re:mote voices

Title: Fremder
Author: Russell Hoban
Publisher: Bloomsbury

A man is found. Floating in space. A body that has been frozen solid. He has no life support. No space suit. And there is no sign of the space ship that he was on. Yet, somehow, Fremder is still alive.

Fremder is a novel by Russell Hoban, which has more of a Science Fiction approach than much of his work. He creates a back drop in which space travel is achieved by something called the Flicker drive, where society has become ruled by a matriarchy, and street gangs terrorise the cities at street level. All of which is woven into the background to varying degrees.

At the core we have a man called Fremder, which we are told is from the German for stranger. The establishment would rather like to know how Fremder survived, particularly because if they can work that out it could have a big impact on space travel. But Fremder is more significant than having just survived the Clever Daughter disaster - his mother was one of the key scientists behind what became the Flicker drive. A device which uses the basis of reality and its impermanence to operate.

There are many Hobanique devices at work in Fremder, the usual things which give his work such a charm. Interactions between characters like Fremder and the psychiatrist Dr. Lovecraft, and the beautiful sexual tensions that are created there. Once back on Earth we travel through a city, getting a feel for it as a palpable environment, even as it isn’t the London we all know and so regularly appears in his work. The science fiction element is obvious, as is the degree of romance. But there is also a darkness to Fremder – the disembodied voices reaching into Fremder’s reality, and the tragedy of his past.

I have seen some comparison between Fremder and Hoban’s earlier novel The Medusa Frequency. Even to some point the suggestion that Fremder is a sequel to The Medusa Frequency. An idea that perhaps overstates the case, though there are undoubtedly extensions of themes at play. In The Medusa Frequency the character has mysterious voices, coming from the tentacled Kraken and the like, while in Fremder there are more disembodied voices, and references to Lovecraft and his tentacled elder-gods. The protagonists are both inspired by the muse of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring – with The Medusa Frequency we have a postcard, while Fremder has something more along the lines of a hologram.

Fremder is probably one of the books by Russell Hoban that I have enjoyed the most. Perhaps there is less of the obvious wit, but it is there, and Fremder is a more blatantly dark novel. Informed by a distinct weirdness and suggestions of ambiguity and potential.