I finished reading H. Rider Haggard’s Wisdom’s Daughter, the fourth book in the She series, about She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed* That’s pretty impressive, considering that Haggard not only killed her off at the end of the first volume, but destroyed her body, as well. “She” is the first case that I’m aware of concerning a fictional character who we saw to be Undeniably and Reliably , Really Most Sincerely Dead being brought back to life. Sherlock Holmes’ revival after his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls doesn’t count. as Doyle himself said, “no one had pronounced on the remains,” so he could claim that Holmes had never really died. Moriarty, who did die at the Falls, appears later in The Valley of Fear without explanation (If you say that adventure occurred before the Falls, then you have to explain how it is that Watson knows about Moriarty – in The Final Problem Watson doesn’t know him at the start, and Moriarty is dead by the end of the story, and there’s no opportunity for the events of That Valley of Fear to take place within its confines), but Doyle doesn’t even try to explain it, leaving things ambiguous. But Ayesha was definitely killed and reappeared later, with explanation.
I’m halfway through The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, which appears to be the very first paperback science fiction anthology. There’s some expected stuff in here (an H.G. Wells story, an Ambrose Bierce, a Heinlein), along with stories I never heard of by authors I never heard of. They seem to anticipate later movies (I doubt that the filmmakers knew of these stories). “Green Thoughts” by John Collier is a surprisingly light-hearted take on the Man-Eating Plant, in which the faces of those eaten appear in the plant’s blossoms, just as in Roger Corman’s original Little Shop of Horrors. “The Green Splotches” by T.S. Stribling concerns aliens in the South American Jungle who capture humans, skin them, and mount the skeletons as trophies. They waylay an American expedition and start picking off the members. When shot, they drip green blood. I doubt if any of this was known to the guys who made Predator.
In much the same way, the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes and its immediate sequels more closely resemble L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Genus Homo (1941 in magazine, 1950 in book form) than Pierre Boulle’s 1963 Planet of the Apes. In both de Camp’s novel and the Apes films, sleeping travelers from the present day awake much later in the future than intended, finding a world gone back to mostly forest and jungle, with intelligent apes at the top. In both cases, the apes specialize by species, with Chimps as the intellectuals and gorillas as the military (something not in Boulle). the humans are first thought to be unintelligent, without language, and are put in cages, until they demonstrate thei intellectual abilities. The planet, of course, is Earth.
*(Ayesha, not Hilda Rumpole)
(Not planned, my tablet hadn’t charged over night sooo)