This led me in two different directions at the same time. First, what makes a story simplistic vs. complex? Second, is it necessarily bad that a story/story premise is simple?

But the story shouldn't be.

Your story is the extrapolation of the premise. Guy gets trapped on desert island/Guy builds time machine/Guy meets girl/replace all "guy"s with "girl"s/replace all guys with girls/etc.

I don't really know what your critiquer meant for sure, but such a comment could mean that there were many obvious questions raised by the premise that you didn't answer in your story. For instance, you have a girl get trapped on a deserted island and have a kid, and then say nothing about how she managed to find food, fresh water, and a father for the child.

Or you explain the food, water, and father, but don't account for the fact that she's going to have to go through labor without any medical backup. Huh, you know something? When I chose the "having a kid" premise, I wasn't even thinking about you personally. Weird, huh? I was just thinking "what would make being trapped on a deserted island much worse for a woman than for a man?"

Complex: Requiring multiple plots to come together to complete the main plot.

As to when simplistic is bad? Well a story seems too simplistic if it goes on for more pages than it should to tell the story. A story can be simplistic but it can't be very long and still seem worth it. Face it, no one likes to read empty pages full of words. (Robert Jordan does appear to like to write those though).

So I must assume that the story itself was too simple, or that this person has some weird ideas about what should be involved in a premise.

As to multiple plots all coming together...that is complex but I'm wondering if it's complex in the way I was thinking. There are many ways to get MORE: more words, more plotslines, more characters, more layers...even a single plotline can be complex, I think, if managed right.

P.S. Survivor, you hit on one of my daydreams for the past few months...not getting strended on a desert island, exactly...usually it involves going back in time to a time when all these things they say may go wrong and are no big deal were a big deal and would mean I'd die instead of getting a C-section. Yeah, yeah, but my mind works this way. That's why scifi and fantasy are my outlets.

"Simple" for me could mean using 5 cent words, basic sentence structures or linear plotting. Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day", which I just read recently, is an example of a simple story. The sun's coming out on Venus for the first time. The children want to see it. They lock the most unpopular girl in the class in a closet and deprive her of the sun, which she has really missed since leaving Earth for Venus. There's no sub-plots and no particular complexity. The story goes from A to B. But it is not simplistic. It's thought-provoking and I've seen readers on both the SCIFICTION board and in the Critters volcano trying to track this story down because of the impact it made on them when they first read it.

For me, "simplistic" would be, to give an extreme example, where the story uses black and white ideas of morality, and ignores grey areas. A lot of movies are like this, where you have a Virtuous Hero and a Blacker than Black Villain, and no shades in between. (Should we allow poachers wantonly to kill all the wild animals in Africa? Obviously not. Bad Villain!)

A more complex story in that sense might be one where there is merit in both sides of the argument. Supposing both protag and antag want to achieve the same goal, for example, but have wildly different approaches to how it should be achieved. Those approaches will bring them into conflict, but the reader/viewer will have to decide which they think is 'right'. It's not clear-cut. (Should we allow poachers to take wild animals in Africa to the edge of extinction IF that is the only way they can live long enough for a new supercrop to be developed?)

I guess the idea behind summing up a story in one sentence is this: Does the sentence want to make you know more, or does it pretty much satisfy your curiosity.

It almost sounds like what happened to me when my seventh grade English teacher told me that I might enjoy "The Hobbit". Being the sophisticated worldly wise brat that I was I read the first page and decided she was patronizing me with a children's story. I finally read it about six years later and read it the 20th time about 30 years later.

I wish I could write simplistic prose like that!

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."