It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as 1954: a small group of youths are cast away on an isolated island. With no adult supervision, they soon descend into violent chaos. By the time adults arrive to restore order, several of the young people have been murdered. Others are left permanently traumatized. This is, of course, William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. It’s one of the classics often forced on defenseless schoolkids, as it reinforces an important lesson: humans are beasts who require a boot firmly placed on their necks if they are to retain a patina of civility. Kids may not appreciate hearing this, but people who own and wield boots certainly want it heard.
Anyone who, as I do, deals with kids on a regular basis knows that kids will, if left to their own devices, flout convention with no regard for the feelings and expectations of their elders. Even as a keen-eyed guardian waits for a chance to correct egregious misbehavior, those confounded kids will pick up discarded trash, fix defective signage, assist in the sweeping-up of snowdrifts of theatrical confetti, even spontaneously practice four-part harmony while waiting for public transit. I can only speculate as to what dark motives cause this inconsiderate behaviour.
It turns out that even castaway kids will flout convention, as this Guardian article reveals. With no regard for the feelings of authority figures, six Tongan boys spent over a year marooned on a deserted island without even one brutal murder. Instead they cooperated and survived; they even cared for one of the boys who broke his leg. Their experience suggests that actual castaways might act like the cast of Gilligan’s Island, and not like sociopaths. Dire news for boot-wielders everywhere.
Even a few science fiction authors have dared to write stories in which castaways do not immediately devolve into feral beasts. Here are some examples…
Dear Devil (1950), by Eric Frank Russell. The Martian poet who figures in this novelette is left alone on a radiation-soaked world by his own choice. There are no fellow Martians with whom to contend. But he is sharing the planet with another species: human savages on a post-thermonuclear-war Earth. Now, in most tales of this ilk the natives exist only to endanger the protagonist and allow him (it’s generally a him) to demonstrate the efficacy of his weapons. In Russell’s convention-flouting tale, the poet uses the meagre resources left to him by his former crewmates to help the humans. Rather than being ungrateful, they repay him with love and companionship.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955) by Robert A. Heinlein starts off promisingly. Soon after arriving on an alien world to test his survival skills, student Rod Walker stumbles across the slain body of another student, the victim of someone who clearly understood how stories like this are supposed to work. But no sooner do the students realize that something has gone wrong and they are marooned on an alien world for an undetermined time—perhaps the rest of their lives—than the original premise is tossed out the window in favour of cooperation, community-building, and even elections.
Beauty Queens (2011), a novel by Libba Bray, begins with the plane-crash deaths of thirty-seven of the fifty contestants flying to the Miss Dream Teen beauty contest. The survivors find themselves on a seemingly desolate island. One might expect that the thirteen survivors, competitors all, would be inclined to see each other as impediments or even as paleo-diet foodstuffs. Well, no. Despite some interpersonal friction, they cooperate, using their surprisingly diverse skill set and the wreckage of the plane to survive en masse.
SPOILER: the island only seems to be desolate.
What the Wind Brings (2019) by Matthew Hughes. When a storm drives a Spanish ship onto a desolate shore in what is now northern Ecuador, Alonso Illescas finds himself cast away—along with the slaves he was escorting. The Africans’ leader, Anton, would like nothing better than to see Alsonso’s head on a stick. At the same time, Anton is a man who tries to take the long view. The Rio Esmeraldas is filled with natives who have a justified suspicion of all newcomers. They’ve fought them off so far…but one day the Spanish will return to subjugate the natives and re-enslave the Africans. Survival for both groups will require cooperation. Also, as it turns out, help from Alonso.
***
The idea that people are not complete monsters is indeed a shocking one, but a conceit that inspires diverting stories. No doubt I’ve overlooked other examples. Feel free to mention them in the comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is currently a finalist for the 2020 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Re:Note two. No they never find out who killed the kid and his dog and I agree with you, nature red of tooth and claw repaid him.
Primitive man didn’t survive by lone badassery, he and she survived by cooperation. The Family, the Band, The Tribe.
Margaret Mead, I think, commented on how in the relics of human communities one finds the remains of people who broke major bones that then healed, an indication that they were cared for by those around them despite being momentarily useless.
Would like to note that the Tongan kids referenced in the article come from a culture that values the family and practices the 4 core values of respect, cooperation, humility and loyalty. I’d be more surprised if the 6 Tongan boys turned into ravening beasts than if they stayed pretty normal as they did.
Contrast that with the boys in Lord of the Flies. They come from the British culture as the empire is in decline. Class divisions as well implicit brain v. brawn divisions were clear. Not surprised in the least that kids from disparate backgrounds would turn.
Also, the boys in Lord of the Flies were fictional, which is a very useful attribute to have when the author wants to promote a point of view.
Wait, writers are allowed to make stuff up without running experimental trials with living human subjects? I need to go cancel my cozy country estate murder mystery test run.
@5 But I was looking forward to that – should I stay home now?
No one ever talks about “Baby Island”.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7932.Baby_Island
I guess the human ability to co-operate with one another is a trait that can just as easily be turned to good or ill – it isn’t rogue individualism that’s the problem in Lord of the Flies, but tribalism, specifically two rival factions. By extension, what makes the kids in the book so scarey is that they’re just kids, but kids behaving as adults would – didn’t the mutineers who settled on Pitcairn island all end up killing one another?
I thought of Pitcairn island too. The mutineers ended up killing each other and being killed by the Polynesian men they tried to exploit. As I recall one lone mutineer was left as patriarch of the women and children.
Even with divisions of race or class there’s still a deliberate decision made to cooperate or not. The mutineers tried to dominate by force and it undid them. Group cohesion was obviously poor even among the Englishmen and they competed violently rather than cooperating, which perhaps was to be expected from men who’d violently rejected hierarchy and authority.
Bligh BTW had horrible people skills but when the situation was desperate, as on a small boat on the open Pacific, he was the man you wanted! He managed to get every man with him to shore alive. Of course several died after arrival.
@7: On your link there are lots of people talking about Baby Island. But what about “Peter Pan”… populated with lots and lots of – originally – lost babies. They will lean out from the perambulator… One girl to take care of all of them, and Tinkerbell is a little… fairy. I decided not to use the other word.
@3: There are earlier, positive Robinsonades, with “The Coral Island” being one with marooned boys only and a specific influence on “Lord of the Flies”. “Dated and imperialistic” it says in Wikipedia.
Is it certain that the community of marooned Tongan boys started with 6 or were there perhaps more of them at the start? These things have to be checked. In television shows on the topic, usually someone is voted off each week.
9. Yeah – it was quite a feat of navigation! He also acted as consultant when Dublin’s harbour wall was being built some eleven years later.
James: I wonder how much of an effect the 1977 NYC Blackout had an effect on people’s expectations when the 2003 blackout started?
@2: It was Margaret Mead. Specifically, it was Dr. Mead identifying a very early sign of civilization and contrasting it to mere technology.
@3: I was thinking that also. Which isn’t to say that kids wouldn’t band together under dire circumstances, just that Tongans started several steps ahead.
@10: the Guardian reported that there were 6 children and they all survived. Most impressive was how they cared for the one with the broken leg, both physically and emotionally.
Tom Godwin’s Space Prison (aka The Survivors) has a shipload of castaways – colonists-cum-prisoners-of-war dumped on a hostile, frozen hellplanet after their captors separate out and take the ones they think they can use. They make a point of not only surviving but preserving everything they know with the intention that their descendants are going to be able to take over any enemy ships that come back later.
Ryk Spoor’s Castaways books are big on the cooperation and interspecies teamwork, but they’re more along the lines of Swiss Family Robinson IN SPACE than Lord of the Flies.
Does Barry B. Longyear’s Enemy Mine count?
I am embarrassed to admit I have not reread the Longyear since the 1980 Berkley Mass Market of Manifest Destiny. So, what, 20 years?
Interesting article!
I’d suggest Jules Vernes’ Mysterious Island (Project Gutenberg free ebook link). It IS SF,
if only for the long long long civil war era balloon flight.
There may be other SF elements later, but I wouldn’t want to post spoilers for a 150-year-old book :)
Another true story features the survivors of the Batavia which crashed onto the Abrolhos islands off the coast of Western Australia in the 17th Century, which features murder, marooning, long sea voyages in tiny boats, water and food shortages, and the establishment of a dictatorship.
@7,
Someone else who read Baby Island?
Terry Pratchett’s Nation has an Edwardian-ish young woman landing on a tropical island with one survivor of a hurricane.
It should be noted that Alonso, Anton, et alia, really existed.and really prevailed.
I was in lower Manhattan on my way to CBGBs when the 1977 blackout hit. CBGBs is close to the NYC clubhouse of the Hell’s Angels, who promptly deployed themselves and started directing traffic.
@12, I think more New Yorkers had 9/11 at the back of their minds – my friends & coworkers in Lower Manhattan definitely did. Once we heard it was “simply” a power outage & not another attack, the relief gave way to a light sort of carnival atmosphere. Bodegas were giving ice cream to kids, strangers were hanging out on stoops, chatting on line for pizza, sharing cabs to other boroughs; it was lovely.
On this subject I highly recommend A Paradise Built in Hell — not SF (gasp!) but a piece of popular non-fic from 2010-ish. Rebecca Solnit recounts the 2003 Blackout, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, New Orleans during Katrina, the ’91 SF blackout and historical catastrophes like SF’s Great Earthquake of 1906. I read it in late February & it’s helped me contextualize a lot of recent behavior, both by those in power & those in danger.
@@@@@ 17, Mike G.
Interesting article!
I’d suggest Jules Vernes’ Mysterious Island (Project Gutenberg free ebook link). It IS SF,
if only for the long long long civil war era balloon flight.
There may be other SF elements later, but I wouldn’t want to post spoilers for a 150-year-old book :)
You mean things like deciding to invent bricks, and, within a week they have finished 6,000 of them? There’s a science fiction premise for you.
I’ve carried bricks by the hod-full. (This was before fork lifts roamed construction sites.) I would have been hard put to move 6,000 bricks in a week. Bearing in mind that you have to handle each brick twice. From pile to hod, from hod to bricklayer’s table.
Making 6,000 bricks in a week is out of the question. Just the drying time in the forms would kill your proposed schedule.
I loved the book when I was eight.
As a teenager whom—“to rise in the world he had carried a hod,”—I knew better.
All those steps to recreate civilization on a desert island are wildly optimistic.
Fernhunter @24: There were five protagonists in The Mysterious Island (not counting the dog), which would cut the working time down a lot. But I agree that the book was wildly optmiistic.
ragnarredbeard @@@@@ 3
Do keep in mind that Lord of the Flies was fiction, not some account of what actual British boys did. So it’s not necessarily clear that the lesson is “of course boys from a pure, wholesome [noble savage] culture would behave better than boys from some decadent, decaying ‘civilized’ culture.”
(One could have all sorts of fun by randomly picking aspects of the story and making them important. E.g., all the Tongan boys were students at a Catholic boarding school — obviously it’s Catholic education that counts! Etc.)
I think Lord of the Flies can be compared to the Tongan Castaways only in this: one of Golding’s themes is that children express their parents’ culture without any of the filters or self-deception adults engage in. He characterizes British upper-class culture as shaped to the demands of imperialism, always looking for an Other to both fear and brutalize, an overlord to obey and envy, and a war to fight; his child-characters express that mindset, but without any overarching authority to apply the brakes. The Tongan Castaways grew up watching their parents shape their own behavior to the demands of island life, and expressed that instead. Cooperation, consensus, and communality aren’t noble savage virtues: they’re what you have to do if you want to make a go of life on an island you can walk across before lunch.
A good fictional comparison might be the backstory of Always Coming Home by Le Guin. (Note that Le Guin shows but does not tell the history of the Kesh–I made some inferences.) The ancestors of the Kesh witnessed TEOTWAWKI, and almost certainly knew about Lord of the Flies even if they hadn’t read it. They concluded that their civilization had contained the seeds of its own destruction, and they mindfully designed their own culture to exclude the potential for all of that happening again.
Thanks to Jenny Islander for the keen insights. Also a big heart for mentioning Ursula.
in The Passage by Justin Cronin a group of children are brought to a place of high walls and bright lights surrounded by a sea of vampires, so a metaphorical island. The children use what they remember to establish a government, school, vocations, standards for trade and family life,
Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom’s Landing would be another example of cooperation for survival.
Jenny Islander @@@@@ 27:
Yes, I remember that when we read Lord of the Flies in school, much was made about the final line, where the rescuing (adult) naval officer “… turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.” The cruiser representing the adult world of warfare, of course…
I suppose the question comes down to this: is Lord of the Flies wrong about how isolated children (or maybe just boys) would behave as a general rule for humanity (as I think James was suggesting), or was it probably right — or at least plausible — if we’re talking about boys from a “bad” society like Britain and only wrong if we’re talking about boys from a “good” society like Tonga?
Ironically, Tonga is a monarchy with a stratified, hierarchical society and a long history of quasi-imperialism and hegemony over its neighbors (including at times Samoa). The “serfdom” of the lower classes was only formally abolished with the 1875 constitution, and it was only in 2010 that the legislature had a majority of elected members (previously, it was about half elected commoners, half aristocrats). It’s my understanding that even today much of the economy remains in the hands of the royal family and the aristocracy; the World Bank estimates a Gini coefficient of 37.6 for Tonga, slightly above the UK’s 34.8 — so they’re about equal in terms of how much of each society’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few people.
So Tongan society, in some respects, is not necessarily that dramatically different from British society.
In Supernova Era by Cixin Liu, spoiler:
All the adults know they are going to die over a few months, try to prepare the children, and the children left behind go through a rotten phase before getting their act together.
@31: I won’t say good and bad in this example, although I certainly have an opinion. But I think Golding isolates his characters to show that imperialist culture shorn of the ability to cast its cultivated aggression outward–to foreigners or to designated Others at home who are segregated from the “good” people–will devour itself. For a RL example, see the English colony (I forget the name) where people sat around doing nothing because they were not of the farming class TYVM, and then were surprised when they didn’t have any food. But Tongan culture is designed to function in relatively small groups in definitely small areas, otherwise it wouldn’t be there.
Jenny, you are probably thinking of Jamestown.
Maybe more to do with numbers than cultural values? It just takes one rotten apple – our laws exist mostly to contain such people – but the likelihood of one kid out of the six being a sociopath was always going to be pretty remote. A hundred kids? I’m not so sure things would have turned out so well. And that’s ignoring how a larger group would have behaved very differently, anyway (ie – comparing the six kids with the Lord of the Flies was flawed from the start)
I adore BEAUTY QUEENS from Libba Bray. Especially recommend the audio book read by herself! It’s massively underrated – and soooo funny!!!
Here’s a true, fascinating story about when a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, and it turned out completely differently than Lord of the Flies. Spoiler: They all cooperated and helped each other as much as possible.
There is obviously still an argument to be made that humans are at their core craven, selfish creatures, but as it turns out, Golding’s novel was colored by his own miserable life (and his feelings toward Nazis), and for all these years people have taken his “important lesson” about the selfishness and cruelty of humans at face value. As far as storytelling goes, his book is morbidly fascinating. But as far as reality goes, it’s unlikely at best.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months#maincontent
Dale O @@@@@ 37:
That’s the exact same Guardian article that James linked to in the third paragraph of his OP.
Since the Guardian article first came out, I’ve been looking for the original documentary about the Tongan castaways.
It’s on youtube now: Six Tongan Castaways in Ata Island | OLD DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL 7
There are plenty of post-apocalyptic stories where the survivors (eventually) have to co-operate to survive, but I understand we’re looking for castaways that do this.
In any case, I’d propose that Kay Kenyon’s short story “Castoff World” (which I published in SHINE, back in 2010), embodies this at its absolute minimum–one child making do on a drifting, semi-intelligent island–and as a metaphor: in order to survive on the biggest scale, we need to survive on the smallest scale, as well.
Admittedly, it would be great if we could see something similar–but also completely different–in novel form. Bear with me, reader, I’m working on it.
Another interesting real-life example is the subject of Island of the Lost, in which two ships were wrecked on opposite ends of Auckland Island in 1864 and later. The survivors never met each other and their fates were entirely different.
I think it’s lovely to hear about this group of boys, and in general, when they can humans, even children pull together. But not always. And something that should be remembered, cultural bias aside, these boys were friends before they got in trouble. The 6 of them had planned a grand adventure, to run away, maybe even to New Zealand. It’s a lot easier to pull together when everybody already gets along. In Golding’s book we see groups who already rub each other the wrong way, for a number of reasons, but who are restrained by the confines of their culture from acting out against those they do not like, or if not bound by cultural convention, are able to avoid them. On the island they all must interact, and the tribalism we see at play starts off along lines that had already formed, ones Golding probably observed in the schoolyard in his time as a teacher.
Would the story of the boys from Tonga have had a less pleasant ending if there had been more of them, and some of them weren’t friends, or were even disliked by the others? We’ll never know. But in my experience, when things get tough, the people who don’t get along tend to divide further, while those who do cleave together. This isn’t always true, but sometimes it is.
@42: ones Golding probably observed in the schoolyard in his time as a teacher. This I think is key, just as much as comments about the UK (or at least English) culture as a whole. In The Silver Chair, Lewis blames in-school brutality on ~”progressive” education — but a number of other stories suggest that English school experience was not nearly as chummy as portrayed in boarding-school novels, even if it wasn’t always as bad as If…. ISTM that one of the issues has been that children got sent off too school very young, and were supervised by older children (there being not nearly enough adults, and those disinclined to get involved outside of classes and organized games) who had themselves come up through such a system; it’s easy to imagine the steady decay of ethics and its replacement by ~”Suffer as I suffered!”. This is a generalization — I suspect that castaways would behave differently depending on how bad their school was — but I’ve seen enough references to suggest that it’s a component.
Going back to the theme: the ultimate answer to Golding might be Richard Ashby’s “Commencement Night“, in which a number of infants are left on an island carefully altered to be survivable. It turns out not to be a real exception for reasons, but the assumption of the project from the start is that the growing kids won’t just turn on each other.
Then there’s the James Barrie play, The Admirable Crichton in which the butler takes command of the castaways which include his noble employers, because he’s the only member of the party with any useful skills.
Lord of the Flies isn’t Golding’s attempt to show truth about anything except himself and his own world view. He was a depressed alcoholic who beat his own children, not someone who thought the best of anyone. To quote the research of the man who brought the Tonga story to life (Rutger Bregman):
“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.
Bregman’s original article:
https://weirdnews.info/2020/05/10/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months/