My Planet of the Apes Memoir
The original Planet of the Apes is a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle. I've read it. It's okay. I guess Pierre Boulle wrote some other spy novels, and those were pretty good, and he was in love with a married woman, who promised to leave her husband, but ultimately went back to him, and so Pierre Boulle had to go on with a hole in his heart. But his apes have gone on for fifty years, fascinating us. I always preferred the Planet of the Apes movies to the later sci-fi bonanzas, the Star Wars movies. The Planet movies weren't exaggerated fairy tales--they were difficult, and dark, and they showed a future that had gotten out of control. That seemed, I guess, more persuasive to me than the heroic blah-blah-blah of the Star Wars franchise. One time, when I was six, I was at my friend Dane Peterson's house with a couple other kids, and Dane's older brother Paul was putting us through an "astronaut training" cycle in Dane's basement. We had to run do...