Islomania? Insularity? the Myth of the Island in British Science Fiction (Critical Essay‪)‬

Utopia (1516) by Thomas More, The Tempest (c.1611) by William Shakespeare, New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon, Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) by H. G. Wells, Deluge by S. Fowler Wright (1928), The Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding, Concrete Island (1974) by J. G. Ballard, A Dream of Wessex (1977) by Christopher Priest, Web (1974) by John Wyndham, The Wasp Factory (1984) by Iain Banks, The Scar (2002) by China Mieville ... That is a brief list of some notable works in the history of British science fiction. (It is not the purpose of this paper to argue that all these titles necessarily are science fiction, but if pushed I would be happy to do so.) I could double the list, triple it; I could take just one author from that list, Christopher Priest, and produce another list: Indoctrinaire (1970), Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972), Inverted World (1974), The Dream Archipelago (1979/1999), The Affirmation (1981)--and still everything I named would share one obvious characteristic: they are all island stories! "The island is a state of mind," J. G. Ballard said in an interview once (Burns and Sugnet 29). He was talking specifically about Concrete Island, but the remark has far wider implications. I want to look at those implications, and at why that state of mind seems so distinctively British.