Annotation - Chapter 14, Page 125

• (125:15) "by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?"

Of course Riddley's logic is off, since he doesn't know what A.D. means and thinks human history started from zero. If about 2500 years have passed since humanity was bombed back to something resembling the late Stone Age, then their technological progress is actually about on track with ours, since roughly the same amount of time passed between the original Stone Age and Iron Age in Europe. But even at the dawn of history, people were already developing myths of having come "way way down from what they ben time back way back."

The mention of the year 1997 has led many readers and critics (including David Huisman in "'Hoap of a Tree' in Riddley Walker") to assume that that was the year of the nuclear catastrophe. That's possible, but all that the novel tells us is that it wasn't any earlier than 1997: Goodparley only said that the Ram had dug up a piece of a building with that year inscribed on it, and that they hadn't found any later years so far. Since very few structures from the old world survived at all, and most buildings aren't prominently marked with the year of their construction, Hoban has left plenty of room to place the Bad Time anywhere in our future.