Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Till We Have Faces,’ by C. S. Lewis

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…the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. We call it the wrath of the gods; as if the great cataract in Phars were angry with every fly it sweeps down in its green thunder.

I wonder what J. R. R. Tolkien thought of Till We Have Faces. I can’t seem to find any information about that online. Tollers and Jack were, of course, somewhat estranged by the time this novel was published; not turned enemies, but their friendship had cooled through the circumstances of life. I have an idea Tolkien thought Lewis had lost interest in their mythopoeic project, their shared endeavor to write new myths foreshadowing the gospel for modern pagans.

But that’s very much what Till We Have Faces is – though the myth isn’t a new one (Tolkien specifically wanted English myths) but a retelling of a classic Greek one, the myth of Cupid and Psyche. The central mythopoeic idea that myths are “good dreams” that anticipate the gospel is here, richly and beautifully realized.

Orual is a princess in a fictional barbarian kingdom, apparently sometime in the early Iron Age. She is the oldest – and ugliest – of three sisters. Redival is pretty and frivolous. Istra, the youngest, is so beautiful and sweet that people treat her like a goddess. “The Fox,” the girls’ Greek slave tutor, calls her Psyche, and Orual dotes on her.

But when famine and pestilence come to the land, the people turn on Psyche, accusing her of blaspheming the gods, causing all this evil. It is determined by the priests that she must be taken to the Mountain and sacrificed to the Beast who dwells there. Orual is injured trying to defend her sister, and so is unconscious when the ceremony is carried out.

Later, Orual travels with the chief of the king’s guard up to the Mountain, to gather her sister’s bones for burial. To her astonishment and joy, she finds Psyche there, alive and well. But the girl tells her a crazy story about being married to the Beast of the Mountain, who is actually a sublime god. Orual, certain that Psyche has gone insane, conceives a plan to bring her to her senses. And great evil will come from this.

I first read Till We Have Faces a lifetime ago, when I was in high school and the book was fairly new. It was the second Lewis book I read, after The Screwtape Letters. Callow as I was, I recognized it for a book full of depths, but I couldn’t see very far into them.

Reading it now, as an old man, I found much more in the story. It moved me deeply. Has any book ever dissected the human heart as this one does, bringing to light all the petty possessiveness, jealousy, and even hatred that we humans often mean by what we call love?

Great book. Read it if you haven’t yet. If you have read it, read it again.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Buried Caesars,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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There are still a few of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Toby Peters novels left that I haven’t read. But now I’ve read Buried Caesars, in which Toby meets Douglas MacArthur and Dashiell Hammett.

The Toby Peters novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are set in Hollywood in the 1930s and ʼ40s. They are semi-comic in spirit, finding our private eye hero taking jobs for one famous figure or another (usually, but not always, movie stars), though he never achieves financial success, continuing to live in a shabby boarding house and sharing his office with a low-rent (and low-hygiene) dentist.

It’s 1942, and Toby is summoned to a large estate, where he meets a man who isn’t supposed to be in this hemisphere. General Douglas MacArthur is supposed to be in the Philippines, but he’s come home in secret to deal with a personal crisis. Certain of American victory, he has – he explains – made some plans for running for president after the war. He prepared some strategy papers for his campaign which would be highly embarrassing if they were made public at the present time. And now one of his aides has stolen the papers and is in California offering them to the highest bidder. MacArthur wants Toby to investigate because he’s a) known to be discreet, and b) almost unknown otherwise.

Toby promises to turn all his resources to the task. His problem is that his resources are in fact very limited. However, he is surprised to find a famous man in the dental chair of his office-mate – the author Dashiell Hammett. Hammett explains that he’s trying to enlist for the war (in spite of his age), and the army tells him he has to get his teeth fixed. He’s (temporarily) off the bottle, he has a couple days free, and he’s curious to see whether he still retains some of his old skills as a Pinkerton detective. So he and Toby set out together.

Clues lead them to a castle in the desert, where a crazy millionaire is plotting a military coup, but he’s not the only suspect. Toby will also pick up a stray cat and a framed photo of Wallace Beery in a woman’s wig.

Buried Caesars is undemanding entertainment. I always resent Dashiell Hammett in real life (as opposed to his novels, which I love) because of his unrepentant Communism, but as usual, author Kaminsky steers clear of the most controversial stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Deep Blue Good-bye,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.

Another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald – and this is another important entry in the series, if only by virtue of its being the first.

I’ve told the story here before, because it amuses me. So I’ll just summarize it now. In 1963, Fawcett Publications, a major popular paperback house, hired a new author to create a detective series, replacing Richard S. Prather, their former top seller, who’d followed deeper pockets to greener pastures (to mix a metaphor). John D. MacDonald, the new kid, came up with a slightly reclusive hero, a beach bum living on a houseboat, called Dallas McGee (changed quickly to Travis McGee after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas). McGee called himself a “salvage expert,” but he didn’t salvage shipwrecks or cars. He recovered stolen objects or money, in return for half the value as a finder’s fee. The first book to appear, in 1964, was The Deep Blue Good-bye. (Every volume would incorporate a color in the title.)

McGee is persuaded by a friend, a dancer, to talk to another dancer named Cathy Kerr. Cathy is a country girl, a single mother, living hand to mouth. But she thinks she might have a right to a missing treasure. Her father, she explains, came home from the war with some secret package that he hid carefully, before being sent to prison for murder. He died before his release, but after a while his former cellmate Junior Allen showed up – a big, strong, dynamic type who swept Cathy off her feet and soon had her completely dominated. He also dug holes all over their farm. And one day he found something and vanished. Cathy is pretty sure he found her father’s stash, and she and her kid could sure use half of it, if McGee could get it back for her.

McGee doesn’t need work just now, but he’s impressed with Cathy’s dignity after all she’s been through. He traces Junior Allen’s footsteps, learning he was last seen on a yacht with a rich, beautiful woman. McGee finds the woman, Lois Atkinson, in her home, cast off by Allen and now a wreck of herself. Allen systematically broke her down and degraded her, and she has nearly starved herself to death in despair and self-disgust. McGee nurses her back to health, and at last begins a gentle affair with her, one which threatens to break through his prickly personal defenses.

But he still has Junior Allen to catch, and he formulates a devious plan to con the con man.

Unfortunately, as with all plans of battle, this one does not survive contact with the enemy. And Junior Allen is a formidable enemy indeed. The climax is one of the most harrowing and memorable in the series.

I read a review some time back that argued that The Deep Blue Good-bye is unworthy of the rest of the books, weighed down by the standard tropes of 1960s men’s fiction. I cannot agree. MacDonald certainly serves up the expected necessaries – plenty of violence and sex. But I think the original readers back in 1964 must have been puzzled by this book – there’s a lot of genuinely excellent prose here, and even the obligatory sex scenes are lyrical and revelatory of character, rather than sordid. (Though I do not approve of the sexual mores.)

Some of MacDonald’s prose – I would argue – is as good as that of his contemporaries Hemingway and O’Hara, only ensconced in far more interesting stories.

I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tinwork, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.

Another notable element in this book was one moment – never to be repeated again that I can recall – when McGee hints at some trauma in his earlier life that left him perpetually commitment-averse.

To draw a line under it all, I highly enjoyed The Deep Blue Good-bye and recommend it. Not for kids.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

A Peaceful World, If You Can Keep It

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O Thou Faithful Father in heaven, would that I could render unto Thee adequate thanks and praise for all the blessings Thou hast bestowed upon me during all the days of my life up to this hour, but this is not within my power and ability. For I am flesh and blood, which cannot but do wrong. Thou, however, dost daily grant me blessings without measure . . .

from A Lutheran Treasury of Prayers (CC BY NC ND 4.0)

My church tradition doesn’t encourage the use of liturgical prayers to mark the hours of the day, though I wouldn’t doubt some leaders would like to move us toward that and more awareness of the church calendar. Perhaps it’s impractical for modern believers. We have many ways to keep the time and many ways to remember the Lord throughout the day.

I begin with this because last week I finished The Book of the Dun Cow again–this time with friends. The heroes perform a supernatural duty unknowingly by marking the day with liturgical crows, specific canonical crows for Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline. I say crows because this is a beast fable. The leader/pastor of this part of the world is the rooster Chanticleer.

It’s a marvelous story with great pacing, strong characters, and the moving theme that the everyday Gospel habits of ordinary church people keep the enemy bound.

Simply, the animals were the Keepers. The watchers, the guards. They were the last protection against an almighty evil which, should it pass them, would burst bloody into the universe and smash into chaos and sorrow everything that had been made both orderly and good.

I wrote about it the first time I read it a few years ago, so I’ll direct you there and move on to other links to share. A cool bit of trivia: The Book of the Dun Cow is the name of the “oldest surviving miscellaneous manuscript in Irish literature,” written on what some believe to be the hide of the cow of St. Ciarán of Clonmacnoise.

Star Wars: I’ve been sucked into YouTube reviews and reactions to the new Star Wars series The Acolyte. It started with World‘s review: “The investigation makes no sense, and the Jedi detectives are incredibly stupid. They ask all the wrong questions and dismiss the most obvious clues. The plot is full of holes.” And it followed by several YouTubers who would love to enjoy a good sci-fi show and don’t find it here. It’s discouraging. As I’ve said before, if the Tao of the Force means anything, it means the good stories will come back after the bad ones have their moment.

Science Fiction: SciFanSat, “an online magazine where imagination takes center stage,” has ten issues available.

Memoir: Professor Esau McCaulley says, “No book can replace the role that real friends and family members play in our lives, but books can change or inspire us. They can depict traits that we are drawn to emulate. They can help us imagine different futures when hope is in short supply.”

Faith: “Perhaps the emptiness of the culture of self in a time of tumult—war, economic anxiety, political instability—is causing many to turn once again to Christianity.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Peace River Village,’ by Christopher Amato

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In our diversity-loving modern world, nothing is more popular than various kinds of fusion (perhaps because lots of fusion ultimately leads back to uniformity). Sometimes fusion can work very well, as when, oh, for example, an author blends historical fiction with adventure fantasy.

Other fusions work less happily, or at least it looks that way to me based on reading the fusion of Cozy Mystery with Thriller that is Christopher Amato’s Peace River Village.

The eponymous PRV is a retirement community in Sunland, Florida – which I take to be a fictional town (at least I never heard of it when I lived in the state). In a quiet, pleasant cul de sac, several former police officers have settled down for their golden years, purely by coincidence. There’s a vigorous widow who used to be a captain in Gary, Indiana, and two old cops from Chicago and DC who’ve settled into curmudgeonly routine and torpor. And another cop has just moved in across the circle.

One non-cop is a widow named Cora, whose great concerns are her daughter and granddaughter. The daughter is a degenerating drug addict living in a fetid apartment, but she still has hope for the granddaughter, Jennifer. Jennifer is a good, pretty girl who aspires to go to college. She is close to her grandmother, and spends a lot of time with her.

So when Jennifer doesn’t show up for a promised weekend, and Cora can’t reach her on her cell phone, Cora consults her neighbors, then calls the police. But the police dismiss the girl’s disappearance as a runaway case, and the neighbors start making inquiries on their own. What they uncover will lead to corruption, drugs, and human trafficking.

I’ll say this for Peace River Village – it interested me enough to keep me reading to the end, just because I was concerned about what happened to the girl. But I found the book very slow. The labored jollity of the retired cops’ jokes and the general low energy of their lives didn’t harmonize well with the serious nature of the crime and the victim’s peril. Things got moving toward the end, though, timed just right to permit a nick-of-time rescue.

The writing was labored and overdone – it could have used a lot of verbiage-trimming. The book had the flavor of Christian fiction (though I don’t think it is one of those), except for quite a lot of profanity.

I didn’t like Peace River Village a lot. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Man Switch,’ by Matthew Quirk

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I think I may have to give up reading thrillers. The older I get, the more tender-hearted I seem to grow, and the harder it is to read about people in peril. Meanwhile, as I get older, the thriller writers get better and better at their job. Matthew Quirk’s Dead Man Switch was excellently written, and I thought it might kill me.

This is the second volume in a series starring a hero named John Hayes. Hayes previously worked for yet another (the recurrence of this theme in literature surely must indicate some public hunger) super-secret, deniable military unit tasked with assassinating the very worst terrorists in the world. The operation, called Cold Harvest, does not officially exist, and all its operatives know that if they’re caught they’ll be liable to capital punishment. But they also know the thing has to be done.

Hayes has retired, withdrawn to a secret location with his wife and stepdaughter. For strategic reasons he has agreed to be officially listed as a fugitive. In the eyes of the world he’s a traitor and a hunted man.

But he gets called back to Washington. Several members of the Cold Harvest unit have recently died in accidents. The accidents have been meticulously orchestrated, but they’re not coincidental. Someone is trying to wipe out the unit members.

But that, as it turns out, is the least of it. The real plan is much bigger than that, and diabolically organized by a master criminal choreographer.

Good plotting is a fine thing, and Dead Man Switch is marvelously plotted. But what impressed me even more was that the characters were extremely well drawn and psychologically complex. I cared about them – which made reading about their sufferings all the more difficult.

Author Quirk also has a knack for elevating suspense through withholding information from readers, only to spring it on them at the strategic moment. He writes very short chapters, which makes the story seem to move faster.

Dead Man Switch is a masterfully written novel, superior in style, in plotting, and in characterization. If you relish action, I’m sure you’ll like it. I’m not sure I could handle another.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Sign of the Four,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

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“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?”

In 1889, Arthur Conan Doyle, struggling young London physician and aspiring writer, had one of those magical moments that save a career and change literary history. He’d already sold a detective story called A Study In Scarlet to an English publication, and now an American publisher, Joseph Marshall Stoddart of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, was asking for a follow-up. His company proposed to start an English version of their magazine, and they wanted the rights to a new story that would be printed both in Britain and America (music to a writer’s ears!). Stoddart invited Doyle, along with several other writers (Oscar Wilde was one of them, and would influence one of the characters in the final story), to a dinner at the Langham Hotel on August 30. Doyle agreed to bring Sherlock Holmes – who’d never been intended as more than a one-off character – to life again in a serialized novel to be called The Sign of the Four.

The story opens in Holmes’ and Dr. Watson’s lodgings, where Holmes is suffering a period ennui for lack of work. (This is the first time we learn of his cocaine use, to which Watson strenuously objects.) Then they are visited by Miss Mary Morstan, a young woman Watson finds extremely charming. She tells them that a mysterious benefactor has been sending her periodic gifts of valuable pearls. Now she has an invitation to visit a man named Thaddeus Sholto, who tells her she has been grievously wronged, and he wishes to put things right. Holmes and Watson agree to accompany her to see the man, who proves to be a hypochondriacal esthete (the Wilde influence). He says he is the son of a recently deceased retired officer from India, who was a close friend to Mary’s father. But his father, he says, cheated her father, taking possession of a treasure that should have been shared by both. Now his brother Bartholemew also refuses to divide the wealth. Thaddeus asks them to go with him to face Bartholemew and get Mary’s rights for her.

But when they all go together to see Bartholemew, they find him hideously murdered and the treasure missing. The police, when they arrive, arrest the hapless Thaddeus. Holmes and Watson take their own line in the case, following up Holmes’ scientific observations and deductions. Eventually it will all lead to a reckless chase down the Thames in steam launches, and a lurid confession from the true murderer.

One can discern an acquisitions editor’s hand in the framing of The Sign of the Four. To appeal to readers’ tastes, Doyle has added a couple elements missing from A Study In Scarlet. First there’s a romance (one is happy for Watson in finding a wife, though Doyle never knew what to do with her in later stories and fans have happily wasted tons of paper arguing back and forth how many times Watson was married). Secondly, there’s a chase, employing about the fastest transportation technology available at the time.

TSOTF has never been one of my favorite Holmes stories. Mainly (as I said in my previous review) I don’t much care for the foreign excursion; I like Holmes in his element – yellow fog and hansom cabs, top hats and bowlers. And Doyle generally does foreign cultures somewhat poorly – this story features three Sikhs in India named Mahomet Singh, Dost Akbar, and Abdullah Khan. Of all those name elements, only Singh would be used by actual Sikhs. The rest are Muslim names, absurd in context.

Doyle was not the first or last detective writer to distort police procedures for the sake of his plot, but the deviations seem pretty extreme here – would a police inspector actually allow a treasure box that’s material evidence in a homicide case to be carried to a private person’s home before examining it before witnesses? Whatever happened to chain of custody?

This is also the story where Doyle’s memory fails him, and he informs us Watson is suffering from a leg wound from Afghanistan, rather than the shoulder wound he had in A Study In Scarlet. More inexhaustible fuel for controversies among Holmes scholars.

Still, it’s a Holmes story, and not a bad one in its best parts. (The quotation at the top of this review, one of Holmes’ best-remembered lines, comes from TSOTF.) I always had the idea that it was this story that made Sherlock Holmes a public sensation, but that’s not true. It was the short stories, which Doyle would now begin writing, that would really put him on the literary map.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Devil You Know,’ by Neil Lancaster

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British police procedurals tend to be a tad more sedate than American ones. More brain work than gunplay. Author Neil Lancaster breaks that rule as much as possible in The Devil You Know, part of a series set in Edinburgh, Scotland, starring police detective Max Craigie and his mysterious friend Bruce Ferguson. They are both former military snipers. Bruce gives justice a nudge now and then by eliminating the occasional very bad criminal. Max is uncomfortable with this, but they owe each other their lives, and he can’t help sympathizing.

An incarcerated felon, heir to an important crime family, has come forward offering to provide the police with explosive information – information that will bring down a major political figure. In return he wants a transfer to a more comfortable prison – he also stipulates that Max Craigie must not be involved in any way. When the police attempt to carry out the deal, it goes spectacularly wrong. And then Max and his colleagues are in it full-bore, running down leads, hacking computers, and doing surveillance with drones. A lot of bullets will be fired and blood spilled, as well as dark secrets uncovered, before it’s all over.

What I liked best about The Devil You Know was the characters. Author Lancaster is good at painting vivid personalities. There’s quite a lot of cop humor here, which is not all that common in British crime novels – though the c.h. generally takes the form of simple insult, taken affectionately. The weakest aspect of the dialogue is the occasional awkward info dump. The author hasn’t quite mastered that.

An important plot turn involves the heroes’ lives being saved by pure coincidence. That’s a weakness in plotting.

Still, all in all, I found The Devil You Know an entertaining and suspenseful novel. The relationship between Max and Bruce, which is advertised as central to the series, actually plays very little role in this story.

I wonder about the increasing popularity of vigilante characters in contemporary crime fiction. Does it indicate a sense among the public – one too subversive to be plainly stated – that our justice system isn’t really doing its job?

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Way,’ by Tom Barber

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Sam Archer, hero of One Way, is a New York City policeman, formerly a London policeman (it’s complicated). He’s on the counterterrorism squad, and in his last adventure (One Way is Book 5 in the series) he got injured badly enough to put him out of action for a while. It’s the last day before his much-anticipated return to work, and he’s relaxing on a park bench when he sees what he quickly identifies as a team of bodyguards moving a protected person. The protected person is a little girl, nine years old. Suddenly Sam spies a hit team attacking them, and he shouts a warning. Soon bullets are flying, one bodyguard (they’re federal marshals) is wounded, and Sam has no choice but to join the marshals in their escaping car. They end up taking cover in a 22-floor high rise building, whose ground floor is soon occupied by the attackers. The bad guys successfully cut off communications, and the little group of marshals, plus Sam and the protectee, are trying to find a safe hiding place – as the attackers begin hunting them down from room to room.

We’re operating generally on the Die Hard model here. Our intrepid hero, outgunned (joined here by a kick-butt female sidekick, for the sake of diversity), faces increasingly long odds, as their opponents turn out to be a lot better prepared than you’d expect – and to have surprising backup resources. Secrets are revealed, only to be topped by deeper, darker secrets. Betrayals are disclosed and further betrayals perpetrated. It all culminates in a rooftop showdown, with a bomb ticking in the basement.

For me, it was all a little much.

I’ve bellyached about the Cinematic Thriller Formula before. This formula dictates that the novel must work like a contemporary action movie – the drama has to ratchet up constantly (nothing wrong with that), and the limits of human physical endurance (as well as the laws of physics) can be generally ignored. Each narrow escape may be plausible in itself, but cumulatively they defy credulity. The strategy is to keep the audience so excited they don’t have time to engage their critical brains.

The problem with that is that novels are, by nature, a slower medium than movies. Most readers can, and do, pause for a break frequently. When we pause, some of us ponder – which conflicts with the author’s purpose.

Also, a movie usually doesn’t last much more than two hours. But a novel can take many hours to read. Being old and weak of heart, I dislike being kept in a state of fight or flight for ten hours straight. It wearies me, and I had a rough weekend.

For all that, I can’t deny that One Way did its job effectively. It was a little odd to read an American story written with English spelling and orthography – “kerb” for “curb,” for instance. But the author did a good job. His prose could use some pruning, but it worked.

Perfectly fine, if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

The Planets of the Apes Are Anti-War

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Over the past week, I watched the first three original Planet of the Apes movies. I didn’t know the stories. I knew only what anyone familiar with sci-fi over the years would know, a plot point even the sequel spoils in its own trailer. But the whole movie doesn’t turn on that revelation. It was just an interesting surprise to 1968 moviegoers–no doubt part of what made it a successful movie.

You’ve heard that the original Star Wars and Jaws movies were blockbusters that changed moviemaking ever since. You probably know parts of the score from those movies. They have a tone of adventure that feels like a movie. Planet of the Apes leans into the strange and alien. This trailer captures that tone with minimal spoilers. The score invokes the wild unknown of 1960s sci-fi. It isn’t the music of adventure but of survival.

The director, Franklin J. Schaffner, wants us to experience the space crew’s voyage and their crash landing in a sea. We see water breaking through ship’s seems as if in the crew cabin ourselves. The three-man crew drag themselves to shore, and the first real cynicism comes for Taylor (Charlton Heston) laughing loudly at his earnest crewmate planting a pocket-sized US flag next to the water. The crew treks through a canyon wilderness, afraid that, though the air is fine, there may be no drinkable water or living plant life.

The first 30 minutes follows this track. Will they survive or won’t they? This kind of story tension gets me scratching my head, because if you tell viewers upfront the apes rule the planet, how long will they tolerate the main characters scrambling along on their own? Maybe if we were learning about the crew as well-rounded men, it would be more interesting. But we only get the wilderness and three men looking for water.

On the other hand, Richard Schickel wrote in Life Magazine, May 10, 1968, it was the best American movie he’d seen that year–“faint praise,” he says, “considering the competition,” but still he and his four-year-old daughter loved it.

I had thought the first film was going to focus on racial tolerance or bigotry, but it’s really an anti-war movie. The ape society is governed by religious zealots who won’t tolerate evolutionary theories and stamp out any hints of civilization beyond their own. God made apes in his own image, they say. Humans are just mute wildlife. Most of the hostility is in apes treating humans as non-sentient animals, and the story is driven by the threat Taylor poses to their carefully managed social order. The overarching theme, which starts with questions from the crew after they abandon ship and resumes with chimpanzee Cornelius revealing his exploration of ancient human ruins, is the question of what happened to humanity. The authorities won’t tolerate open discussion of humans once having civilization or being anything more than they are today. For viewers, though, if humans were more on this planet, what happened to them?

That’s what the famous scene at the movie’s end hammers home. Taylor realizes he didn’t crash on another planet. He returned to Earth 2000 years later, long after mankind had destroyed civilization through endless warmongering and the A-bomb.

Planet of the Apes (1968) is good period sci-fi. There are things to complain about (like the fact the humans are described as being unable to speak but in fact they are completely mute —they never make a sound), but it’s a good story. I laughed at the scene of government leaders being confronted with facts and ideas they rejected.

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