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Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.
Technical Considerations for a Robinsonade
Challenging And then Some! I already mentioned my hesitation to write this project, because it seemed to me virtually impossible to do justice to a novel that has only one human character in it.
Tom Hanks in the 2000 movie Castaway solved the problem by using a volleyball ("Wilson") as his foil for dialogue. I'd like to mention, by the way, that in my opinion, 20th Century U.S. author John O'Hara was the greatest genius in writing fiction composed sometimes almost exclusively of dialogue. A pure Robinsonade (no supporting cast like in the 1812 novel Swiss Family Robinson) is a technically daunting challenge, as opposed to stories richly loading up the dialogue and character interaction as in O'Hara's short stories especially.
Spoiler. Okay, in most shipwreck (robinsonade) stories, the marooned loner does have a life beyond the island. So, there is usually a wrap-up toward the end. How has the experience changed him? Tom Hanks' character, as in decades' worth of similar movies, goes home after some years to find his marriage has moved on (so to speak). In the case of my novel, there are no humans left (or are there?). The long-ago biology lab at an upstate New York university evolved into a series of living caves, almost a vast network of wombs, that keep producing clones like Alex Kirk (using the DNA of individuals who died a million years ago). Alex Kirk came to exist in 1,000,000 A.D. because one sunny spring day, by a beautiful lake on the university campus, two undergraduates were walking along holding hands and having a date. A graduate student from Bio approached and asked if they'd donate blood samples for an unspecified experiment (whose outcome nobody could have foreseen, unless you read my novel). Both Alex Kirk and his young girlfriend, Maryan Shurey, agreed. Why not? A quick prick of a needle, a small vial of blood, and they were treated to a gift certificate (dinner for two). What impoverished, starving student could resist an offer like that? And the rest, to paraphrase 'as they say', is Future History (SF). With those plot devices, despite the loner theme in a robinsonade, I open up limitless outcomes for the story.
My History on This Theme… There's a parallel history story for this story in my life, reminiscent of what I have recently unveiled about my romantic 2017 Paris novel (Paris Affaire: a Young Poet and His Angel in the City of Light) which I retitled with identical text as The Bells of Notre Dame in April 2019 in reaction to the terrible fire that destroyed part of Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral. The 2017 novel was actually a wildly fun remake (with an afternoon's worth of global changing and replacing names in the source file) of a much earlier New Haven novel (On Saint Ronan Street) that I wrote in West Germany during the Cold War, where I was stationed for five years as a soldier in the U.S. Army. During that same service period (two enlistments), I wrote a lot of other material, including the last two dozen or so of my 425+ poems written mostly as a teen and college student in Connecticut, and including several novels. The New Haven love story gathered dust as an unpublished (almost!) novel for forty years until I finally published it through Clocktower Books, my San Diego CA small press imprint. During those same service years, I sat many a night in a moth-fluttered former Hitler barracks office, then a U.S. Army headquarters, typing away to the soft strains of Mozart, Brubeck, and Rick James among others. One of the short stories I wrote (A Million Years For Love") tells of a young human cloned in a post-apocalyptic system of living caves. He's the only human on earth, the ultimate Robinson Crusoe type, marooned beyond time and space with no hope of rescue because the human species has been extinct for eons. That story had a few 'almost' moments as well, but remains to this day (BRY 2019) unpublished). It would eventually be the kernel or core or basis in 2001-2002 for my writing what I published in early 2003 as Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.
Intersecting Themes 2000+. A number of passions in me converged after the millennium t o cause me to write this story. As just mentioned, a pretty close blueprint lay in my dusty manuscript box from the 1970s (short story of about 6300 words). In fact, I just took a break and searched my computer for a copy and there it was, a scan I digitized a few years ago. Hell, why not? I'll publish that also, as it was in the 1970s. I fleshed out the details far more in the 2003 novel, but the valley and the caves and clones and the evolved killer predators ('rippers' or 'howlers'). As in the novel, a long-ago university lab evolved into sentient, living caves that regularly give birth to these doomed human clones (whose bones litter the valley, after the flesh is picked off by those bear-like predators).
I can see a number of cultural influences from the late 20th Century. In an early paragraph in the 1970s short story, the text reads: "…Now the tears were dried up and he felt a painful but beautiful new sense of urgency. He was alive, after all, and to be alive was wonderful--especially when you faced the project of seeking the only other human being alive, who happened to be a beautiful girl with whom you were very much in love…" (make that 'a million years for love'). Classics scholar and bestselling popular author (another of my heroes) Erich Segal of Love Story (1970) opens his novel with words much like those, expressing a doomed and tragic love. In virtually every one of my novels, I have written a powerful love story between a strong female lead and a strong male lead, which always ends on a happy ever after note after some harrowing adventures (plot, suspense, story). I've decided to publish that story and post it on Galley City as a free read attached to the novel written a quarter century later. More on that soon. Meanwhile!
Planet of the Apes Moment—The Other Plot Problem. The novel was off to a great start in 2000-2001 and then came to a crashing halt about halfway through its ultimate length. I call it the Planet of the Apes (or POTS) moment. Remember: POTS is another (what else is new?) Robinsonade story! When Alex and Maryan seem to have triumphed as Mr. and Mrs. Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. No sooner have they made a new life for themselves, than they are captured in a net by horseback riding Siirk, furry alien-looking intelligent creatures who are now the cruel masters of the Earth. POTS had already been done, and I had no taste for going in that direction. So what to do next? I was stymied for a good half year or more, working on other projects. Then another set of inspirations tumbled down on my head.
"I'll Be Bekk" and "Sayonara, Baby!" Like most red-blooded young men of that era, I not only enjoyed by poetry and rarified literature (F. Scott Fitzgerald) but I also loved a good adventure flick with larger than life heroes. Just to name a few:
We're talking Arnold Schwartzenegger in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984).
We're talking Predator (1987). We're talking Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood.
We're talking Bruce Willis 12 Monkeys and The Fifth Element.
We're talking Sigourney Weaver in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)…
Need I go on? I was marooned offworld in Cold War Europe when Ridley Scott's classic movie Alien came out. I most likely saw it at my local AFEES military theater in garrison. I definitely remember buying a copy of a magazine special, which I still treasure among my grave goods today (just kidding, I hope) all about Sigourney Weaver and the movie Alien. And I'd go back to the barracks at night and start typing to the tunes of Mozart while moths fluttered around me and it was otherwise silent except for the sounds of drizzle and distant passing cars outside. Aside from the perennial North Atlantic rain, those years in the late 1970s were early indicators of global warming; unusually hot summers that produced excellent wine crops but also caused at least one metal bridge in the U.K. to buckle and collapse. The apocalypse is all around us, like a raincoat waiting to be buttoned up to the neck.
A quarter century later, in the new millennium, I was typing in balmy, sunny San Diego as I have done all my life and will continue to do until my last breath. Out came the 2003 novel Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D., based on my 1970s short story A Million Years for Love. As with On Saint Ronan Street (1976) and its love child, The Bells of Notre Dame (2017/2019), each story is complete in its own right; and although they are siblings, each is quite different from the other.
So again, I got stuck halfway through Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.. At that point, I called upon the film-spirits of Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartzenegger, and Sigourney Weaver
to rescue me. I also realized that I had been limiting myself needlessly—why just end with a robinsonade (they survived, they built a hut, they baked bread, and they decided never to bring children into the terrifying Earth of one million A.D. I nearly ended the story on a downbeat note when the POTS-style nets dropped on them, signifying the end of their freedom and the final realization that humankind is extinct. However, I never end a story on a down note if I can help it. I also never let a good love story die on the vine (the only exception being Lizzie's true life tragedy in Lethal Journey, dramatizing the true crime and famous ghost story in Coronado, California of 1891; couldn't change that one although I'm working on a new fantasy novel to remedy that also). So, I did two things. No, I did not show them riding along the beach and saying through gritted Charlton Heston teeth "Oh you bastards..." while gazing at the Statue of Yadda Yadda (no trace remains in one million A.D.). Instead, I showed the Siirk killing and oppressing a more likeable, also alien race called the Thuga. Alex and Maryan ally themselves with the Thuga, and take the fight for freedom to a long-abandoned orbiting space station, which contains an astounding secret that will change the future of humankind.
So there begins a rousing second half of the novel filled with lots of new imaginative twists. Unlike my tekkies and gamers, a few mainstream readers, jolted out of complacency by dramatic and radical twists in the story, found it hard to keep up. A fair amount of complaining set in ("why can't this just be a predictable, ordinary, mass-produced fast food story so I don't have to stay up all night reading, can't follow half of it, and wind up dead tired all the next day?" or words to that effect). Like Ridley Scott with his wonderful 1982 Blade Runner (hated and reviled by many, including SF critics who should have known better, and today recognized as one of the finest films ever made, an atmospheric poem with plenty of shootings and chases if you just loosen up and let the director tell his story…) (yeah, actually, my experience in some of the later Amazon type reviews was that a certain type of reader wants to remake your story for you and tell it his or her way, otherwise it is 'flawed' and so forth; to whom I and the more appreciative readers say in an Austrian accent: "Sayonara, Baybee").
I solved my plot and story problems and wrote a complete novel that I am proud to rank among my favorite DarkSF stories, along with the also not popularly understood but artistically received Woman in the Sea (new 2019 title, formerly This Shoal of Space, an early 1996 pioneering HTML Novel published online by John Argo). Let me conclude the technical discussion with an example of misunderstandings.
Insular Dwarfism: Science, Not Fantasy. One kind, sweet woman who read Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D., didn't understand it, and therefore didn't like it but still posted a sort of bruised, mournful thanks made the statement that "in the second half it becomes high fantasy." She is referring to the tiny elf-like people who live in the main hydroponics section of the orbiting space station, which by now (eons after human extinction) has become an evolutionary petri dish. Wrong, my dear, with all due respect. Miniaturization is a scientifically observed principle, in reaction to loss of environment. Take for example the dwarf mammoth species Mammuthus lamarmorai (Sardinia, over 40,000 years ago). Similarly, see the pygmy mammoth of California's Channel Islands, which survived long after its huge mainland cousins became extinct. Insular dwarfism is a defensive evolutionary strategy of adapting to an environment of diminished resources by shrinking generationally in size. Today, scientists are looking at a possible (not yet confirmed) human version of this called homo Floriensis (according to a growing number of biologists, a possible form of insular dwarfism found among humans surviving extreme conditions during extreme glaciations; here's a recent finding about the Floriensian Ziahe mandible related to our long ago ancestors associated with the paleontology of the Denisova cave in Siberia. The apparent dwarfism of the Floriensians sounds much like that of insular elephantidae just mentioned).
Why do I mention that? It's a good example of why readers ought to let a writer tell his or her story and not retell the story for the writer. I want to deliver to you a story you'll enjoy, and I have proven that I live in the mainstream of both commercial and literary art. But I'm going to tell the story my way, as my artistic and intellectual creation. Thousands of gamers and tekkie types enjoyed the hell out of Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. during those halcyon early years of the World Wide Web. Those readers are still out there, just looking for something new and creative and fresh to enjoy. And by the way, what if someone were to make a game based on the far-future, dangerous post-apocalyptic Earth with its living caves, rippers, and other strange developments in Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.? Think about it. All the elements are there—total HighSciFi, as I call it…human clones, a post-apoc world, living caves, prowling howlers, furry cruel Siirk, sympathetic and heroic Thuga, a vast orbiting station full of evolved secrets and abandoned gadgetry, a mysterious haunted village on a dark offshore island that must once have housed a culture of escaped human clones, lots of undersea reefs and wrecks to explore…
P.S.: Cannibalistic Clones. The wonderful 2003 Library Journal review gives high marks to my novel, calling it a fresh and original approach to a great classic. The review mentions how Alex Kirk's world as a loner changes when he discovers a woman's bloody footprint on a sandbar (which takes him to the mysterious offshore island and its deserted village). The review also uses the term 'cannibalistic clone' referring to Alex's violent birth in the caves, and nearly being devoured by a misfire (many of the clones don't turn out so well, and resemble Frankensteinian monsters). Apparently, amid our current national paranoia, anger, and divisiveness, there was an organization of underground librarian misfits—sort of Frankensteinian clone fails of the wonderful librarians we hold so dear(I can see the horror movie already…
That reminds me: Stephen King wrote a novella titled The Library Policeman that I read in his 1990 anthology Four Past Midnight). Much better fictional concept… than my (true) librarian tale. But I digress…
These annalistic clones had a blog going online for a time, in which they raved and raged against the world, the government, all the usual tropes, above all against libraries and 'liberals' and U.S. national library associations. The lead clone in this pack saw the Library Journal review of my novel and began howling with rage on his blah or blog. Apparently, psychiatric help and tranquilizers were not available to him. I discovered his blah while doing searches on my work to gauge SEO effectiveness. When I saw the hate, I spoke up on the blah and asked if he had actually read my book. "I don't need to," he raged, "all I needed was to see 'cannibalistic clones' to know what garbage you write, that they are promoting as usual…" and thus he went from cannibalistic to ballistic. I suspect he wore brown shirts and shiny boots, slicked his hair apart up the middle, had a little mustache, and would have preferred to see Mein Krampf reviewed instead of my novel. Luckily these anti-librarians seem to have faded into the woodwork by now, although book burning, book banning, and cerebral dwarfism remain ever a Floriensian peril in our endangered world. This novel of mine seems to have ignited amazing antipodes of love and rage that leave me scratching my head in puzzlement. It's just a story, folks; and a damn good one, I think. There have been other distant bellicosities, but these notes should suffice.
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