My friend Brad made a comment about THE GREAT GATSBY as a school set-work book having put a great many boys off reading. Needless to say various people swarmed to the book’s defense, with the usual ad homs from the kind of people who have no other argument to make. Now, as a fast reader, well and truly addicted to reading before it was thrust upon me: I didn’t hate it. I found it pretentious, boring and with little I could relate to, or wanted to. I am pretty sure Brad was right.
The set-book book I hated with the heat of at least several suns was LORD OF THE FLIES (William Golding). If that had been my first book, I would never have read another. It was in a way a setting too close to the many daydreams I had had — which had their roots in THE BLUE WORLD (Jack Vance) and LEST DARKNESS FALL (l. Sprague De Camp) – my two first sf novels, and, in their own way both castaway stories. They were both action stories, and more importantly for me, had problem solving heroes.
Golding’s story centered around ‘political’ power among the group, and not at all on the things I was interested in: building things, catching food and solving castaway problems. It assumed a descent into a savagery, dictatorship and murder away from civilizations influence… Which was absolute opposite of what I wanted to read about. Bad guys, sure, but I wanted the other side to contrive and win.
Fortunately for my faith in my fellow humans it turned out there was a real kid’s castaway story – The Tongan Castaways – where six kids did exactly the opposite of what Golding had described. With nothing, really, they worked together to survive, caring for one of their number when he broke his leg, sharing, looking after each other. They worked hard, co-operated, contrived, and kept up their faith. They couldn’t build a full civilization, but they worked towards it, and survived for 18 months.
I thought I’d write something of the same ilk, but sf.
So: Is this something you’d read, rather than Lord of Flies or Great Gatsby? (first draft, plenty typos and rough as guts.)
KRAKEN!
Dave Freer
One minute they were walking along the corridor. The next they all fell down, tumbling over each other. Metal shrieked. The lights flickered, and then dimmed.
Tal McKee couldn’t say he’d heard the explosion, just felt it, throwing them around like marbles in a tin can. He heard the airtight doors hissing closed, and the loudspeakers start blaring: “ATTENTION. ATTENTION. FOLLOW THE FLOOR-LINE INDICATORS TO YOUR NEAREST LIFEBOAT. REMAIN CALM. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
“Ouch! Get off me!” said the person under him. He rolled off – and onto some other kid. So, he did his best to stagger to his feet. So had one of the other kids – the scrawny guy whose hair looked he’d been through a lawnmower. His eyes were very wide, and his voice squeaked a bit, but he said: “Come on guys. Get up! We’ve got to get to the lifeboat.”
It was enough to pull Tal towards himself. “Yeah. Come on.”
One of the others sat up. “Ow.”
“You OK?” asked Tal, nearly colliding with the scrawny kid, reaching for the blonde boy who had sat up. It wasn’t just they were both going the same way. The ship was rocking and bucking around. They pulled the kid to his feet. “What happened?”
“Don’t know,” said Scrawny, tersely. “Can you stand on your own?”
“Yeah. I’m scared.”
“So am I. Come on, we gotta get these other people up, and to the lifeboat.”
Tal took a swaying step to other two on the corridor floor. The one was the solid guy he’d landed on. There was blood on his face, but he was trying to sit up. Tal grabbed him and he yelled, “Argh! My arm, you idiot.”
Tal took him by the other shoulder. He realised scrawny had the big guy by the shirt front and they hauled him up together. The big guy looked at them, confusedly. “What’s going on?” he demanded as he cradled his arm.
“Don’t know. Got to get to the lifeboat.”
“Lifeboat?” Asked the big guy, looking around, obviously not really with it.
“Lead him,” said scrawny to the other kid, who still standing there, looking terrified. “Follow the emergency line,” He pointed. The kid nodded and Tal turned to the last person on the floor. He wished he hadn’t. The man was bleeding, his eyes were closed, and one leg was clearly at the wrong angle. For a moment Tal wondered if he was dead. But then he saw the man’s chest move.
“What are we going to do?” asked the scrawny kid, beating him to it.
“Can we drag him?” Tal asked.
Scrawny nodded. “Have to.”
So, they grabbed a handful of bloody clothes and did their best. Luckily, he wasn’t that large – still a lot bigger than they were. Moving him took all their strength. After a few yards Tal said: “We’ll never get him there.”
“Floor-bot!” said the other kid and ran back, away from the lifeboat. Before Tal could decide what to do – or work out what the scrawny kid was doing, he was back, carrying a floor-scrubber-vacuum bot. It beeped indignantly at him.
“Help me get it under him. It’s got wheels.” They rolled and lifted and strained. The man moaned faintly. But it did carry some of the weight, and now they actually could drag him.
It still wasn’t easy, or going very fast, and the lights flickered several times. Tal was panting, wondering how much longer he could do this, and whether they should just give up and try and get to lifeboat, when the younger blonde kid showed up. He immediately took hold too. “How… far?” panted Tal.
“Next corner. It’s close,” said the kid.
It helped having a third person. Not a lot, but knowing it was close helped too. They dragged on. The man moaned again. At this point the big guy arrived, “What’s happening?”
“Trying… get him… the lifeboat,” grunted the other kid. “Pull, Johnno.”
The big guy might be confused, but he was big. He pulled a horrible face, managed to get the arm he was still cradling in through the buttons of his shirt. With the other hand he grabbed and pulled. Between them they managed to get the injured man to the lifeboat exit. The doors were normally closed, but they were open to the lifeboat airlock, now, and that too was open. With a last effort, they hauled the man through and in.
Somehow, Tal had expected to see other people in there. Adults. Spacemen to take charge. “Where… where is everybody?” He didn’t say ‘are they all dead?’ He didn’t dare.
Mad Genius Club 
81 responses to ““Just about exactly not like Lord of Flies””
Ooo! I like it. The epitome of “in medias res.”
Where’s the scout uniform to stuff into the hole in the hull?
And when can we expect the sequel? Just wanted to be the first to ask.
Well, you got the role model right, anyway. 🙂 No sequel planned.
Yes, please!
I used to play Eve Online a long time ago. One of the interesting findings was that most people, when dropped into an absolute anarchy will cooperate with each other and leave each other alone.
However there is a small percentage of the population who will simply go around killing people. And all of the government structure forms from dealing with that.
So in a cast away situation, most people will simply buckle down and work together to survive, until you’ve got a big enough group that you’ve got one or more psychos in it. Only then does the tribal stuff start. And I think even then, only if there are enough psychos that they don’t just get evicted from the tribe and wiped out.
I never played it, but heard many of the stories about emergent social orders (or lack thereof) in EVE Online. Sounded fascinating.
Had an actual classical libertarian professor for college polysci and ethics. After class we’d talk about the current instanities going on, and which ancient thing the were behaving like. Apparently it is very, very common for direct democracies to dissolve into extremely bitter civil wars.
I was really only active in the tribal warlord period, before the big stations. They’ve moved on to much more formalized warfare since then.
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote: It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government on the other hand enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest, both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good, and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum, by which alone this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.
By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time, must be prevented; or the majority, having such co-existent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together; that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.
From this view of the subject, it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.
James Madison
I would read this and I would get a dead tree copy to save for future grandchildren.
Yep! May I hope you do write it? I love this kind of story, even now. As a kid, I hunted down and read all of them that I could, but fortunately didn’t read Lord of the Flies until it was inflicted on my children.
Am busy doing so.
Atta boy!
You may actually have a situation in which Tal is the POV character, but hyper-competent Scrawny Kid is the protagonist / leader?
Actually, all but the adult are POV characters, sooner or later. :-). Scrawny kid is inventive, has his areas of competency – and gets into difficulty more often because he rushes in headlong.
yes please
Sigh. I love Lord of the Flies. If you don’t like it, then I won’t presume to dictate your tastes, but dear God am I sick of people tossing that castaways story as if it disproved Golding’s point: There were fewer kids, they were all roughly the same age, and they all knew each other beforehand.
In Lord of the Flies the kids were younger, and of varying ages, and they didn’t know each other beforehand.
You want to see the real-life Lord of the Flies? Look in any city in 2020, replace face-paint with face masks and spears with needles.
It utterly baffles me how so many conservatives and traditionalists – who like myself believe in Original Sin and human corruptibility and the need for social structures – can have such an irrational hate-on for a book that portrays just that.
You’re also missing another point – which is hard to miss because it’s right there in the title: Lord of the Flies. The book falls into that particular genre of weird fiction when the characters venture out of or are thrust out of the normal world and find themselves in a place were Weird Things Happen.
Specifically: a Literal Freaking Demon is among them. Why does everything go wrong for them? For the same reason everything goes wrong for the heroes of C.S. Lews’ The Last Battle for 90 percent of the book: because Tash has come among them.
That’s the double fake-out: Simon realizes there’s no monster, except there really is.
@Groovy – I think the biggest objections most people have to Lord of the Flies is not so much the message, but the fact that they had to spend several months over analyzing it in school. Same reason why everyone hates The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. On their own, they are fine examples of the Literature genre. However, when one is forced to examine every little detail over the period of several months where one gets constantly hammered by the story’s message, it gets… trying.
To my knowledge, most college literature classes do not commit months to any single work. At most, they spend a week on a single work and move on. You only find that kind of torture in high school.
By the way, I’ve heard that one student didn’t believe how the characters started the fire using one kid’s glasses.
So he proved to his teacher that it wouldn’t work.
Fortunately, according to this story the teacher didn’t punish him for proving that. [Very Big Grin]
Paul Howard (Drak Bibliophile) *
I don’t know know what kind of glasses the kid was using, but after a quick Google search I can find a number of examples and vids of how it is indeed possible to start a fire using a pair of glasses.
Besides, the glasses also double as a symbol for the power – and limitations – of civilization.
And if you object to possibly stretching realism to prove a symbolic point, then you also need to object to John Galt’s motor in Atlas Shrugged, which pulls energy from the air and is also symbolic of man’s mind and creativity – that’s a whole lot more unrealistic than using glasses to start a fire!
https://www.survivalworld.com/preparedness/fire-with-glasses/
“Nearsighted glasses will not start a fire.”
And the entire point is that Piggy is blind without glasses.
Time of day and speed are also an issue.
*headtilt* what….makes you think you are among people who think Atlas Shrugged constitutes uniformly excellent story-telling, to the point where you can namecheck one of its gimmicks in an argument from authority? Because in my experience, only the looniest and most diehard of Rand’s followers claim it to be anything other than a flawed, over-long work with some interesting social commentary.
^^^ THIS ^^^
I’d argue it’s a fair comparison. Rand said her philosophy champions dealing with objective reality – she even called it Objectivism – yet she permitted herself use of at least one fantastic element in her story because she judged it a perfect symbol for individualism and creativity.
Her plot was also somewhat contrived and many of her characters exaggerated, sometimes to the point of caricature, yet in doing so she still gave a genuine portrayal of a destructive mindset that she accurately saw as threatening her civilization.
John C. Wright among others has said as much several times on his web site, even as he disagrees with Rand’s philosophy as a whole (his commenters have struck up some interesting conversations, with the opinion that Rand misidentifies what she’s attacking as “altruism,” since the altruism on display in Atlas Shrugged is just a mask for self-seeking of status by appearing to be altruistic. Don’t ask me to list which blog posts I’m talking about, I don’t remember the exact dates).
LOTF takes some comparatively small liberties in order to present a poignant warnings about what happens when you take human beings and strip away community, society, shared experience and belief.
A more stark refutation of Rousseau’s noble savage and the importance of the Gods of the Copybook Headings you couldn’t ask for, and told in a tense, suspenseful adventure rich with symbolism.
How can a purely imaginary story refute anything?
The same way a purely imaginary story can teach any idea. Are you saying that the purely imaginary Narnia refutes nothing?
Does it teach the existence of dragons and talking animals?
Now you’re just being obtuse.
She’s telling folks to make a case, rather than appeal to social status.
No, I’m not going to explain how fiction, imagination, and application vs allegory work, and if that’s where this is headed then I think I’m about done.
Feel free to have the last word if you think that’s important.
Hon, you’ve been given the chance to make your case. With a wide range of folks who agree or disagree with you to varying degrees, and moderators that will pop in if stuff gets too hot.
Consistently, you’ve fallen back on variations of abusing those who don’t already agree with you, even when the only thing they did was engage with your arguments directly and in good faith– *but did not agree with you right out of the box*.
That is far more important that a ‘last word,’ and it’s a bit concerning that your focus is still on appearances.
Nope. You assert that the way these fictional characters are depicted refutes something real. It refutes it the way Narnia refutes that animals can’t talk.
Again, are ethics real? How about principles? And does a fictional book like Narnia provide examples of the reality of those things? Intangible != unreal.
Fictional examples refute nothing.
I guess I was lucky: my school only went over short stories.
Just like this objection, the problem with Lord of the Flies is that it is specific sort of adult cynicism demanding respect, while having to get exceptions at every turn.
Oh, the base concept of this story when tested is inaccurate, and kids aren’t monsters? Well, it matches my interpretation of adults in a completely different situation with very different influences.
Following the description of the Veddy Veddy Realistic story for a major plot point doesn’t work? Well, it’s symbolic.
The author anvil is simply too heavy to not result in suspension of disbelief dying? There’s a literal freaking demon that isn’t mentioned and would in fact go against the entire point of “humans are the real demons” or “hell is other people.”
It’s fine if you enjoy it, you’re allowed to, but as the old saying goes, it’s spinach.
“It’s fine if you enjoy it, you’re allowed to, but as the old saying goes, it’s spinach.”
Yep.
While I think of “Lord of the Flies” as the Ultimate “The Bullies Won” type of story (and I hate Bullies), the fact is that people can read the same story and get different reactions to the story.
So, in many ways, it only matters “if you (the reader) enjoyed it” as long as you allow other readers to Not Enjoy It.
Of course, the same thing applies to “you (the reader) didn’t enjoy it”.
Heck, I’m even down for an enthusiastic discussion of it– steel sharpens steel, and you can get so much good stuff out of playing the “well, how about if we read it this way?” game. To the point that I can make an argument for having folks read stories that you are almost certain they’ll hate when learning how to identify techniques, because if the story is horrible, you won’t be distracted by it.
Anybody here who’s beta read a story knows that feeling– you are so into the story you miss spelling errors, homophones, plot holes, etc.
The metrics have to be applied evenly, though.
Sorry, it was a crazy week and I just plain wasn’t able to check back in and respond till now.
First off, I read that conversation between Simon and that pig’s head and got shivers down my spine, then and now. No one will ever convince me there wasn’t something on that island with those kids. And when Simon returns and is about to tell the kids about the crashed pilot just in time to get killed by mistake? Just in time to join all the kids in shared blood-guilt? That was more than a confluence of coincidences
I say the comparison to 2020 is apt: when close friends and beloved family screamed at me through their masks and in terror of the Koof-Beast that I was a selfish National Socialist who wouldn’t care if I caused the deaths of the sick and elderly, I very clearly heard an undercurrent of “kill the brute! Spill his blood!” Likewise when I heard barely – just barely – veiled delight from people who’s opinion I once respected whenever the news splashed some breathless tale of a jab-skeptic who passed away. That was exactly what Golding was warning about, and exactly what he presented in stark detail.
The glasses? Fine, it was a stretch of realism, but a very small one. Suppose you mentally swapped the glasses out for some other symbol of civilization like a spyglass or a magnifying glass? It would change nothing, but the symbology of the glasses, seeing everything through the lenses of civilization, and the lenses cracking as the situation degrades is such a perfect use of symbolism that I’m willing to wink at the stretch.
The references to the castaways and other disasters? They only prove Golding’s point: all those were cases where the people had something to fall back on – pre-existing bonds of family, community, shared experiences, and they had something Higher to look to.
In LOTF the kids had none of that: they were too different in ages and experience, they didn’t know each other. The only exception was Jack, who had a sub-group that was already loyal to him and they pursued an exciting, high-status role of hunting, which built up social capital for him.
Is that contrived? Literally all fictional plots are by definition contrived, but I argue that the situation was sufficiently set up and the characters well enough drawn that the happenings were logical and believable with the exception of Simon’s timely death, and I hold that something was at work there.
It’s spinach
Ever try wedding/holiday soup? It’s made with spinach and it tastes great.
Again.
Nobody says you’re not allowed to like it.
However, “I like it” and “I can ignore these issues” or even “I head-canon this other route” does not patch over the issues with declaring it such a superlative example that it must be enforced as mandatory reading, nor does it make it a good choice for teaching the things it is supposedly teaching.
Meh. I don’t detest “Lord of the Flies” because it is unrealistic, or bad writing, or even bad characterization. I detest it because it is a dystopia – and I detest ALL dystopian fiction.
Not as much as dystopian fiction that ends with an “easy button” solution, though. My most hated reading in my school days was “The Jungle.” Blech.
So, when are we blowing up Omelas?
One can admire the craft – a “utopia” that is actually a dystopia – and still dislike the story.
This is another type of story that I take a serious dislike to. The one that makes the assumption that evil MUST exist for there to be good. That is what I do not care for in LeGuin’s tale (and the “counter” story by Jemisin) – that life is a footrace in which there are only winners and losers.
Now, it is difficult to imagine a culture in which everyone is a winner. I haven’t come across one, myself (although RAH came very close in “Beyond This Horizon”). I suspect that it would end up being annoying by being boring (even The Master had to have SOME losers, albeit “evil” ones, in the story).
Our Western culture is unique, IMHO, in that it minimizes the losers, and the majority are winners. Even those “losers” are (when not interfered with) can join the ranks of the winners, WITHOUT someone else becoming a loser – which has not been seen to a great extent in any other culture that I have studied, either current or historic.
I don’t know what this would look like, but the way to have everyone be winners is for them to be competing for something different.
Like, you being the world’s best pizza chef doesn’t make my being an awesome chicken-whisperer any less, if we’re both happy.
Fun as explosions are, all you have to do is say a kind word to the child. That’s quicker.
I had not considered that. One kind word would do it. (Been a long damn time since I read it, but not long enough.)
Now I think nothing short of an orbital kinetic strike will be sufficient. One kind word and then extraction from the target area for the kid first.
That, and we round up all the ones who walked away and give them a good hearty slap on the back of the head.
Each unto their own. I think it was a book for adults, about adults (the ‘children’ were cardboard masks for adults), moralizing and depressing, with little faith in humanity. While the tongan castaways were a smaller group, some older (which, Golding-philosophy should have made it worse), I have been involved in various forms rescue/disaster cope several times (from search-and-rescue, to bush-fire fighting) and my experience says in extremis humans can indeed be remarkable and put aside their dominance games — those tend to come from people NOT doing the work, and NOT in extremis. I don’t deny they exist, or that humans can go feral. I just think as a small boy I loathed reading it.
I never did read it. Cole’s Notes for the win. Got a 60, close enough. Didn’t let my kids read it either. Take a 60, drive on kid.
They made us read “The Collector” too, if you can imagine. So very teenager-unfriendly. Our English teacher was very Progressive and Avant-Garde for the 1970s. My response was a monster story where the good guys won and the bad guys lost. Got a 60, close enough. ~:D
Hmm. If that was the basis for The Life of George the Dragon (and his many friends) – I think you deserved more than a 60.
I thank you for your kind words, good sir. ~:D
The story, as I dimly recall, was mostly motorcycles and girls fighting Eldritch Eeeevile. What does one expect from a 16 year old, after all? But I was pleased with it, and I remembered that enjoyment all the way until I wrote my first proper book.
Lucky for me, I had read all manner of SF/F by the time I hit high school. So the teacher was banging on about The Collector and I was busy at my desk drawing handguns from The Weapon Shops of Isher and giant tanks from Keith Laumer’s stories to blow up the main character of that evil book. I’m sure teacher found me very frustrating.
I’m quite encouraged by what Dave is doing here. A strong retort and hearty rebuke to the hateful nihilism that has taken over SFF the last 30 years, crowding out nearly everything else.
But then Dave has always been like that. “Bats, Rats and Vats” is one of my favorites from his dead-tree back catalog.
Go Dave! ~:D
I need to dig up my copy of The Weapon Shops of Isher to reread. The anthology is buried somewhere down in my book boxes.
Oh, wait… That – and the sequel that I was not aware of are on Kindle. Next buying spree…
You can always sing along….
“I sick of people tossing that castaways story as if it disproved Golding’s point…”
It does.
That’s not the only such story, of course. Every time there’s a storm, flood, fire, whatever in Europe, North America, most places, Lord of the Flies gets disproven again and again. Perfect strangers pick up tools and start working together.
It’s just that the boy-castaways is so amusingly on-point. Lord of the Flies is dystopian socialist propaganda, with no connection to reality at all. Like Omelas, but longer.
Humans simply do not work like that. Even chimps don’t. Stick a bunch of strange chips in a cage, they do not kill each other. They figure out who’s the boss chimp, and then they run with it.
If dystopian socialist propaganda is your jam, then by all means carry on. For myself, I frigging hate it with the fire of ten thousand suns.
Never bothered refuting Lord of the Flies but I did write a whole chapter of “The Demon Slayers” destroying Omelas. You probably wouldn’t like it, the townspeople realize they are a-holes and burn the place down themselves.
Cthulhu takes two megatons per second to the forehead in the same book, I’m sure you wouldn’t like that either. Or even get the reference…
Is that published? I want, but cannot find!
I am still writing it.
Write faster, Dave. [runs away giggling]
I definitely will pay to read this… I love these kind of stories. When is it coming out?
when I finish writing it. 🙂
Yes, this sounds quite interesting.
I was lucky that my school didn’t require me to read The Great Gatsby, Lord Of the Flies, or Catcher In the Rye. We also didn’t have a summer reading list. We did have to read Moby Dick though, which was its own punishment. Half the book I liked, the other half bored me out of my gourd. Personally, if they wanted to push a sailing story on us Kipling’s Captains Courageous would have been a much better choice.
I do have a theory as to why TGG, CINTR, and LOTF get picked is to try to train kids into reading for a deeper understanding that they will use later in college texts. Unfortunately it pushes even more students away from reading at all except for school work because they see it as a punishment.
I just realized– those two books, and Bridge to Terabithia, are alike in one way:
The entire point of all three rest on taking a dream and smashing it.
“Oh, you want to be rich to get the girl?”
“Oh, you want to have an adventure with no adults?”
“Oh, you want to have a friend who also loves wonder?”
Now that you mention it, The Pigman too. “Oh, you want friends and a home life?”
I think we just rediscovered the type of “realism” that resulted in the book “No More Dead Dogs.”
Bridge does end with his introducing his sister to Terabithia.
Great, so his sister is going to die, too.
He gets to die alone, after having killed off everyone he cares about by introducing them to the weird, shameful thing of actually wonder and imagination.
On what grounds do you base this assertion?
Having been a kid who wanted nothing more than to have someone I could share this thing-which-makes-you-a-target.
The arc of the story is take a risk, be happy, and be slapped down lower than where you started.
Same as a horror movie.
Blast it, Mary, now I’ve spent half the day driving around with a good, literary argument for the introducing-his-sister part being a suicide attempt.
Because those who spread wonder *will die*.
But the whole point of building the bridge was to make it safe to go to Terebithia.
The friend thought it was safe enough to cross, as well.
And it killed her.
….yeah, at least the old Greek and Roman stuff has some dignity and heft to their “in the end everything is dust” setup.
The friend crossed by swinging across on a rope during a rainstorm /flash flood.
He built the bridge after she died and before introducing it to his sister.
The fight about it being too dangerous was during the flash flood, the rope breaking and her dying from hitting her head was when he was elsewhere on a trip.
He built the bridge before making his sister the new queen, which is where the angle for her being the next to die comes in– can probably scrape up enough “proof” for either way– but the sister already knew about it, from following them and then from trying to come when he left the wreath.
Way more solid than the “starfish in the dead kid’s boot means he’s still alive” from *The Ledge* By Lawrence Sargent Hall. (Yes, I had to go look up the name so I copy-pasted.)
Guys, we are all forgetting the gentleman who originated this subgenre of robinsonade, and predicted something closer to the Tongan castaways than to Lord of the Flies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years%27_Vacation
Two Years’ Vacation – Kindle edition by Verne, Jules, Benett, Léon. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
And I have not read it. I’ll have to remedy that.
No problem! Didn’t mean to guilt-trip anyone, but I have a soft spot for the book and it seemed a shame not to mention it.
A very nearsighted friend of mine cheated starting a campfire with his glasses. But for the Lord of the Flies as a book…I borrowed my brother’s copy and didn’t get even halfway through it. As someone upthread pointed out 2020 proves its premise but I’m still about positivity in my books. We need to strive for better. I’ll never forget 2020 but any of my reading material on it will stay non fiction.
When is it coming out, David? How will it be marketed?
<drool>
When I have finished writing it! The marketing will have to depend on decisions reached then.
Verne’s story wasn’t in my “Complete Verne” (admittedly a challenge for the prolific scoundrel), but I turned it up as a Kindle Unlimited: https://www.amazon.com/Two-Years-Vacation-New-Translation-ebook/dp/B0D2Y45NGT/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1
I’m confused. I went to read the next paragraph and there wasn’t one. I want a next paragraph!
It’ll come…
I’d read the hell out of this, give it to my godson, and recommend this to my husband, my students, and their dads.