The Lone Sentinel, like Glom, Gloom, began as a story to entertain Dereske's children. Both fantasy tales were directly inspired by features of the surrounding landscape: Glom, Gloom by a small Scottish forest near the little stone cottage where the family was living, and The Lone Sentinel by the tall steel towers Dereske and her children observed while driving through the Great Plains.

Dereske's debt to Robinson Crusoe is tacitly acknowledged when Erik names his dog Thursday, and the destruction of Maag seems related to that of the witch in The Wizard of Oz. Generally, The Lone Sentinel seems to observe the conventions of the speculative fiction (science fiction) genre and, like many other works of this type, to have been indirectly influenced by twentieth-century anti-utopian writers such as Orwell and Huxley.