As we all sit at home waiting for disease and/or economic collapse to find us, many people have been watching Contagion, or zombie films, or any number of other shows or movies about pandemics. For me, though, one of the pieces of media that has felt most relevant is Ann Halam’s too little-known 2002 YA adventure novel Dr. Franklin’s Island. Halam, aka Gwyneth Jones, is best known for work like the White Queen series—ambitiously opaque feminist cyberpunk novels which push the boundaries of epistemology and gender. Dr. Franklin’s Island, though, is beautifully, and often painfully, limpid. It’s a quiet story about how isolation can lead to horror, trauma, and sometimes to something better.

The novel’s narrator is Semirah or Semi, a shy nerdy Jamaican-British girl traveling to Ecuador on a summer program for young conservationists. En route, though, their plane crashes, and Semi is washed up on an island with cool girl Miranda and irritating whiner Arnie. The three of them manage to survive on coconuts and fish for weeks, before Arnie disappears. Not long thereafter, Semi and Miranda are kidnapped by Dr. Franklin, who wants to use them in transgenic experiments. He turns Semi into a fish creature and Miranda into a bird creature. With limited communication, and completely alienated from their former lives, they struggle to retain their humanity and try to find some means of escape.

As most readers will have figured out from the brief plot description, Dr. Franklin’s Island is what Halam calls “an argument” with H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. Halam in an afterword says she liked Wells’ story very much, but “I didn’t like [his] ideas about animal nature vs. human nature.”

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