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lieslindi's review
Bookriot Read Harder 2016: Read a book originally published in the decade you were born. I regret that I finished Fire Next Time in 2015.
This amused me. Because it is French and thus couldn't end with the Statue of Liberty, I was all a-flutter to learn its denouement. It is very French, in the way that the book of Mary Poppins is very British, with each nation at the center of the universe -- not just geocentric but francocentric. It reminded me of Jules Verne, of course, inescapably for French speculative fiction, but also -- and Verne would scoff, because reportedly he dismissed Wells -- of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.
Spoilers follow.
This is partly because of the themes of evolution common to both, and partly because of how the transmutation of apes and men parallel that of the Eloi and the Morlochs from the upper and lower classes. It is also because with a Jungian whipturn, an ape plumbs the racial memory of humans by activating the speech center of one who recites the origin story much like the spinning disks in the 1960 "Time Machine" movie.
I was surprised that the origin story in the later Apes movie (the one where Zira and Cornelius space- and time-travel to contemporary Earth, "Escape"), which always struck me as flimsy, was in fact lifted faithfully from the book. (The movie did embellish it with the bonfire of dogs and cats.) But then I am also surprised that Pierre Boulle contributed to the later movies.
I was not surprised that Boulle served in World War II. I knew he contributed to the screenplay of "Bridge over the River Kwai," though I understand the main writers were not credited because they were blacklisted. Several bits of the book reminded me of wartime (and other) atrocities, particularly in death camps in Europe and southeast Asia. And indeed and of course his experience informed his novel.
The big reveal was no reveal because I've seen the movies and because I've read a book or two before in my life. And how I do love a framing device. That was the most charming part of the book because it reminded me of stories in Illustrated Man.
This amused me. Because it is French and thus couldn't end with the Statue of Liberty, I was all a-flutter to learn its denouement. It is very French, in the way that the book of Mary Poppins is very British, with each nation at the center of the universe -- not just geocentric but francocentric. It reminded me of Jules Verne, of course, inescapably for French speculative fiction, but also -- and Verne would scoff, because reportedly he dismissed Wells -- of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine.
Spoilers follow.
This is partly because of the themes of evolution common to both, and partly because of how the transmutation of apes and men parallel that of the Eloi and the Morlochs from the upper and lower classes. It is also because with a Jungian whipturn, an ape plumbs the racial memory of humans by activating the speech center of one who recites the origin story much like the spinning disks in the 1960 "Time Machine" movie.
I was surprised that the origin story in the later Apes movie (the one where Zira and Cornelius space- and time-travel to contemporary Earth, "Escape"), which always struck me as flimsy, was in fact lifted faithfully from the book. (The movie did embellish it with the bonfire of dogs and cats.) But then I am also surprised that Pierre Boulle contributed to the later movies.
I was not surprised that Boulle served in World War II. I knew he contributed to the screenplay of "Bridge over the River Kwai," though I understand the main writers were not credited because they were blacklisted. Several bits of the book reminded me of wartime (and other) atrocities, particularly in death camps in Europe and southeast Asia. And indeed and of course his experience informed his novel.
The big reveal was no reveal because I've seen the movies and because I've read a book or two before in my life. And how I do love a framing device. That was the most charming part of the book because it reminded me of stories in Illustrated Man.
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