Review by Duncan Lunan
Gary Gibson, “Echogenesis”, 252 pp., hbk, £24.99, pbk £11.99, Brain in a Jar Books, 2021.
(First published in different form inParSec #2, December 2021.)
What was the surname of the Swiss family Robinson?
It’s not a trick question. Such was the popularity of Robinson Crusoe, particularly in Europe, that any adventure story involving castaways became known as a ‘Robinson’ or a ‘Robinsonade’. Grammatically, Johann David Wyss’s 1812 novel is ‘The Robinson of the Swiss Family’ (Fig. 1). R.M. Ballantine’s The Coral Island (1857, Fig. 2) is one, and so are William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954, Fig. 3) and Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (1955, Fig. 4).
All their characters have to make the best use they can of available resources, and have to deal with opposition from outside or within their own ranks. Echogenesis (Fig. 5) is in the same vein, though the complications of interstellar travel and suspended animation make it more difficult than usual to work out who’s who.
Detailed comparison between those predecessors is fascinating, and I had to do it once when commissioned to write a correspondence course on Lord of the Flies. There’s one discovery which I can’t resist mentioning, though. The novel takes place within the context of nuclear war in Europe, and the castaways are evacuated children making for Australia before they’re shot down. In a pivotal scene of the novel, there’s an aerial battle over the island, telling us that it’s within fighter range of both Australia and Indonesia, almost certainly in the Torres Strait north of Cape York, the most northerly point of the Australian landmass. Golding’s detailed description of it is virtually identical to the island of Tuin in the Torres Strait, where Lucy Irvine and her partner ‘G’ set themselves the task of surviving unaided for a year in Castaway (Gollancz, 1984, Fig. 6), and the details in that are very illuminating (not least, the significance of the pigs, which feature so prominently in Lord of the Flies).
When we ‘did’ Lord of the Flies at school, our teachers were very keen to stress the realistic portrayal, by contrast with The Coral Island – “This what would really happen, this is how you would behave”.
We weren’t fooled, partly because I’d received The Coral Island as a prize in primary school (Fig. 7) and knew it virtually by heart.
Fig. 7. DL prizegiving 1954, The Coral Island
There are only three boys in it, the youngest is years older than the oldest in Lord of the Flies, the oldest has had the equivalent of a survival course, and the collapse of order in Golding’s book is largely due to the conditioning the boys have received at their public schools, coupled with the trauma of the war and their evacuation. The cruiser lieutenant at the end, so disappointed by the behaviour of British schoolboys in isolation, is himself a last participant in that conflict, as in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957, Fig. 8). The naval phrase generally refers to a captain who is onshore between commands, which is not the case with Shute’s Kerans – was Shute, publishing so soon after Golding, influenced by him in his choice of title? It’s striking that Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky was also published so soon after Lord of the Flies and could be seen as a riposte to it – Heinlein’s teenage characters are also much older than Golding’s, and the bullies who try to take them over don’t prevail.
In the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (first edition, Granada, 1979, Fig. 9) John Clute and Peter Nicholls say “Only the enabling frame of [Lord of the Flies] (a world war) is SF.” There’s a bit more to it than that: William Golding joined the Navy in 1940 and served in cruisers, destroyers, mine-sweepers and what the Penguin Classics edition casually calls ‘a rocket ship’ (firing, not propelled by), so he was aware of the rapid development, especially in weapons, during the Second World War and early Cold War. The escape capsule in which the boys crash-land from their airliner is straight out of early 50s centre-spreads in the Eagle (see ‘Updates on Spaceflight’, ON January 14th, 2024). They’ve been crammed into it without adult supervision, and it washes out to sea, taking with it any first-aid kits, tools, life-rafts, radios and other survival equipment it may have carried – the opposite of Crusoe’s situation where he has all the resources of his ship to draw on, although the officers and crew are gone.
Gary Gibson’s characters are plunged in medias res into a similar situation, waking up in survival pods amid the wreckage of a burning space shuttle, on a planet of another star, with no idea of where they are or how they got there. The loss of their equipment parallels the problems of Ballantine’s and Golding’s characters, and their loss of memory leaves them without an authority structure, like the absence of adults in Lord of the Flies. The people who should be in charge don’t know it, and the group has been infiltrated by survivalists who have brought the issues of conflict back on Earth with them, even if they don’t remember doing it.
Not remembering their training, they don’t even have the vague ‘Beware of stobor’ warning of Tunnel in the Sky, which took the place of specific briefing on environmental dangers. Left unprepared, the characters of Echogenesis begin to fall victim, first to spider-like killers from the trees, then to the semi-sentient ‘howlers’ who gather in ever-larger numbers, like the undead of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. When the late Ed Buckley illustrated my first book Man and the Stars, he proposed that the first wave of an interstellar colony should settle on an offshore island about the size of Britain, to be able to handle any dangerous life-forms that they found (Fig. 10). It wasn’t until after publication that we realised we had duplicated the reasoning of H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds, where the Martians do exactly that in order to get the upper hand over us. The settlers of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes’s Legacy of Heorot (Simon & Schuster, 1987, Fig. 11) do try that approach, but fail to understand the life-cycle of the predators which the late Jack Cohen had devised for the authors; and retreat to an island is the last resort of the survivors in The Day of the Triffids. Gary Gibson’s characters don’t think of it until very late in the book, when the slaughter of howlers by earlier landers has turned an entire continent of the creatures against humans. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate, the internal enemies come increasingly to the fore; and to say more would give too much away.
Spoiler warning: I did say ‘landers’, plural. We may know the surnames of the characters, unlike those of The Swiss Family Robinson, but things in this novel are really not as they seem.