Annotation - Chapter 2, Page 8

• (8:19) "some girt big rottin iron thing some kynd of machine"

Riddley never describes the ancient structure in any more detail, but it seems likely that Hoban had something in mind, if only because his first published book, What Does It Do and How Does It Work? (1959), featured his own drawings of large machines. Jamie Madden notes that Hoban's "interest in things mechanical has been noted by a number of critics," and describes the beasts in What & How as "chthonic," since "every single machine in this book is an earth-mover." (Russell Hoban/Forty Years, ed. Alida Allison, 2000.) In his dark, expressionistic illustrations, even a working machine looks almost as if it has already been half absorbed by the dirt like the ruins at Widders Dump.