The series began with French author Pierre Boulle‘s 1963 novel La Planète des singes. Boulle wrote the novel in six months after the “humanlike expressions” of gorillas at the zoo inspired him to contemplate the relationship between man and ape. La Planète des singes was heavily influenced by 18th- and 19th-century fantastical travel narratives, especially Jonathan Swift‘s satirical Gulliver’s Travels. It is one of several of Boulle’s works to use science fiction tropes and plot devices to comment on the failings of human nature and mankind’s overreliance on technology, though Boulle rejected the science fiction label, instead terming his genre “social fantasy”.^[3]

The novel is a satire that follows French journalist Ulysse Mérou, who participates in a voyage to a distant planet where speechless, animalistic humans are hunted and enslaved by an advanced society of apes. The ape species are sorted into classes: the gorillas are police officers, the chimpanzees are scientists, and the orangutans are politicians. Eventually, Mérou discovers that humans once dominated the planet until their complacency allowed the more industrious apes to overthrow them. The story’s central message is that human intelligence is not a fixed quality and could atrophy if taken for granted.^[3][4] Boulle considered the novel one of his minor works, though it proved to be a bestseller. British author Xan Fielding translated it into English; it was published in the United Kingdom as Monkey Planet and in the United States as Planet of the Apes.^[5]