Lonely Island Adventures

One of the weirder 20th-century pulps was called Lonely Island Adventures. It published Robinson Crusoe-style stories about people cast off on isolated islands, forced to survive with their wits. The magazine ran from 1925 to 1949—it gave rise to a small but dedicated community of fans, and the journal even minted a bona fide literary star, Mary Sterling.

One might wonder: how is it possible to tell so many stories about this one thing? It's a problem with the Western too—how is it possible to tell so many stories about a lone gunslinger saving a woman in peril. At the end of the day, what is there that's new to say?

With the Lonely Island Adventures, there was some variation in terms of the location of the island—sometimes they're in the Arctic, sometimes they're in the Mediterranean, sometimes they're in the Hebrides, and oftentimes the cast-offs are from various times and places. Alexander Greenspar wrote a dozen stories about a decadent Roman nobleman exiled to an isolated Black Sea island and forced to fend for himself—the success of these stories led other writers to write stories about ancient Persian, Chinese and Viking castaways.

But more often the drama came from interpersonal conflict and sexual intrigue. These writers learned how to place various groups of people on the island together in a way that would generate conflict. And these various scenarios themselves turned into tropes, and writers learned how to innovate within these tropes.

There is an anthology, The Best of Lonely Island Adventures, which does a great job of picking stories that demonstrated various tropes. For instance, Alfred Rossler’s "The Wizard of Al-Kaban" was an example of The Tempest trope: a vaguely Asiatic wizard rules an island, but he has a pretty daughter, Asdrama. In this case, there is a tribe of people who worship the wizard, and their chieftain, Xuchar, falls in love with the daughter. Asdrama reciprocates that love, but the two of them are terrified to confront this wizard. In the end, Xuchar faces down the wizard in his lair, and he kills the man, taking Asdrama home. But the story ends on a note of pathos:

On fair evenings, Asdrama would forever after turn her gaze to the crumbling towers of her youth. And, on days when the cares of hearth and home were not too pressing, she would navigate those

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