Or it’s a fun science fiction book about chimps, orangutans and gorillas ruling a planet. The novel may also be read as a cautionary illustration of our relationship with our environment and the animals with which we share the Earth. It is a statement against complacency, a warning that history will repeat itself if we are not eternally vigilant. I think Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes is a social fantasy, an allegory for revealing our civilization as blindly mimicking our past, as “aping” the good and bad of what has come before. With his customary wit, irony, and disciplined intellect and style, the author of The Bridge Over the River Kwai tells a swiftly moving story dealing with man's conflicts, and takes the reader into a suspenseful and strangely fascinating orbit. Out of this situation, Pierre Boulle has woven a tale as harrowing, bizarre, and meaningful as any in the brilliant roster of this master storyteller. Only the journalist retains the spiritual strength and creative intelligence to try to save himself, to fight the appalling scourge, to remain a man.
The scientist is put into a zoo, the journalist into a laboratory. To this planet come a journalist and a scientist. On the planet of the apes, man, having reached to apotheosis of his genius, has become inert. In this simian world, civilization is turned upside down: apes are men and men are apes apes rule and men run wild apes think, speak, produce, wear clothes, and men are speechless, naked, exhibited at fairs, used for biological research. With these words, Pierre Boulle hurtles the reader onto the Planet of the Apes. "I am confiding this manuscript to space, not with the intention of saving myself, but to help, perhaps, to avert the appalling scourge that is menacing the human race.
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