Man the Fugitive (Planet of the Apes The TV Series, #1) by George Alec Effinger


Man the Fugitive (Planet of the Apes The TV Series, #1)
Title : Man the Fugitive (Planet of the Apes The TV Series, #1)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0426151739
ISBN-10 : 9780426151739
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 172
Publication : First published January 1, 1974

ALIEN PLANET

The fantastic adventures of astronauts Alan Virdon and Pete Burke, accidentally time-warped 1000 years into the future -- to the Planet of the Apes...

Of Zaius, head of the Council of Apes, who forbids any knowledge of mankind's long dead civilization....

Of Urko, gorilla leader, who hates all humans and vows death to those who claim superiority....

Of peace-loving Galen, who could forgive Zaius' fear of knowledge -- but not his hatred of humans nor his vengeance upon the two men who carry the secrets of the past.

Contains the novellizations of the episodes "The Cure" and "The Good Seeds".


Man the Fugitive (Planet of the Apes The TV Series, #1) Reviews


  • Craig

    Effinger wrote four books that were adaptations of the television series Planet of the Apes, which was based on the original 1968-1973 series of movies, which in turn had been based on the Pierre Boulle novel from 1963. The TV series only ran for fourteen episodes at the end of 1974 and was not particularly well received. Each of his books adapted two of the scripts of the show. He did a good job of adapting the stories, and managed to establish some continuity between them. He obviously didn't spend as much time and energy on them as he did on his original work, and he also was in very poor health while writing them. Nonetheless, he still produced entertaining prose, threw in occasional lines and bits that enhanced the televised versions, and managed to tell an interesting series of stories.

  • Robert Schneider

    Standard television series adaptation that was quite common for science fiction series of the day. Decent writing, the author did try to flesh out the stories a bit, but nothing special. This book adapts 2 of the series episodes. Being the first book of the series I wonder why they didn't adapt the first episode to explain who everybody was and how they all got together. It is like they only expected people who watched the show would read the books and they never thought someone almost 50 years later would read this without having seen the show. Both stories are quite similar, which is how they packaged these kind of things. If you like one type of story you will want more of the same. They used to package video releases of shows the same way with "themed" tapes/disks. In "The Cure" Virdon, Burke, and show up in a town that winds up having a plague and the two humans just happen to know how to make the cure. The apes distrust them but still follow their directions and things end good with apes rethinking how they perceive humans. In "The Good Seed" Virdon, Burke, and Galen wind up on a farm where things aren't going so well. The two humans just happen to know about farming practices and try to teach the apes. The apes distrust humans but still follow their directions and things are looking up for them and the apes rethink how they perceive humans. All in all the first story was bland and, with the life and death of a whole town in the balanced, felt forced. The second was a smaller and more personal tale only involving one family just struggling to get along. Much more time for character development. I enjoyed it much more.

  • Mike

    In the days before VHS was common, these TV and movie tie-in books were extremely common. This is not bad, but also not that exciting. Which is a pretty accurate reflection of the Planet of the Apes TV series it was based on.

  • Marc Hilton

    How appropriate considering today’s political climate. I’ve always enjoyed Mr. Effinger’s stories.

  • Charles

    a pretty good take off on the Planet of the Apes. From the TV series.

  • Valerie

    I first realized that knowledge of apes was not considered a prerequisite for writing about apes early in my life when I went through a period of reading of Burroughs and his imitators in my late childhood. I quickly realized that with my fairly intensive self-education in primatology, I knew MUCH more about apes than any fictional presenter I've encountered to date--with the possible exception of Otis Adelbert Kline, whose works tended to be more realistic in their depictions of nonhuman intelligences and their human fosterlings

    One thing I did not know at the time was that humans ARE apes. The postulated differences in most fictionalized (and nonfiction) accounts are largely superficial. Humans share about 99% of their DNA with chimpanzees (a fact glaringly illustrated when Jane Goodall sent hair samples from herself, a chimpanzee, and a baboon (not an ape, but a closely related monkey) to a DNA lab). The primary genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is neoteny--the retention of juvenile and even infantile characters well into senescence. Humans are more neotenous than chimpanzees, and this accounts for nearly all the superficial differences between the species (including the substantially longer lifespan of most humans--but also including things like the larger size, larger brain size relative to body size, etc).

    The CLOSEST relationship between nonhuman apes and humans is between chimpanzees (and bonobos, now considered a separate species) and ALL humans. It's also the closest relationship between chimpanzees and ANY other species (excluding the aforementioned bonobos). Chimpanzees are NOT more closely related to gorillas (and most especially not to orangutans) than to humans. If one pictures the severely truncated ape family as a hand, it's tempting to imagine humans as the thumb, and other great apes as the other fingers. This is inaccurate. Humans and chimpanzees are closer together than either are to other apes--and the other apes are not that closely related to each other, either.

    Pierre Boulle, in the original Planet of The Apes book, was, as my mother pointed out, deliberately imitating Gulliver in The Land of The Houyhnhnms--using nonhuman intelligent beings as a foil and illuminator of human qualities, both attractive and repugnant. Swift's representation of an equine civilization is, however, more realistic than even Boulle's version--which has been caricatured to varying degrees by later versions.

    The social structure of 'civilized' (meaning domesticated, largely, in the sense of being house-dwellers, since the various versions of the stories never include more than one city) nonhuman apes need not resemble their ancestral forms, anymore than 'civilized' humans live as their (largely) nomadic ancestors did. But the representation of the three defined species of 'apes' in this book and other books of this ilk are simply inaccurate. Orangutans in nature are almost entirely solitary, of necessity. In civil society, they might become more socialized--they would almost CERTAINLY not be administrators. Chimpanzees might become less egalitarian than their ancestors (the focus on alpha males in chimpanzee studies often clouds issues that should be elaborated: for example, I've often wondered what would happen in a chimpanzee band if the alpha male wanted to do one thing, and his mother another...). They almost certainly would NOT separate into urban aristocratic intellectuals and rural dullards, however.

    The worst slander in these books, however, is against gorillas. Gorillas are NOT violent. They especially are not violent in androcentric gangs. The response to danger of gorillas is fourfold: first, to avoid danger wherever possible; second, to hide or otherwise escape if there is any way to do so (and gorillas are surprisingly adept at hiding, for such large creatures); Third, to try to bluff their way out of trouble; and fourth, (only as a last resort) to try to fight their way out. Creatures with this sort of survival strategies would make LOUSY soldiers, unless situations had profoundly changed in the interim.

    Speaking of which, all societies in this series (except, a bit surprisingly, the human societies) are, with few exceptions, so androcratic that the stories often approach the 'another planet without women' standard. A quick count of how many female characters there are compared to males would very quickly become so unbalanced that one would be troubled by the Smurf reproduction question--do the apes in this world reproduce asexually? Is there, perhaps, one queen ape per community, producing multiple young with different fathers?

    In a few stories in this (almost) complete novelization of the television series (one story is left out of these two volumes, and one that I've never seen on tv is added), it is revealed that there ARE females of the various species. This series, being a series, is more homely (one couldn't use 'humane', though I'm tempted) than most versions of the theme. The mundane lives of humans and nonhuman apes are more developed. Though there is violence, it's usually contained--though not always without casualties.

    Dedication: "For Sherry Gottlieb and Jim Frenkel, my cavalry" ['my' being George Alec Effinger]

    CONTENTS

    I The Cure: (based on a teleplay by Edward J Lasko) The fact that malaria has survived through the millennia is a bit surprising--but then a lot of the survivors would be along the line of living fossils in these stories. The geographical location of these stories is unclear--it's hinted in one of the episodes that it's in Alta California. The climate is more nearly tropical than subtropical, however. Which may account for there being cinchona plants in the wetlands...

    2 The Good Seeds: (The credits say that this episode is based on a teleplay by Robert W Lenski--but it's not clear whether this episode was ever aired--it's not in the recordings I have) The lessons in good husbandry preached by one of the astronauts (Burke) are not likely to have been current in the period when the astronauts left Earth on what was intended to be a space journey and ended up, inadvertently, as an exercise in time travel. Unless Burke's family were conscious practitioners of anachronism (? perhaps as producers of organic foods?) they would not have learned things like how to construct a rail fence--or an old-fashioned windmill, or an improvised shower...

    I should point out that even in non-mechanistic agriculture, it's not necessarily a good model of agriculture, pastoralism, etc to have the farmers be of the strong, ignorant, and rude type. The mother in the tenant-farming (sharecropper? At one point the eldest son says in an offhand way that heifer calves belong to the landlord) family is a more urbane type--a former nurse from the only known city. She often argues with her stiffly conformist husband about things like the future of their daughter. The evidence is that she does not regret the choice she made to marry into her husband's job--but that she thinks that there should be compromises made--and that this was so even before Burke and Virdon were forced to stay over because Galen had injured his leg.

    In many ways, the farmer and his elder son at first find Galen an even greater threat than the two 'alien' astronauts, because he is of their own place and time, and may force reconsideration of traditions they believe are 'best-fit' for the science and art of farming. It's only when the labor (and soil)-saving innovations the astronauts introduce begin changing things (for the better, perhaps, but it's still traumatic) that they begin to find the humans an even greater threat than the scarecrow monsters they had originally despised. In the end, the resolution is far too dependent on happenstance--things could easily have worked out differently, if luck had turned the other way. The authors argue that this is generally the way of things, in this world as in any other--that the life of a squirrel is one long exercise in terror--and that is the way it must be. I have my doubts about this.