The first is obvious: the human condition itself must have become an issue for discourse. Dorrington a Bristol Merchant ( 1727) by Peter Longueville, a Parody of Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner ( 1719) in which the protagonist is adopted by a Friday-like ape.įor there to have evolved a sustained imaginative interest in, and use for, apes as observers or mirrors of the human condition (without Homo-sapiens-compliant moat-defensive anathemata directed at the messengers), two conditions were probably necessary. Philip Quarll, an Englishman: Who was lately discovered by Mr. An example is The Hermit: Or, the Unparalled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr. In the centuries before 1800, Satires were less frequently found, though some texts did come close to Proto SF.
All the same, this outsourcing of evil away from humanity, which the modern imagination tends to find disreputable, survived until well into the twentieth century, for the most part latterly in Pulp literature, where ape-monsters proliferated.
Gaia project apes full#
Apes appear in Western literature from at least the time of Plato, by far the most common instances of the topos – as Jess Nevins suggests in "Apes in Literature" (2013) (for full citation see further reading below) – representing the ape as essentially evil and sexually dangerous, a point of view consistent with Christian doctrine, but not of central interest to the history of Proto SF. The main focus here is therefore on the complex history of "apes" (henceforth without quotes) in Fantastika. In the present, twenty-first century version of the entry, the general rubric "apes" is generally meant to apply to the great apes: chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans though monkeys sometimes feature in relevant tales. Insofar as we deal here with Neanderthals and other early real or imagined hominids, we are not much concerned with what in the third decade of the twenty-first century has become a flood of discoveries we are primarily concerned with works of imagination about survivors, Neanderthals thawed out of ice-floes (see Sleeper Awakes Suspended Animation), or survivors in lost garden enclaves of our fallen world (like Bigfoot, the Yeti and other legendary humanoid creatures, who are also relevant to the discussion), some of them immortal (see Immortality). We no longer refer in this entry to Neanderthals or other cavemen in their natural habitat, which lies in the distant past (for which see Anthropology Origin of Man Prehistoric SF). In the second edition by "cavemen" we meant to designate proto-human races, including Neanderthals, though without taking a particular stand in the debate on the evolutionary tree (or grove) for examples of evolution in reverse, see Devolution. The heading for this entry should be seen as a rough short-hand designation for a subject whose nature is diffuse and has changed constantly over the centuries in the second edition of this encyclopedia (1993) our remit for this entry – then entitled Apes and Cavemen (in the Human World) – was perhaps excessively broad, though we did not then (nor do we now) focus on quasi-imaginary creatures, variously described as monkeys or apes, who proliferate in Western literature from the time of Plato, and who normally serve as rhetorical markers whose main function is to signal humanity's superior condition.
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