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Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.
What is a Robinsonade?
Robinsonade is a term coined nearly 300 years ago by the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel. I urge you to take a few moments and read the Wikipedia entry for Robinsonades (just mentioned). You'll find an amazing (yet hardly complete! Where is Planet of the Apes?) list of books (even one predating Daniel Defoe's 1719 archetypal classic), films, plays, and TV shows (oh, and let's not forget computer games!). In fact, I'm waiting for a qualified, talented developer to make a great game for the masses out of my DarkSF novel Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. (duly licensed by me, of course).
A Literary Genre: Robinsonades is what Herr Schnabel named the type or trope that included his own novel The Island Stronghold (1731). That's just twelve years after Daniel Defoe's novel about Robinson Crusoe was published, so we see how rapidly this exciting genre caught on.
By the way, it's worth noting that Daniel Defoe based his novel on a true story. A cantankerous Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk was put ashore by an English fleet and marooned off the coast of Chile from 1704-1709. His crime was complaining too much about the condition of the ship on which he was a sailor. The ship left him behind, sailed away, and soon sank in a storm; a few survivors were taken prisoner and treated badly by their Spanish captors; so ironically, Alexander Selkirk was the only unscathed survivor of a disaster he had forecast.
That brings me to another By The Way, namely my choice of names. The hero of my story is Alex Kirk, named after our Scottish curmudgeon. There is a woman in the novel, whom I named Maryan Shurey. Daniel Defoe's wife was named Mary (Tuffley). The last name comes from a character in Defoe's novel—a young Moorish boy (Xury) who is taken into slavery by the Turks along with Robinson Crusoe. That's in the Mediterranean, before the famous journey to the Americas resulting in his fictitious shipwreck. One of the many dark crimes Robinson Crusoe commits, for which he must atone on the island, is that after Xurey helps him to escape, the two are rescued from the sea by a passing Genoese sailing ship. Crusoe immediately betrays his savior and sells the boy into slavery (nice going, huh?). Crusoe also participates in the slave trade, among other terrible things, culminating in his nearly being lunch for cannibals (from whom he rescues his pal Friday). So again, my Robinson character's name is Alex Kirk, and his significant other in the story is Maryan Shurey as in Xurey. And there we are. Reasons for everything.
Historic Shipwreck Tales. This genre's antecedents go back as far as history has left any record. I seem to recall a tale about an ancient Egyptian expedition to the land of Punt in Africa that was shipwrecked. We have the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale (not exactly a shipwreck, per se, but a whale of a tale). I remember also, from my Latin Classics in high school, the story of how teenage Julius Caesar was taken prisoner by pirates, who held him for ransom in the Med somewhere. He played it very cleverly, befriending his captors, who were holding out for money from Julius' wealthy Roman family. The ransom was paid, and the young man happily returned to his parents. Not long after, he organized a fleet to go after the pirates. Capturing them on the shore where they had held him captive, he ordered a grisly, painful execution for them. He sat at a table lavishly set with a great lunch, and wined and dined himself, while they suffered and cried on their crosses all around him as they slowly died. Wotta guy, that Julius! (who single-handedly destroyed what was left of Roman democracy and republic by usurping constitutional law and declaring himself dictator for life, a danger in every democracy in any era including the 21st Century).
Many Stories Told. The Wikipedia article O have cited offers a rich list of movies, stories, and television series that can be considered robinsonades. Among the best known is Swiss Family Robinson (1812).
Science Fiction Robinsonades. My first encounter with an SF Robinsonade was the 1964 cult classic Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which I saw as a teenager. It left a lasting impression on me, and informed me of the vast possibilities for genre-stretching. Readers will remember the 1960s series Lost in Space, which proved to be so popular that it's been remade as at least one movie and at least one TV series. So in terms of combining my love of SF with my fondness for the robinsonades genre, it was chemistry at first bite. I did have reservations about tackling the lone man against nature theme, with its technical challenges (and no volleyball) but I overcame and out-thought my doubts to my total satisfaction.
Was Daniel Defoe a Science Fiction Author? Let's break this down, one brick at a time. Defoe's 1719 novel was certainly what we might call a techno-thriller today. Remember that the plodding, investor-driven, scared bunnies in Big Publishing feel they must pigeon-hole and censor novels to stay ahead of public perceptions. To state this cautiously, think about the prefaces to the SF anthologies by Damon Knight and his peers during the 1960s, which was a boon time of harvesting the best SF from the golden ages of pulp (1930s-1950s). The operative terms at the time, hating imaginative literature, included Bug-Eyed Monster (BEM) stories. Creativity and imagination tend to be frowned on by Puritans (see the painting American Gothic (by Grant Wood,1930) to address any questions. It's a satire, I'm told. The arrival of the 1977 box office colossus Star Wars probably did more than any other film or book to rocket SF into the mainstream. Even more recently, a remember a painful, seminal moment in which a young fellow worker (intelligent; programmer)described to me how he had watched and enjoyed a 'sigh fie' film. He squirmed with embarrassment, lest I think badly of him for that guilty pleasure. After all, sigh fie is all crap, right? Hmmm... you haven't heard my lecture about how SF tropes permeate most of world literature. By SF we generally mean Speculative Fiction these days, to cover the diametric opposites of fantasy and science fiction. The definitive word on those came from another great SF anthologist in the 1970s, Judith Merril. I listened to a radio interview, in which she defined Fantasy as "a literature of the impossible and the improbable" (e.g., elves, fairies) and Science Fiction as "a literature of the possible and the probable" (e.g., robots, spaceships). By the way, I remember reading an old 1950s World Almanac, which had one supercilious article about the possibility of space travel. According to that American Gothic scripture, a journey to the moon seemed like an absurd idea, and certainly not doable before the remote Year 2000. So much for that sigh fie idea.
Back to Defoe, however. The publishing coneheads dodge cultural bullets by whatever irrational means, like classifying 'horror' in the Mainstream shelves at the bookstore, while 'sigh fie' and 'fantasy' are jumbled together in one ill-considered category. Then, for readers and censors who squirm at character-driven writing and like their imagination to come in a toothpaste tube, they created a category or sales type called the techno-thriller. Now if you ask me, techno-thrillers by their nature are about technology, which is driven by science. So in effect, those manly novels whose leading character is a new jet, or a new tank, or a new type of electronic gadget (usually for warfare purposes), are really SF novels in the science fiction sense. Or, to put a finer point on the whole discussion, while I have been an avid fan of Judith Merril's definitions most of my life, I am seriously persuaded by another authority, the late great Ray Bradbury, who said to hell with worrying about categories, and just concentrated on writing wonderful stories. If Ray needed an Illustrated Man (fantasy) so be it, even if the stories included one about a space journey to Venus (as the planet was imagined back then, a drizzly jungle world). And yet Ray Bradbury was probably the first to create a real Virtual Reality story in 1950 titled The Veldt (published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1950 as The World the Children Made; talk about early SF in the mainstream!).
So now, about Daniel Defoe. His 1719 shipwreck novel is basically a techno-thriller, based on true events, and can easily be categorized as a science fiction novel.
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