Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes, novel by French writer Pierre Boulle, first published in French in 1963 and published in the U.S. in English translation the same year. The novel inspired the 1968 film of the same name, which itself led to four sequels and two television series.

Boulle’s satirical novel opens with a space-faring couple finding a canister floating in space. The canister contains a manuscript giving an account of the journey of three Frenchmen to a planet in orbit around Betelgeuse. The manuscript is written by one of the men, Ulysse, a journalist who accompanied Professor Antelle and the physician Arthur Levain on the voyage. They name the Earth-like planet Soror and are surprised to discover a group of apparent humans. The humans behave like wild animals, with no signs of culture or civilization. Suddenly the pack of humans is attacked by a group of armed gorillas who are dressed as hunters. Arthur Levain is killed, and Antelle and Ulysse are captured. Antelle is caged in a zoo, where he becomes feral, but Ulysse is placed in a biological laboratory, where he is required to mate with Nova, a female human from the pack.

Ulysse persuades the lab’s scientist, a chimpanzee named Zira, that he is intelligent, and he learns the simian language. He is permitted to speak before a scientific congress and is then granted his freedom. He works with Zira’s fiancé, Cornelius, who discovers that the primates learned their culture some 10,000 years earlier from humans, who had trained apes to serve them and gradually allowed the apes to supplant them. When Nova gives birth to a boy who is able to cry, the apes fear trouble from a possible race of intelligent humans and plan to eliminate Ulysse, Nova, and the baby. Zira and Cornelius help the family to get to a spaceship so that they can return to Earth.

As they travel, the baby becomes a toddler and learns to speak French; he teaches Nova to speak as well. When the family arrives on Earth, where, because of time dilation, 700 years have passed, they are met by gorillas in military uniform. They quickly return to the spaceship and back to space. Ulysse writes the story and releases it to space. The space-faring couple who read the manuscript conclude that it must be fiction; they are chimpanzees.

Drawing on his own experience as a prisoner of war, Boulle explores the nature of the relationship between prisoner and jailer, and Ulysse comes to identify more with his captors than he does with the humans. Even when he addresses a meeting of an important scientific institution in fluent ape, he is assumed by most to be a trained animal. The story is disturbing, questioning our assumptions about our position relative to animals, and it ends with several ironic twists that serve to underline this message.