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Planet of the Apes Question Tilting
Hey, do you remember that book by Blake Crouch called Recursion which didn't have any recursion? Let us now return to this idea of recursion. Is the Planet of the Apes a recursive story? How so, or how not? Do two reversals make a recursion?
Comments
I'll confess my ignorance. What do you mean by "a recursive story"? Is it that there's the main tale within a framing story?
I don't think I'd call _Planet of the Apes_ recursive as it only has two layers, though admittedly they do mirror each other very nicely. A recursive story, to me, implies that there are several levels, and each one somehow calls the next one down in a kind of stack. Some of the Arabian Nights stories were like this.
The classic one has to be...
It was a dark and stormy night, and the pirates pressed close around the camp fire, and the captain said, "Lads, I'll tell you a story: it was a dark and stormy night, and the pirates pressed close around the camp fire, and the captain said, 'Lads, I'll tell you a story: it was a dark and stormy night...'"
I think it uses recursion (the ape societies are a simpler repetition of human societies), but isn't a recursive story because that is only a device for the points the author wants to make, which are not about recursion as such, but about stripping away disguises.
I took the end as a recursive element. Ulysse completes this long voyage, visiting a planet of the apes where it became obvious that apes supplanted humans, only to return home to find that apes have once again supplanted humans. So off he goes into space again. Weill he forever be finding the planet of the apes? No matter where he goes? I think Boulle's answer is 'yes', because we're all destined to be apes.
Good point. Even the Professor succumbed to loss of intelligence. Why is Ulysse immune? (And does it matter? I think not.)