Planet of the Apes (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Pierre Boulle
- First Published: 1963
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy
- Time of Work: After 2500
- Setting: Soror, a planet in orbit around Betelgeuse
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction
- Subjects: Future, Other worlds, Space flight or travel, Time travel, Allegory, Science fiction, Planets, Space and time, Animals, Apes, Evolution, Stars
- Locales: Space, Fictional planets
The Plot
Xan Fielding’s translation of La Planète des singes was known in some quarters by another title, Monkey Planet (1964), a phrase lacking the dignity Pierre Boulle had conferred on his simian civilization. The dignity of a simian society that, whatever its many ineradicable imperfections, has eliminated war and the serious consequences of racial and class conflicts is somehow associated less with the prank-suggestive adjective “monkey” than with the more substantial noun “apes.” It is dignity, or the quality of worth, with which the story is...
[The entire page is 912 words long]
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