Robinsonade

Much, perhaps most, Minecraft fiction follows the robinsonade template, emphasizing the day-to-day life of a character, including nonhuman characters, striving to survive and thrive in a recognizably Minecraftian world by utilizing its resources.

The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades, which in no way express merely a reaction against over-sophistication and a return to a misunderstood natural life, as cultural historians imagine.

The reader has so far followed Mr. Lecky, the novella’s single reflector, on a Robinsonade through a deserted department store.

If it touches on isolation, tabulae rasae, or close encounters of a new kind, or if it has a character commenting on society from the outside—it’s a Robinsonade.