La Planète des singes

La Planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) draws directly on the work of Charles Darwin and on two earlier novels, Lyon Sprague de Camp’s Le Règne du gorille (1941) and Vercors’s Les Animaux dénaturés (1952). Boulle also incorporates Einstein’s theory of special relativity, using time dilation to bring his hero back to Earth in a distant future.

Evolutionary theory is set out explicitly in chapter II of the second part: “We know that they [the species] probably all had a common origin. […] Apes and men are different branches, which evolved, from a certain point, in divergent directions, the former gradually rising to consciousness, the latter stagnating in their animality.” The artificial evolution of the apes and the decline of mankind are revealed in chapter 8 of the third part, through the account of a domestic ape who gradually stops working, learns to speak, and begins to give orders, while his human masters sink into an intellectual torpor.

Boulle imagines a world in which natural evolution strips mankind of its dominance over other living species, in favor of the apes. The idea came to him during a visit to the zoo, watching gorillas: “I was struck by their almost human expressions. That led me to imagine what a man/ape relationship would look like. Some believe I had King Kong in mind when I wrote the book, but that is entirely false.”

In the novel, the hero bears the ordinary, even slightly ridiculous name of Ulysse Mérou, far removed from the American film adaptation, in which the majestic Charlton Heston plays Captain George Taylor. Gone too is the film’s famous twist ending with the devastated Statue of Liberty: the novel closes at Orly, with a view of the Eiffel Tower, and the planet of the apes, though real, is not Earth. None of this appears here, but Boulle’s own ending is just as effective and surprising.

A very fine copy, with its original rhodoid wrapper.