ISLANDS

   Islands play a crucial role in imaginative fiction, providing geographical microcosms in which the consequences of various types of scientific or political hypotheses may be incarnated and made available for inspection by visitors from the world at large. An archetypal island venue is ATLANTIS, mentioned as early as the time of ancient Greece by the philosopher PLATO. Many an island has played host to a UTOPIA, including Thomas MORE's Utopia itself (1516 in Latin; trans 1551), Austin TappanWRIGHT's Islandia (1942) and Jacquetta HAWKES's Providence Island (1959); not very many have harboured DYSTOPIAS. Islands also feature extensively in SATIRE, notably those displayed in Jonathan SWIFT's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Although rarely fantastic, the islands featured in ROBINSONADESare also of some significance in the history of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION. Islands are the natural refuge of weird lifeforms in many early fantasiesof EVOLUTION, including William Hope HODGSON's "The Voice in the Night" (1907). An island was the natural "laboratory" for the daring scientificexperiment carried out in H.G. WELLS's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), the prototypic island-sf story and the significant inspiration of such later works as S. Fowler WRIGHT's The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), the 1940 title story of Adolfo BIOY CASARES's The Invention of Morel and Other Stories (trans 1964), and-of course - Brian W. ALDISS's Moreau's OtherIsland (1980; vt An Island Called Moreau US). A very different experiment - an attempt to produce super- INTELLIGENCE (by somewhat fraudulent means) in a child cut off from the world - is carried out on M.P. SHIEL's The Isle of Lies (1909). An artificial island is featured in Jules VERNE'sL'ile a helice (1895; trans as The Floating Island 1896; vt Propeller Island).Early pulp sf made considerable use of islands in its thought-experiments. Notable weird lifeforms are featured in "Fungus Isle" (1923) by Philip M. Fisher and in "Nightmare Island" (1941) by TheodoreSTURGEON. Even more exotic fauna appear in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Land that Time Forgot (1924), Stanley G. WEINBAUM's "Proteus Island" (1936) and Edmond HAMILTON's "The Isle of Changing Life" (1940). However, the scopefor the deployment of undiscovered islands in fiction shrank dramatically during the early part of the century, and although such defiant-minded authors as Lance SIEVEKING, in The Ultimate Island (1925), would not be put off, most writers transferred their more extravagant thought-experiments to remoter locations. Apparently innocuous islands continued to be used, however, as bases for the hatching of nefarious schemes in many NEAR FUTURE thrillers, ranging from Edmund SNELL's Kontrol (1928) to Ian FLEMING's Dr No (1962), and for such social experiments asthose carried out in Aldous HUXLEY's Island (1962) and Scott Michel's Journey to Limbo (1963). Extraterrestrial islands play a significant rolein many sf stories about watery worlds, notably the floating islands of VENUS in C.S. LEWIS's Perelandra (1943) and the "islands" thrown up by thesentient ocean in Stanislaw LEM's SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970).The symbolic significance of the word "island" has maintained its prominence in stories which treat artificial satellites, SPACE HABITATS, asteroids, planets or even galaxies as islands in the void, and it continues to supply neat titular metaphors to such novels as Raymond F. JONES's This Island Earth (1952), filmed as THIS ISLAND EARTH (1954), Marta RANDALL's Islands (1976)and Bruce STERLING's ISLANDS IN THE NET (1988). A series of particularly ingenious metaphorical changes have been rung by Gene WOLFE in "The Island of Dr Death and Other Stories" (1970), which has been assembled with "The Death of Dr Island" (1973), "The Doctor of Death Island" (1978) and "Deathof the Island Doctor" in The Wolfe Archipelago (coll 1983). Exotic robinsonades continue to be written, often ironically; examples include "The Terminal Beach" (1964) and Concrete Island (1974), both by J.G.BALLARD.Because islands supply a strictly delimited space, rather like a stage set, in which a plot may develop, they are ideal for certain kinds of narrative exercise. Even if it were not for their specific "laboratory function", therefore, they would have a significant continuing role to play in sf. Recent works illustrative of this role include Hilbert SCHENCK's A ROSE FOR ARMAGEDDON (1982) and Chronosequence (1988) and GarryKILWORTH's Cloudrock (1988), in which an atoll is left high and dry after the surrounding ocean has vanished. The Galapagos islands, which played a crucial role in guiding Darwin to the theory of evolution by natural selection, are afforded a key symbolic role in Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's bitter futuristic fantasy Galapagos (1985).

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