Aliens and Alienation in Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des Singes

ABSTRACT This article offers a radical re-reading of Pierre Boulle’s Planète des singes (1963), a novel dealing with interplanetary exploration in 2500 and the discovery of a world in the Betelgeuse system with three orders of rational simian species and a subjugated humanoid race void of rationality and abused by the primates on the planet. This close of the novel focuses on the narrator’s love affairs with two extraterrestrial females (one a low-intelligence humanoid, the other a rational chimpanzee-like creature). In this framed science-fiction novel, Boulle creates a first-person narrative with a dislikeable central character, Ulysse, who unwittingly engineers the downfall and extinction of humankind. I propose that the work should be interpreted less in the satiric tradition, with which it undoubtedly possesses affinities, and more as a veiled and sustained critique of Western capitalism and the consumerist society of the reader. Boulle subtly uses the taboo relationships of Ulysse with two aliens as a reflection on social codes and agencies of control.