Nova

From http://www.wikipedia.org:
Planet of the Apes (Novel)
Planet of the Apes is a novel by Pierre Boulle, originally published in 1963 in French as La planète des singes. As singe means both "ape" and "monkey," Xan Fielding called his translation Monkey Planet. It is an example of social commentary through dystopia.
The main events of the book are placed in a frame story, in which Jinn and Phillys, a couple out on a pleasure cruise in a spaceship, find a message in a bottle floating in space. The message inside the bottle is the log of a man, Ulysse Mérou, who believes that he may be the last human left alive in all the universe, but has written down his story in hopes that someone else, somewhere, will find it.
Ulysse begins by explaining that he was friends with Professor Antelle, a genius scientist on Earth, who invented a sophisticated spaceship which could travel at nearly the speed of light. Ulysse, the professor, and a physician named Levain fly off in this ship to explore outer space. They travel to the nearest star system that the professor theorized might be capable of life, the red sun Betelgeuse, which would take them about 350 years to reach. Due to time dilation, however, the trip only seems two years long to the travelers.
They arrive at the distant solar system and find that it contains an Earth-like planet, which they christen Soror (Latin for sister), "because of its resemblance to our Earth." They land on the planet and discover that they can breathe the air, drink the water, and eat the local vegetation. They soon encounter other human beings on the planet, although these others act as primitive as chimpanzees and destroy the clothing of the three astronauts. They live with the primitive humans for a few days, hoping to civilize them and learn their language.
At the end of this time, they are startled to see a hunting party in the forest, consisting of gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees using guns and machines. The apes wear human clothing identical to that of 20th century Earth, with the exception that they wear gloves instead of shoes on their prehensile feet. The hunting party shoots several of the humans for sport, including Levain, and capture others, including Ulysse.
Ulysse is taken off to the apes' city, which looks exactly the same as a human city from 20th century Earth, with the exception that some smaller furniture exists for the use of the chimpanzees. While most of the humans captured by the hunting party are sold for manual labor, the protagonist winds up in a research facility which is doing experiments on human intelligence. The apes perform experiments on the humans similar to Pavlov's conditioning experiments on dogs, and Ulysse proves his intelligence by failing to be conditioned, speaking and drawing figures of geometry.
Ulysse is taken in by one of the researchers, Zira, a female chimpanzee, who begins to teach him the apes' language. He learns from her all about the ape planet. Eventually, he is freed from his cage, and meets Zira's fiancé, Cornélius, a respected young scientist. With Cornélius' help, he goes to make a speech in front of the ape President and several representatives, and is given specially tailored clothing. He tours the city and learns about the apes' civilization and history. The apes have a very ancient society, but their origins are lost in time. Their technology and culture have progressed slowly through the centuries because each generation, for the most part, imitates those of the past, considered to be a recognized ape-like characteristic. The society is divided up between the violent gorillas, pedantic and conservative orangutans, and intellectual chimpanzees.
Although Ulysse's chimpanzee patrons Zira and Cornelius are convinced of his sentience, the society's leading orangutan scientists believe that he is faking his understanding of language, because their philosophy will not allow for the possibility of sentient human beings.
Ulysse falls in love with a primitive human female, Nova, whom he had met in the forest at the beginning of his visit to the planet. He impregnates her. This proves that he is the same species as the primitive humans, which lowers his standing in the eyes of many of the apes. However, their derision turns to fear with a discovery in a distant archaealogical dig and analysis of memory in some human brains. Evidence is uncovered which fills in the missing history of the apes. In the distant past, the planet was ruled by human beings, who built a technological society, and enslaved apes to perform their manual labor. Over time the humans became more and more dependent upon the apes, until eventually they became so lazy and degenerate that they were overthrown by their ape servants and fell into the primitive state in which our protagonist found them.
While some of the apes reject this evidence, others take it as a sign that the humans are a threat and must be exterminated--in particular, an old orangutan scientist, Dr. Zaius. Ulysse gets wind of this, and escapes from the planet with his wife and newly-born son, returning to Earth in the professor's spaceship.
Again, the trip takes several centuries, but only a relative time of a few years to the protagonist. Ulysse lands on earth, over 700 years after he had originally left it, and lands outside the city of Paris. However, once outside the ship, he discovers that Earth is now ruled by sentient apes just like the planet from which he has just fled (this is where his story on paper ends). He immediately blasts his ship off into space once more, writes his story, places it in a bottle, and launches it into space for someone to find.
The book concludes by returning to the couple who had found the bottle, who are revealed to be apes themselves. They scoff at the unlikelihood of humans having been advanced enough to build spaceships, and conclude that the story must be someone's idea of a joke.
Planet of the Apes (1968 film)
Planet of the Apes is a 1968 science fiction film about an astronaut (Charlton Heston) who finds himself stranded on an Earth-like planet two thousand years in the future. On this planet, non-human apes are the dominant form of life and humans are beasts. The film is based on the Planet of the Apes novel by Pierre Boulle.
Astronauts Taylor, Landon, and Dodge are in deep hibernation when their spaceship (non-canonically known as Icarus) crash-lands in a lake on an unknown planet in A.D. 3978. The astronauts awaken to find that their fourth companion, Stewart, has died in space and their ship has started to sink. They use the inflatable raft from the ship to safely reach shore. Once on shore, Dodge performs a soil test and pronounces the soil incapable of sustaining life.
The crew abandons their spaceship.The three astronauts set off through the desert, finding first a single plant and then others. They find an oasis at the edge of the desert where they decide to take a swim. While they are swimming, someone steals their clothes. Pursuing the thieves, the astronauts find their clothes in shreds and the perpetrators — a group of mute, primitive humans — contentedly raiding a cornfield. But shortly, the astronauts and other humans are being pursued by gorillas on horseback, hunting the humans for sport and capture. Dodge is shot and killed during the pursuit, while Taylor and Landon are captured and taken back to Ape City; Taylor is shot in the throat, but survives due to the surgical efforts of two chimpanzee scientists, Zira and Galen. Upon his recovery, Taylor is thrown into a cage with a woman who was captured on the same hunt, the beautiful Nova. Due to the throat injury, he has temporarily lost his voice.
Taylor discovers that the apes, who can talk, are in control and are divided into three classes: the gorilla police, military, and laborers; the orangutan administrators and politicians; and the chimpanzee intellectuals and workers. Humans, who cannot talk, are considered vermin, fit only to be hunted for sport or used for scientific experiments. This latter fact is illustrated when Taylor eventually finds Landon, who has been lobotomized by the apes. Taylor had already found Dodge in a museum, stuffed as an exhibit (as Dodge is a black man, he is an anomaly in a world of Caucasian light-skinned humans; this may be the reason the apes put him on display, although many light-skinned stuffed humans are also in the museum).
Taylor discovers that the apes, who can talk, are the dominant species on this world.Zira and her fiancé, Cornelius, take an interest in Taylor because of his lip movements, which resemble talking. While Cornelius and Zira are talking to their boss, Dr. Zaius, Taylor writes in the dirt and attempts to call Cornelius and Zira's attention to it, but he becomes frustrated when they do not notice the writing. Zaius sees some letters on the dirt and realizes that Taylor possesses intelligence, but hastily erases the letters with his cane. Taylor's voice eventually heals sufficiently that he can talk to Cornelius and Zira, who take a liking to him. Taylor and Zaius at the "monkey trial" Zaius soon discovers Taylor's ability to talk and puts him on trial when he tries to escape. After the trial, he is taken to see Dr. Zaius, who threatens to emasculate and lobotomize him if he doesn't tell the "truth" about where he came from. But Cornelius and Zira execute a plan (with the help of Zira's nephew) to free Taylor, who insists that Nova also be brought along. They flee to the Forbidden Zone, where Cornelius (an archeologist) had, a year earlier, discovered a cave with artifacts of human technology. Zaius and a band of gorillas manage to find them and after a brief battle, Taylor and Nova are allowed to escape on horseback. Zaius lets them go without further confrontation, as he thinks it best for everyone if Taylor and Nova both just disappear.
But his experiences so far still do not give Taylor the "why" on how apes became intelligent, talking creatures and humans the wild animals. But soon after his escape, in the final, ironic scene, Taylor discovers the Statue of Liberty half-buried in the beach. He realizes that he's really back on Earth (albeit in the future) and that mankind had destroyed its own civilization, thereby paving the way for the Planet of the Apes.
This scene frequently makes "best moments in film" and "best endings" lists. In the span of a few seconds, it completely changes the conception of the film's foregoing events, many of which are thus revealed to have foreshadowed this conclusion – a plot device emblematic of its author, Rod Serling. As with many episodes of Serling's own Twilight Zone series, this final plot twist sees the protagonist's arrogance undone when he is made to realize that it is precisely this characteristically human arrogance that evidently precipitated a catastrophe (assumed to be a nuclear war, a looming fear in the Cold War era) that has plunged humans into savagery and allowed supposedly "savage" subhumans, the apes, to become masters of the earth.
You should create your own MySpace Layouts like me by using nUCLEArcENTURy .COM's MySpace Profile Editor !