Erik James Robinson. Robinson Crusoe 2244. MN: E. J. Robinson, 2014. E-book.

I had to bite. I was just putting together a project for a class’s Robinson Crusoe unit and had listed a number of things inspired by Crusoe (Julie, Swiss Family Robinson, Gilligan, among others) when I opened an email that mentioned this title. Why not? I had enjoyed reading the first sequel to the original Robinson Crusoe. Defoe wrote two. It looks like E. J. Robinson has turned his tale into a trilogy as well. This is the first of the three.

Robison Crusoe 2244 is Crusoe-ish. It is more like Jack Bauer in the zombie apocalypse. Only instead of zombies, there are bloodthirsty nocturnal creatures called renders. These renders are various animals, some with human DNA, that were infected by some kind of virus that mutated after a nuclear holocaust—or maybe they were first mutated by evil scientists, it is not entirely clear.

The humans who have survived the nuclear decimation live in selected cities walled off from the countryside full of these renders. On the island of Great Britain there are eight such locations, or regens, including London and Glasgow. People are afraid to go outside the walls. Being sent outside the walls is a death sentence.

Without giving away too much of the plot, our future Robinson Crusoe (yes, that is his name) is the seventeen-year-old son of a nobe—a noble. The New London government comes up with trumped-up charges against the Crusoe family and some of their friends in a political power play. To escape, Robinson steals a twenty-third century flying machine and flies to North America.

North America apparently has no regens and is supposed to be completely off limits for human beings. Every night he battles renders, but he teams up with some tribal human survivors who call themselves the Aserra. He becomes friendly with a girl about his age with a name longer than Dances with Wolves’ Sioux name, so Robinson calls her Friday.

They are surviving in what remains of Washington D.C. Crusoe sets up his little fort behind the Lincoln Memorial. Another somewhat friendly tribal man camps in a sheltered room in the former Library of Congress, where Crusoe reads up on recent history to give readers some background. Periodically, a pirate ships sails up the river to hunt and to torture prisoners. Neverland anyone?

Some of the survival elements reminded this reader of the Indian John in Brave New World. However, John is from the tribal areas while Crusoe is a New English noble who has to learn to survive. Like John and other Native Americans in story and film, he learns to stoically endure pain. And he endures a lot of it—it seems like he gets attacked at least once each night just like Jack Bauer got attacked in each of his 24 “real-time” hours.

There are a few other minor echoes of the original Robinson Crusoe besides the survival in wild America by a young Englishman. The pirates are not cannibals, but they show up periodically just as the cannibals from the mainland come to Crusoe’s island on occasion. At one point there are a group of clay pots on the riverbank. It was Virginia Woolf who called Crusoe’s clay pots on the sand the “foreground image” of the original, but they mostly seem incidental here.

Unlike the original, Robinson Crusoe 2244 does not have any spiritual lessons or allegories. It is a science fiction survival story set in a future dystopia. Readers who get a kick out of such apocalyptic stories might enjoy this. It does not have the depth of Divergent or the social satire of The Hunger Games, but readers might find the renders an interesting variation of the zombies or mutants that often populate such post-disaster tales.

Erik James Robinson’s web page tells us that the author cut his teeth as a film and television screen writer. It does not take too much imagination to see this series as a film or television show as well.