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Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.

Stylistic Considerations

Cinematic, Slow, Atmospheric… I've mentioned earlier that I was transformed as a poet, as an artist, as a novelist, and as a person while watching Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner. That remains my favorite movie of all time.

Lack of Action? Slow Pacing? Consider this quote from Wikipedia that sums up the widespread panning and badmouthing the film initially got from brickheads including SF people who should have known better. It's now recognized in many quarters as one of the top 100 movies ever made. "Blade Runner initially underperformed in North American theaters and polarized critics; some praised its thematic complexity and visuals, while others were displeased with its slow pacing and lack of action." Think about that for a moment. I'm visualizing the scenes where Deckard (Harrison Ford) at gunpoint pursues the mortally terrified replicant assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) through splintering, shattering store windows and shoots her dead in the rain. Shall I go on? The movie is filled with action scenes, interspersed among beautiful DarkSF ("the Dark Chocolate of Science Fiction") atmosphere and character development. If your idea of what a SF movie must be is sex and violence, shallow as a sheet of paper, then this is not your movie. And my novels are not your novels. But you will never set the standard for me, because I gave up reading your kind of book when I was about six years old.

Ridley Scott almost could not find financing for his movie (shades of Beatrix Potter!). He ended up going all the way to China to obtain financing and support from Sir Run Run Shaw in Hong Kong, maker of over 1,000 movies and known as the Czar of Asian Movies, producing everything from literary and cultural masterpieces to popular kung fu movies. It's a long way from there to a modern update as mentioned by Wikipedia, which tells us that on review aggregator Bloody Tomatoes, …"Blade Runner holds an approval rating of 90% based on 111 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, 'Misunderstood when it first hit theaters, the influence of Ridley Scott's mysterious, neo-noir Blade Runner has deepened with time. A visually remarkable, achingly human sci-fi masterpiece.' Metacritic, another review aggregator, assigned the film a weighted average score of 89 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating 'universal acclaim'. Denis Villeneuve, who directed the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, cites the film as a huge influence for him and many others."

I confess to being guilty of many of the same artistic and intellectual crimes as Ridley Scott and his crowd. I began my writing life as a child poet, writing in several languages, and producing over 425 poems before I hung up my poetry pen around age 27 (the fateful age when rock stars die and poets flare out). I was a professional journalist at 17 (summer intern college student, CT metro newspaper The New Haven Journal-Courier. I wrote my first little novel at 11, and began my first full novel at 15, which I completed at age 19 as a sophomore English Major at the University of Connecticut. I had written a dozen novels by age 30, all of them in that "nobody would ever be interested in stuff like this" category as Ms. Potter. Yes, my work although always governed by a major love story ending in HEA, and full of suspense, adventure, creativity, imagination, and poetic writing, is simply not suitable for general consumption for all the same reasons that Blade Runner (as a prototype and an archetype of the literary film) failed to meet the commercial standard of fast food. And that's where it rests for many readers.

Cinematic, Atmospheric, Poetic, Gripping… Let's look at the opening of Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D. A young man wearing only a loincloth stands in a shallow bay, spearfishing for survival. Watching him from the opposite shore are a group of terrifying predators ('howlers'), a kind of evolved cross between wolves and bears, who are waiting for him to make a single mistake and he's lunch. That's a Glimpse, as the opening title reads. We enter the dark (living) caves where he was born, a fully formed clone of a young college student who donated a blood sample to a university lab one sunny day a million years ago. Alex Kirk, who takes his name from that long ago DNA model, is born fighting for his life. Not all the clones born in these living caves (long ago university laboratories) are successful humans. Some are deformed, like Frankenstein monsters, and devour their brothers as they lie waiting to be born in tanks of water amid the eeriely glowing, fungus-covered walls… and so it goes. Slowly, cinematically, my directorial decision in writing this novel that reads like a movie was to create a sumptuous, intelligent, well-thought out entertainment. It's post-apocalyptic and fits many other popular tropes, but the reality is that it is an intellectual and artistic exercise (again: Blade Runner or Dark City or Chrysalis to name just three ambitious, high art movies) that loses many readers. That is as it must be, because I gave it my 100%, my all, and I am very proud of it and happy with it on all levels.

Why Am I Saying All This? Because in recent years, as the novel (and others like Woman in the Sea have been swept away into an ocean of fast-food sameness, of commercial cynicism and mediocrity, I have lost my original world-wide readership of forward-looking tekkies and gamers who know a rousing SF story when they read one. Back in the mid 1990s, when relatively few homes actually had powerful computers and the Internet, I was publishing HTML Novels online (before e-commerce; we're talking proprietary, not public domain; entire in HTML to read online, not on portable media like floppies or CDs). It was exciting, to say the least, releasing a new serialized chapter every Sunday evening San Diego time. All around the world, as tech workers arrived at their offices, they would begin their day (in Hong Kong, in Johannesburg, in Cologne, in Ottawa, in New York City, you name it) with their morning coffee or tea, and log in to read my next chapter. I made available to them a full TXT file in case (as so often happened) they became too impatient and needed to immediately know the ending.

Virtual Reality 1990. Before Dark City (1998) and The Matrix (1999) there was Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story The World the Children Made in the Saturday Evening Post, republished the following year as The Veldt. In 1981, French author Jean Braudillard published Simulacra and Simulation. All of these are known as virtual reality (VR) stories today, some also known as neo-noir or we could use my term DarkSF ("The Dark Chocolate of SF"). I had read everything ever written by Ray Bradbury (who sent me a personal rave in 2008 for my dark holiday fantasy The Christmas Clock (read free or buy at Galley City). During the 1980s, as a returning G.I. amid typical heavy duty readjustment crises, I was working at a vast Yoyodyne aerospace COBOL plantation (Thomas Pynchon in my all-time favorite novel, The Crying of Lot 49) when one day I had a fascinating discussion with a trio of friendly, sympathetic programmers. They explained to me how, given the tiny memory capabilities in those enormous building-sized computers of the day, a method called 'virtual paging' was used to rapidly read in and out of memory not only data to be processed, but actual snippets and routines of code. My creative mind quickly took that to a remote level in the science fiction world, and the result in 1990 was the first draft of Woman in the Sea.

Here we have a typical situation. It's a clash between reader expectations and author intentions. I think readers today are more attuned to VR than they were then, so the novel should be more easy to understand now. I compounded by ambitious follies by adding yet another trope: I purposely wrote it to begin like a horror story (supernatural) but to prove by the end that it's purely science fiction (logic). It was all an exhilarating exercise in atmospheric writing, dreamy scenes and poetic visions, but today I might write it as several novels rather than one six-hour movie (so to speak). So it is what it is, and we all move on. That's Woman in the Sea. Here we are talking about Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D.. Even at Fictionwise, tekkie/gamer reaction to the latter was a bit muted, whereas the latter got a rousing bunch of mostly rave ratings (only 6% negative).

What it all comes down to is this. If you like a novel by Thomas Pynchon or William Golding or Alice Sheldon ('James Tiptree, Jr.') or Cordwainer Smith and their like, I may have a story or two for you. Or not, and it's all good, and we move on with our lives.

About SF: A Parting Point. William Golding, who received the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature, is probably best remembered for the (initially much rejected) novel Lord of the Flies, which became a great movie in 1963. For some readers, it may not be immediately clear, but the story is post-apocalyptic in the sense that it centers on a group of choir boys whose plane crashes on a remote Pacific Island during a huge, unspecified sort of world war. That most certainly also makes it a robinsonade (shipwreck story) as well. In all of that, there is an underlying science fiction foundation. Moreover, one of Golding's other novels that I enjoyed in my teens is The Inheritors (1955). This is clearly a science fiction novel by any measure, being an imaginative interpretation of the arrival of homo sapiens into the prehistoric world of homo neanderthalensis, visualized by Golding in a sympathetic manner.

While I am on the topic of great SF authors (in every sense of Speculative Fiction), I want to mention another genius who came within reach of a Nobel Prize: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The erudite, widely traveled internationalist was Argentine by birth, where he lived most of his years. He was a poet and short story writer of world renown, exemplifying the best of South American and French surrealismo. His fiction deserves mention in any catalog of SF, alongside other greats like the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. I make no claims for myself, except to say that I know in whose company I tread (and write).