There’s a surreal feeling when you finally come across a piece of media that’s the canonical source for most of the tropes in a genre.
Treasure Island (1883) was written about 150 years after Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and I’m probably not ashamed enough of the fact that I thought that they were both by the same author, written maybe a few years apart. What a powerful incarnation of pure pastiche. Not only all the fiction surrounding historical events, but the entire history of the genre getting pressed flat, laminated into a two-dimensional representation of a real time where actual people experienced their lives. Kinda crazy.
