Islands of the Imagination
“Twenty-six miles across the sea...” the Four Preps sang in 1958, celebrating the allure of Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California where I live. Not a very wide channel, about the distance from Calais to Dover; weekend sailors in small sailboats cross it all the time. It’s even been swum more than once, giving the swimmers the chance of eye-to-eye contact with pods of migrating grey whales or the resident friendly dolphins. But to experience the real tug-at-the-heart of this island, stand on the beach at sunset, particularly in the winter when the sky flames crimson and purple, and look across the darkening water at its silhouette. Among other things, you’ll understand why, since the dawn of history, the British Isles attracted waves of yearning immigrants: Picts and Celts, Angles and Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans – and those who’d been there almost since the world began – all of them setting sail for the edge of the known world. (The Polynesians were even braver; they set out across a vast ocean for islands they’d never seen but trusted were there.)
The allure of islands finds its way into our earliest stories and our recent science fiction: Odysseus in the Greek islands, pirates in the Caribbean, Robinson Crusoe’s island, Treasure Island. The names alone often chime in the imagination like poetry: Hebrides, Seychelles, and Easter Island, Christmas Island, and Hispaniola. No wonder Shakespeare set his most magical play, The Tempest, on an island. An island is a world entire in itself, full of fabulous possibilities for a better life, or at least it used to be before the invention of the jet plane and the internet. Not surprising then that many science fiction writers, especially English ones, should be inspired to use island settings, from H.G. Wells classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau, to Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s tales of space stations and orbiting colonies as islands in the sky (The Fountains of Paradise), and China Mieville’s lashed together boats that form a floating island in The Scar.
The metaphor of the island in science fiction can be prison or safe haven, the isolation it affords good or bad. Or as J.G.Ballard put it, “The Island is a state of mind.” Setting a story on an island, whether orbiting or on an alien planet, allows the writer to break free of the strictures of existing societies with their heavy load of historical influence and perform thought-experiments. Science fiction writers and readers like to find answers and solve problems. Such fiction is didactic in purpose to the extent that science fiction is always concerned with the idea of what may-yet-be, far more so than mainstream, mimetic fiction. An island setting offers a useful laboratory. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we’ve become more concerned with the health of our planet since the astronauts looked back from the Moon and saw “this island Earth” floating alone in the dark sea of space.
Gathering my lingster stories together for the collection, The Guild of Xenolinguists, I was bemused to find how islands had crept into more than one of them. I couldn’t have written “No Brighter Glory” if it hadn’t been set on an island; the physical charm of the island for the protagonist and the isolation it afforded the antagonist gave rise to the plot. And I see now that a lot of influences came together in another island story, “Stranger Than Imagination Can.” From the moment I realized that my crew were heading to a world orbiting a star with the impressive-sounding Messier catalog number NGC312150, but called “Prospero” after the astronomer who found it, I knew I was dealing with Shakespeare. True to its Elizabethan inspiration, the beautiful but apparently empty archipelago on my planet was filled with mysterious music and mischievous spirits, with a perhaps deadly purpose at its heart. Islands aren’t always a benign paradise, even if they seem so at first, and Shakespeare’s Prospero was not above making mortals suffer. Isolated from the vast accumulation of human philosophy and technology, and with no alien culture to examine for answers, I freed my characters to learn that the universe may be stranger (and more dangerous) than we can imagine.
Yet analysis aside of the political and psychological symbolism of islands, there remains their purely visceral and perhaps atavistic tug at our emotions. I think of those early humans, on their long migration out of Africa at the dawn of history, coming to the edge of the world as they understood it and facing the daunting power of the sea for the first time. They must have experienced exhaustion, hunger and thirst on their trek through jungles and across deserts; they would have been hunted by fierce animals and maybe other tribes in the humanoid family. And there, on the horizon, perhaps there rose the silhouette of an island promising safety, shelter, a new beginning, if only they could use that newly-developing brain to figure out a way to travel just “twenty-six miles across the sea.” It might as well have been a whole galaxy away.
What a truly science fictional idea!
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
