firstly, and most winningly, is has at times wonderful prose. Take for instance the following lines: "I wonder if others have, as I do, the little tribunal of the dusk. The twelve of them don't require the physical twilight—they'll sit whenever there's twilight in the soul and the bat wings of memory and guilt come flittering through the crepuscule. The look of them varies with the occasion: sometimes they're human; sometimes they're owls." This first person narrator, the titular Fremder ("stranger" in German), frequently has such poetic asides.
Then there is the setting, a dark comedic future that blends elements of both Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series and something akin to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. At the heart of the story is a novel means of interstellar transportation known as the Flicker Drive, whose conceptual depth also recalls both Adams' penchant for wedding genuine technological innovation with dark satire, which also touches upon certain elements of the thumb-nosing of Thomas Pynchon as well, who seems like a true contemporary at heart. Hoban is a deeply read cult writer, with an active society and recently, quite aesthetically-pleasing Penguin reissues.
But for ostensibly a space romp, most of this slim book is set in derelict space stations, mundane housing complexes of the future, and therapy rooms, with much of the explication delivered via notes recalled and people talking to one another. In some way, an anti-space romp, a future delivered that purposefully stares at the equivalent of a Greyhound station in the middle of nowhere.
Its resolution is complex and oblique, related to the central mystery of the Flicker Drive, and may feel a bit too quickly adroit at first, but I think will continue to have resonance beyond...

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

31/2 out of 5

Is this a good book? In many ways, absolutely. The writing in some of these paragraphs is quite clearly some of the beautiful, eloquent and piercing passages of theology, philosophy and general ethics I've read in a book. The scope of the book is brilliant, in a sly 280 pages we have a (admittedly incredibly loose) but nevertheless legitimately intriguing sci fi universe, attempting to use quantum and multiverse theory to retell the Jewish story of the prophet Elijah, with our main character the rough reincarnation of the prophet before the Messiah, and the Kabballist pursuit of the mathematical name of God and the transcendence into Heaven being an attempt by 3 dimensional beings to warp themselves into a 4 dimensional Tesseract universe. You with me? (although it should be mentioned Bestner's Stars my Destination did alot of this about 50 years earlier, proving that sci fi is nearly always ahead of modernist avant garde literature both in experimentally literary boldness and conceptual granduer).

Coupled with is a smorgasbord of literary quotations and musical references, with a profound a brilliant core philosophy around the poetry of Rilke and the music of Bach. In many ways though, no. It's insanely meandering, hopelessly obscure in its references (which cone across as showing off more than anything), the narrative is soft and jelliod to the point of just not existence, absurdly self indulgent, frequently unreadable in how waffle, abstract and uncommitted it seems. The upside of this it's short and bracing, the moments of genuine brilliance enough of a kick to keep you reading, and the end is pretty much nothing short of brilliance, a perfect tying of its themes of Quatum probability and Kabbalistic unknowability. A confusing, messy, but ultimately deeply impactful and thoughtful gem.

[Lauren Barnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

After an accident intergalactic traveller, Fremder, is found floating through space in a kind of stasis without his ship, crew, suit or any oxygen. What happened, how he survived, and why he can’t remember are the focus of the book, all of which tie into the full story of his life.

This book offers what I like best about sci-fi: advancements in science revealing human truth. The book is a tangle of physics, philosophy, music and poetry, making a very beautiful story and one you have to pay attention to completely in order to get the most out of it. Fremder himself is a perfect stranger, as his name implies, and the rendering of him and the emptiness within him is well done.

However, I found the female characters all very shallow and inhuman. At first I thought this made sense - like Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”, here the central character is unable to connect with people, so he wouldn’t be able to see the women he interacts with as whole or human. However, as the story goes on, it’s obvious that doesn’t work with the larger male-female theme in the book, nor with the importance of a female non-human, Pyrithia, to the story. Though it does not ruin the otherwise impressive story, it does distract and frustrate, so I had to give it four stars. Still, I really enjoyed it and think Hoban is an unrealised star.

[Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, for the general public: Russell Hoban wrote two masterpieces, and this is not one of them. Pity the writer forced to write in the wake of Riddley Walker and Pilgermann - those successes will make everything before and after them, even very good novels in their own right, look feeble by comparison. Nor is this necessarily the best book to turn to after those two are read. Probably Turtle Diary and The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz would be my recommendations for next-steps. Fremder is for those of us who have read all those books, and feel a hankering to hear that Hoban voice speak to us out of the vacuities of reality once more.

For Hoban speaks, to paraphrase a metaphor of his own, from cracks in between the bricks of the self, and few writers give me such a blessed reminder of the mysteries that lie in the center of my mind.

Second, to myself: this book shouldn’t work, but it did. Worth reading again, of course. Before that second reading, be sure to know your 1 Kings and brush up on your Rilke (Dunio Elegies).

[Arianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

what a strange read. it was poetic, fascinating, at times incredibly confusing, at times depressing, sometimes frustrating or boring. but I'm happy I read it anyway. this is a short book, but it could be shorter and a lot of the literary references could be shortened too. the enormous bulk of literary references created for me an overload of "meaning" - making it, as a result, less symbolic/meaningful because the meaning was so put on by the endless references (it felt like a lot of: see what I did there? by the author). at the same time, some of the references really pushed the story forward and supported the dreamlike atmosphere that gave the book its eerie quality.
the love interests and the "romantic scenes" were unbelievable and frustratingly one-dimensional, but at least one of those unbelievable love-interests functions as an interesting plot device in the end.
4 stars for the subtle and mysterious world-building, the poetic style of writing and the originality of the underlying philosophical idea. 2,5 stars for the overload of references and the slightly cliche storyline.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I imagine if Barry Malzberg were an excellent writer, he might have written something like this. It's been a long time since I've read anything by Russell Hoban, but, aside from Riddley Walker, which is a work of towering genius, this one is up there with his very best. It shares mythology with The Medusa Frequency, and, to a lesser degree, Pilgerman. These books could almost be considered a trilogy.

Science fiction is rarely so unique. I'm reasonably certain that there doesn't exist another book like one. Certain sections are truly psychedelic in the highest sense of the term, among them a session between the narrator and an oracular machine dubbed Pythia. The book is crammed with layers of symbolism, all tied in knots around a labyrinthine narrative, yet I found it a surprisingly easy read. Highly recommended.

[Gary Latham · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite SF reads of all time. A wonderful book full of humour and mystery and terror. A deep book and deeply satisfying! I've read it many times and just like Riddley Walker (Hoban's masterpiece) it gets better every time. Russell Hoban is a genius with a very particular way of explaining the great mystery of humanity and what it is to be human. Life is a riddle and you have to work out how to unravel it. This is Russell Hoban at his absolute best in my opinion. A book I would happily take to a desert island.

[Two Envelopes And A Phone · Rating 2 out of 5]

A frustrating mix of dizzying science sometimes to do with parallel worlds, unworkable personal relationships, and Old Testament - frustration for me, anyway. Revelations near the end effected some shock value, but by then I had failed to connect the dots during the lead-up, and so I'm left wondering what it all meant. From this author, I vastly preferred Riddley Walker, and am still open to the non-SF offering Turtle Diary, in the future.

[Tilly Norster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gonna be honest- i spent almost all of this book hoping it picked up… spoiler it didn’t.
But i enjoyed the descriptions and dialogue and how the relationships between the characters seem to suddenly cut off? Idk normally this gets on my nerves but it really works with this.
Only issue was it was boring? I had no real motivation to finish it other than just to get to the end.
I liked the integration of language i have to say

[Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Sci-fi meets dystopia.
*Darkly corporeal
*A meditation on fragmented identities.
*Too much knowing leads to unimaginable loneliness.
*Has Mature themes

Fremder unravels a consciousness caught between galaxies, guilt and a fractured persona… where cost of knowing too much too soon was isolation. Inner disintegration runs so deep, it results in looking for love even in obscure recesses across space-time.
With all the quantum physics jargon thrown in this mix, it’s a bit of a difficult read at times.

[Terry Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a sad day when I finished this book as I knew I'd read all his other novels and there wouldn't be any others to come. But this was typical Hoban, bonkers and very imaginative with a few chuckles on the way. On the back of this book there is a quote from The Sunday Times ' Mr Hoban is unclassifiable, thank goodness. He is an original, imaginative and inventive' how true that is.

[Batu Kaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too ambitious for its own good, but still unbelievably good. It's prose is dazzling and headache inducing in the best way, although Hoban does too much in this one with overwhelming soup of metaphors, mythologies and references. One of the most dense novellas(?) I have ever come across, and the payoff seems even more massive than the build up to the sci-fi suspense.

[Antonio López Sousa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ciencia ficción de corte existencialista y de lectura poco amable. La historia de Fremder Elías Gorn parte de un premisa interesante pero el desarrollo de la trama es denso y en ocasiones complejo de seguir. Abstenerse aquellos que busquen algo fácil de digerir.

[Onur Erdem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deep, very deep thoughts in that book. So peculiar, but also meaningful. Such an underrated one. Structure of it may seem confusing, partly it is. After the half of it, I started to subside things about book, then just enjoyed the boundaries of science fiction and also existencialism.

[Martin Willoughby · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is what happens when people tell you how wonderful you are and then publish the resulting rubbish.

[Tod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seriously, a great book. One of Hoban's best.

[PJ Ebbrell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Totally missed out somewhere. Did not engage, when I thought I woul, having read the blurb.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Existential dread. In spaaaace.

[Chris Palin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Total banger

[Dave Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://electrichalibut.blogspot.co.uk...