ROBINSONADE

   Daniel DEFOE's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) provides the original model for robinsonades - romances of solitary survival in such inimical terrains as desert ISLANDS (or planets) - and also supplies much of the thematic and symbolic buttressing thatallows so many of these stories to be understood as allegories of mankind's search for the meaning of life, just as Crusoe's ordeal is both a religious punishment for disobedience and a triumphant justification of entrepreneurial individualism. Crusoe's paternalistic relation to the natives he eventually encounters has likewise been echoed in much modern sf, where until very recently human/ ALIEN relations tended to be depicted within the same code of mercantilist opportunism. A second important model for sf's numerous robinsonades may well be Johann WYSS's Der Schweizerische Robinson (1812-13; trans - perhaps by William Godwin - asThe Family Robinson Crusoe 1814 UK; new trans as The Swiss Family Robinson 1818 UK) - itself imitated by tales like D.W. Belisle's The American Family Robinson (1853) - in which the element of the triumphant ordeal is broadened to include the testing of a full microcosm of social life - leading either to UTOPIAN speculations, to which the robinsonade has always been structurally attuned, or to the simpler, more active adventure of the COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. However, the fundamental thrust of the robinsonade - its convincing celebration of the power of pragmatic Reason, and its depiction of the triumph, alone, over great odds, of theentrepreneur who commands that rational Faculty - continues to drive most of its offspring.

   JC