Magnum Thrax REALLY has a five star average now

Okay, before it was sort of a half-truth that the book Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom had a five star average. It only had one rating, so technically that probably doesn't qualify.

Well, now it has TWO ratings, both five stars, so I can honestly and without moral qualm claim it has the coveted five star rating average.

And if it falls, well, I'll just ignore the change as long as I can.

Take that, reality!

Best of all, my two reviews are not by people I know, nor did I pay them. No threats were made, no hostages taken, no illegal drugs provided, no sexual favours given.

These reviews are for real and for true, based upon the text, and only the text.

Now a five star rating is not something you might expect for a book with 'amusement park of doom' in the title, I grant you. A lesser writer would never have tackled such a toxic term and incorporated it into their masterpiece.

I have reclaimed the term for the highest kind of literature. The sort Hemingway would have written if he got hit in the head with a brick.

You know what I mean.

Magnum Thrax has a five star average review rating on Amazon.com!

Okay, it only has one review.

It's a great one though, and warms the cold cockles of my cruel heart. Someone enjoyed the book, and that, somehow makes it all worthwhile. Never mind the vast sums of coffee money it has generated, the ten bucks means nothing to me.

But saying Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom (A SEO name drop, naturally) has one positive review just sounds kind of, oh, I don't know–needy. Far better to say it has the much coveted and highly prestigious five star average rating. Because marketing. Disingenuous hyperbole is what makes it professional sounding. And this is a shameless hype machine of a blog, unburdened by advertising rules and regulations and truth and all that nasty stuff that keeps us from embellishing our accomplishments with thick layers of lies and fabulist exaggerations. And what is a novel, if not the work of a fabulist?

Besides, the five star average may not last long, and like the Dodo may never be seen again (despite all the devout effort of de-extinctionists everywhere), so I better capitalize on the opportunity and shout it from the virtual rooftop of an unread blog in the middle of the great internet wastelands.

Or is it presumptuous of me to assume that my blog is in the middle?

It could be coveted real estate.

Perhaps there are other worthy unread blogs that are competing for pride of place in the middle of nowhere. If so, let me just reassure you that there's enough room in the emptiness for all of us. Let us draw warmth from each other and our outrageous dreams.

I took a screenshot to capture the five star average for all eternity:

They say one should never respond to a review, positive or negative, so I will say nothing but that I am going to raise a glass filled with an alcoholic beverage and drink all of it while thinking of the unmentionable.

I will say no more.

Quest for an Audience Part… uh…

So, where am I with all this self-publishing schtuff? This online flim-flam word jam? What have I learned from writing Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom?

A lot, actually.

Great deal about writing, of course. POV. Editing. Character development. Plotting. Structure. Outlining. Nanotechnology. Fonts. Coffee. The pros and cons of eating various types of junk food while pounding a key board (the winner: wine gums. No fuss, no muss, last awhile, kinda chewy, interesting texture, sweet).

Mostly I've learned what not to do (Doritos. Awfully messy).

I totally think Shakespeare was going in this direction when he died.
MacBeth would be so much better with fembots, lasers,
and explosions, don't you think?
I wonder why don't they let me in English classes?

I know the market is saturated. It's like a single french fry injected with the contents of an entire ketchup bottle. And I'm talking one big damn bottle of ketchup, something you'd buy at Costco and wheel out on a dolly. With over three million books on Kindle alone, you need to be very, very good to stand out.

Things are very different from 2010. Like Netscape 1994 vs. Chrome 2015. Night vs. day. Burning centre of the sun vs. far side of Pluto, yada yada. You get the general idea.

There are lots of free books out there. Thousands and thousands, and hundreds of new ones every day. It's difficult to even give books away unless you have an absolutely captivating cover and bang on blurb. Think concise. High concept. Story outlines that can be conveyed in one single, sweet sentence and still blow people's minds.

To rise above the vast ocean of books, you need to write populist material which gains readers and reviews quickly. Otherwise, your book sinks into oblivion.

And you need to be fast and capitalize quickly on success. Write a 'book' (30,000 to 45,000 words) per month, all part of the same series, and keep pumping them out in order to stay in the spotlight.

How am I going to squish all
these stupid ads into this one page?
Is it even possible?

Otherwise, you sink into Oblivion. On the plus side you get to hang out in Iceland with Tom Cruise.

Writing one book will get you nowhere and no readers.

You need a series.

And of course there are exceptions that prove the generality.

All of which, in hindsight, seems blindingly obvious. Of course you need a series. Of course you need to define your 'property' quickly, simply and memorably. If I'd bothered to do the research, I'd have known all this going in.

I suppose I kind of did, in my typical butt-backward, muddled sort of way.

It's always been tough to make headway as a writer. Most books put out by traditional publishers sell under 500 copies. And publishers carefully pick through the materials they receive, rejecting virtually all of them. They publish only a small handful of what they consider the very best submissions. The cream of the crop. And these select, elite few still lose money most of the time. They require megahits to pay for not just their rents and salaries and promotional costs, but for all the money losing books as well.

It's like that in film and music too.

Seems like a crazy business model if you stop and think about it. Like setting out to make widgets, only 99 per cent don't work and cost money, and I bet the farm on the 1 per cent that do to pay for everything else. It just sounds weird.

Going... into... banner...
overload... UNNNH

I boldly (if I do say so myself) decided to write a book and let the cards fall where they may. Much like most other bright eyed, bushy tailed novices, I imagine. Not exactly a sound business plan.

But I can do you, dear (imaginary) reader, a favor: if you have somehow stumbled across this site in search of answers, and you are an aspiring writer, I can tell you this, in all honesty and humility: get your behind over to kboards, The Passive Voice, or Dean Wesley Smith's site and take a gander at what they have to say. Smith in particular seems to have his head screwed on straight. I think he may actually be a real person too, which is nice to see on The Internets.

Oh yeah: I've now done the free book promo deal. Yessir: moved about 1,400 copies, which is pretty good, all things considered (people don't know me from a stranger standing outside their window late at night). Don't know if that will lead to reviews or not. We'll see. That was the primary objective, but it's not something I have any control over.

Something I can control: wrote a couple short stories set in the Thraxverse to put up in the wake of the freebie promotional blitz. Got one up on Kindle now for 99¢: Future Fossil, a Magnum Thrax Short Story. I think it's fun, wild and whacky and just plain crazy, but YMMV.

And that's about it. I'm pretty happy with my due diligence in regards to my book and efforts to get the word out, even if my advertising banner campaign was utterly inept. I compared myself to Douglas Adams, which just the kind of outrageous and dubious claim real marketers might make. Take that, internet curmudgeons! Sadly, cheeky ad banners don't work.

Now I face a dilemma: do I write more in the Thraxverse, or try something else? Like, say, standing outside windows, or randomly washing motor vehicle windshields at intersections? Perhaps I will try and build a functioning spacecraft out of macaroni (see if anyone gets THAT reference).

Without much in the way of feedback, it's hard to say. I had fun writing the book, imagining a whacky future reality and a creating a slew of off-beat characters.

This is way too wide for my blog, but by God... boundaries cannot contain me! RAAAH--

May be time to zig rather than zag.

My one and only mobile ad.
One day, it will be a valuable collectible item.
I suggest you pull it off onto your drive immediately.

Right?

Booyah, biatches!

Buehler? Buehler?

Future Fossil: A Magnum Thrax Short Story

Published a Magnum Thrax (you know, this wild and crazy book) Prequel Short Story: Future Fossil.

Return to a screwed up future filled with mad mutants, religious raptors ushering in the rapture, and scantily clad fembots totting big guns. Because tropes are great fun.

The opening:

The leopard spotted tank raced across the searing hot salt flats, pulling a train of wagons loaded with oak barrels. A large, Vegas-style sign spun atop the turret, emblazoned with ‘Pleasurepit Five’ in neon pink. 

The vehicle slowed as it approached a rock formation that jutted out of the salt ocean. It paused, engine revving. 

The ruin of a big purple transport rig lay forlorn in the sand to the right. The windshield had been shattered and the glittering purple paint was streaked by ragged claw marks. 

Far above, in the crystal blue sky, drifted advertising clouds shilling products that hadn’t been made for a thousand years.

The tank's cupola swiveled towards a cleft in the rock to the left, wide enough for a vehicle. There were signs on either side of the entrance, promising water and goods for gold, and death for those who couldn’t pay.

The engine roared. Greasy smoke belched from rusted exhaust pipes. The tank charged up into the narrow passage, clipping the sides of the granite canyon. Sparks and stone chips sprayed out form each impact as the tank raced recklessly forward. 

Several harrowing hairpin turns later, the metal beast pulled out of the canyon’s cool shadows into a gloriously sunlit sand cove. The walls were lined with stacked, makeshift residences constructed out of salvaged materials looted from ancient buildings. Along the north face, cog wheels mounted on steel supports suspended a rickety freight elevator over a thirty-foot wide hole in the ground. Above it was a wooden sign that proclaimed, "Welcome to Utan Oasis."

The top turret hatch popped open, and an impossibly good looking man stuck his head out. Full head of glorious hair, sharp cheek bones and square jaw. Genetically enhanced. He wore wrap around sunglasses and a Seventies-style white disco suit that never, ever got dirty. 

His name was Magnum Thrax. He was eighteen.

“Kal!” he called. “Kal! Where are ya, buddy? It’s Thrax!”

Silence.

“KAL!!!"

Thrax swore. It’d been a week since he’d last had radio contact with his friend. He bit his lip and scanned the compound.

No one in sight.

Dust blew. 

An unsecured door clattered in the wind.

Thrax tapped on the tank surface with the butt of his rifle, and hauled himself out. “C’mon, ladies. Time to play hide and seek.”

Other hatches clanged open and five impossibly beautiful women, wearing skimpy outfits of latex, fishnets, and camouflage, clambered out. They hefted incongruously large energy weapons that hummed with gigawatt-voltage menace. 

“No sign of your friend?” asked one of the ladies. She wore a white armband with a red cross on it. Thrax struggled to remember her name. Candy. Team medic.

“Nada. Gotta find him,” proclaimed Thrax, roughly running a hand through his hair. "I gotta!" 

Check out the whole thing over on Amazon. Give it a read, recommend it with wild abandon, and click endlessly on the like button. If, that is, you feel so inclined. I know I do.

How much do writers make?

Short answer: not a lot.

Take a gander at the graph above.

According to The Guardian, author income has collapsed to 'abject levels': a British survey of 2,500 working writers in 2013 found the median income was a mere £11,000, down 29% since 2005. When all writers were included, the average income was £4,000 in 2013, down from £8,810 in 2000.

The minimum standard of living income in Britain is £16,850.

For many, writing is either a hobby or a secondary job (at least, in terms of income. Soul fulfillment wise, might be the other way around). Only 11 percent of authors earn their entire income from writing, which is also down from 40 percent in 2005. This coincides with the collapse of revenue for newspapers and magazines and the rise of independent publishing. Classified sections used to pull in up to half of newspaper revenue, and now they’re on Craigslist—for free. And with millions of self-published books available, a tough market is getting tougher.

I was talking to a former journalist a couple years ago, after the 2008 recession hit, and she claimed newspapers have been using interns to write material that would once have been done by paid journalists. Sadly, these young people are jumping from one internship to another, without any prospect of getting rewarded with a paid job down the line. It’s like a form of volunteer slavery, accessible only to those who have alternate forms of income to fall back upon, or rely upon family support.

The whole system is in upheaval as revenue streams dissipate.

The music industry isn't any better off:

After 20 years in the music business, (Diana Williamson) says she’s seeing songwriters “leaving in droves. If you can’t make a living, if you can’t afford go to the dentist, you’re going to leave.” This is a lament you’ll hear from artists everywhere these days: We can’t afford to do this any more. The well has dried up. Freelance rates are what they were when the first Trudeau was in power. Rents rose, and royalties fell. Novelists are becoming real-estate agents; musicians open coffee shops.

This sense of doom and gloom has spawned websites such as Newspaper Death Watch. On the plus side, papers have been pushed out of their complacency and are now trying hard to innovate, monetize, and remain relevant. Marc Andreessen, for example, is bullish on the future of the news industry and sees the light at the end of the tunnel.

Let's hope he's right. People are going to want news in some form or another. Yet things are likely to be in a state of flux for the foreseeable future, as technological change accelerates and leads to further shifts in the way books are delivered and 'consumed'.

And then there is Will Self, who wrote a cheeky article for The Guardian called The novel is dead (this time it’s for real):

'How do you think it feels to have dedicated your entire adult life to an art form only to see the bloody thing dying before your eyes?… I do not mean narrative prose fiction tout court is dying – the kidult boywizardsroman and the soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy are clearly in rude good health.'

What a relief. I was worried for my soft sadomasochistic porn fantasy's prospects.

One thing I found surprising was that most of the authors on top of the NYT bestsellers list aren’t making a living at it. Novelist Lynn Viehl, writer of the bestselling Twilight Fall:

'My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshold (based on 2008 figures). Yep, we'd almost qualify for foodstamps.'

Which makes the mad production rate of indie writers understandable: some produce a book a month, albeit short ones of roughly 35,000 words, and report income of tens of thousands per month, far higher than most in traditional publishing. Which is awesome. It can be done.

James Smythe, a sci-fi author who’s won awards and been given glowing reviews, has not yet had any of his five books for HarperCollins earn out. That means none of them have earned back the advance he was paid to write them. They lost the publisher money, as most books do, because publishers are often overly optimistic about how much a book will earn. He teaches at a university to make ends meet:

"Being a writer can't be treated like it's a job. It maybe was once, but no writer can treat it as such nowadays. There's no ground beneath your feet in terms of income, and you can't rely on money to come when you need it.”

The industry survives on breakout hits, which subsidize the much larger number of failures. For publishers, its a matter of throwing enough stuff at a wall, waiting to see what sticks, then lavishing all their attention upon it. Which leads them to 'prey' upon self-published authors in the same way large corporations 'prey' on small, innovative startups. Innovation is costly, risky, and difficult for large, calcified corporations to do effectively. So they sit back and watch while daring, nimble startups take the risks. When one is finally successful, they sweep in, buy them out, and save themselves headaches, development costs, and risk.

Little wonder publishers keep a sharp eye on what sells in the indie market.

I went to a talk by Hugh Howey last year, the author of the best-selling WOOL series, and he said that when publishers first came after him, they only offered him $50,000 for publishing rights. He said no, but they kept coming back with higher offers. He continued to decline. Eventually the number reached into the millions, along with very favourable terms. Finally he said yes. But if he’d not held out, if he’d had any doubts about his work, he’d have gotten poor terms.

Everyone is out for the best deal they can get, after all, on both sides.

Bottom line? It's a tough business that requires perseverance, dedication, and hard work. Those who rise to the top are the ones writing a thousand words or more every day.

Me? I've got no plans to quit my day job.

But I hope you can.

It's on, baby: Magnum Thrax FREE Feb 1st to 3rd, 2015

Yeah, baby, yeah! Finally settled on some dates for the Kindle Select freebie days.

There are apparently between 5,000 and 8,000 free ebooks out there every day. Kindle alone has over 3 million books, and given the emphasis on production and churning out novels every other month (see kboards), that number is only going to grow.

The window where getting exposure was easy is over. People don't have to look for free books, they're already buried under an avalanche of prose.

So I've made a cheeky ad campaign (what the heck do I know, haven't done anything like this before, so booyah!), and I'm planning on blowing my marketing budget, micro it may be, all in one three day blitz from February 1st to February 3rd, 2015. During this period, you can download Magnum Thrax and the Amusement Park of Doom, all 500 odd pages of mayhem and madness, for free.

Free, I say!

Because insidious marketing scheme.

The goal is to get a little exposure and some reviews, which are rather difficult to get, positive or negative.

After that, not much else to be done for volume one.

I'll just get back to work on other writing projects, and see what happens.

Monkeys, mutants, and Marxists

The classic twist ending. A post-apocalypse tradition is born.

“Somewhere out there there has to be something better than man.” - Taylor (Charlton Heston)

As if.

For a thoroughly satirical post-apocalypse, look no further than the first two Planet of the Apes pictures.

They're far more than Apes in Spaaaaace.

We're lucky the series got made at all, despite having producer Arthur P. Jacobs leading the charge and Charlton Heston being attached. Studio execs feared the apes would be unconvincing, even laughable, and wouldn't give the green light until makeup tests proved otherwise.

Nor did the script come together easily. Rod Serling spent a year writing thirty drafts before he finally got the script right, and then only with the help of the formerly blacklisted Marxist, Michael Wilson. Wilson is better known for classics like Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

Pierre Boule's book La Planéte des Singes, on which the film is based, has little in the way of action or fisticuffs. It also depicts a highly advanced ape society, which the filmmakers did not have enough money to recreate on screen. Due to budget constraints, the films' ape civilization would be much more primitive.

The series opens in the cockpit of a spacecraft, the ultimate antiseptic, finely controlled environment. This is human civilization at its peak. All of the crew are asleep, in cryogenic stasis, save Taylor, the misanthropic captain played by Charlton Heston. He's entering a log, Captain Kirk style, but being considerably more introspective because he's got time to kill and themes to advance:

"Space is boundless. It squashes a man's ego. I feel lonely. That's about it. Tell me though. Does man that marvel of the universe that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?”

That's the set up. High tech ship soaring through the stars, mankind's best aboard, pondering the meaning of life. Mankind is on top and in charge.

All is right with the universe.

Heston and his sleeping beauties.

Then the rug gets yanked out and we enter free fall.

They didn’t have enough money to show the ship crash landing, so they shot it from the ship’s POV, using footage taken by airplane. The camera spins and yaws, then careens down into a lake, pulling the viewer along with it.

It’s a stunning, delirious sequence, born of necessity, but it works fabulously, establishing an eerie, artsy vibe, thanks to the fantastic cinematography, the magnificence of the Arizona desert, and the unnerving score. 

If it weren't for the title, the last thing you'd expect is for the astronauts to run into a bunch of talking gorillas. It starts out posing as fairly Hard SF.

Heston and two bright-eyed, bushy-tailed comrades, Landon and Dodge, escape their sinking spacecraft, but the fourth member of their expedition, a woman who would be the new eve, dies before landing due to a malfunction in her cryotube.

The barren Arizona desert makes for a wonderful alien world. Lifeless from horizon to horizon. The cast is framed against the vast landscape, without a single plant to be seen.

Eventually the stranded astronauts find a weed, which fills the crew with hope, despite Taylor razzing them every step of the way. Soon the wastes give way to lush forest and grassland. They find a pool right out of Doctor Doolittle and jump in, only to have their clothes and equipment mysteriously stolen before they can get out.

They encounter a herd of mute humans, who have been reduced to the level of animal intelligence.

Heston figures they’ll be running the place in short order.

His ambitions are quickly dashed as they hear hunting horns sound.

Because these human beings are being hunted like animals. The pursuers are at first unseen. We catch glimpses of poles thrashing the cornfield, rifles firing, horses charging. Humans are flushed like birds, herded like cattle, shot like dogs.

Finally Heston catches sight of the horsemen and realizes… they're apes!

One of the astronauts is killed, a second captured, and Heston wounded in the throat. 

Smile! Apes proudly pose over fresh trophies. Wait, aren't those... Soylent Green?

As the hunt concludes, trophy photos taken over their corpses. By making apes the oppressors, Serling set into very sharp relief man’s barbarity to man, and comments on racism and colonialism.

Granted, it's pretty obvious what planet this is, as the apes speak perfect English. There was some talk of having the apes speak a kind of gibberish at first, which becomes intelligible (English) as Heston picks up the local language. But this was abandoned as being too complicated for audiences of the time.

Heston is injured and separated from his friends, and gets thrown into the upside down world of ape politics. It’s a simplified mirror of our own world, of course, with ape society broken up into three castes: orangutans are authority figures, gorillas are soldiers and workers (presumably farmers as well), and chimpanzees are the middle class and ineffectual intellectuals.

This class based view of society fits with Wilson's Marxist leanings, and actually enriches the picture, adding further depth to the social messages and sharp witted satire.

In fact, the ape actors so took to their race / class based roles that they all ate by group: gorilla with gorilla, chimp with chimp, orangutan with orangutan.

Heston with his chimpanzee patrons. It's like Uplift, except they dissect you.
So it totally, like, isn't. Never mind.

Taylor is paraded around on a leash, threatened with castration and lobotomy, and kept in a cage. The world is now fully inverted: privileged astronaut and American hero Taylor is now a mere animal. From top to bottom in under thirty minutes.

Due to his throat injury, Taylor cannot speak, and his attempts to try are mocked by apes as mere mimicry.

For such a man as Taylor, the fall could not be greater.

Heston's fellow astronaut, post-brain surgery.

The threat of having his balls lopped off compels Taylor to escape. He leads the apes about in a merry chase around their village and gets pelted with rotten fruit and finally snagged in a net. As the gorilla guards move in to apprehend him, Heston utters the classic line, "Take your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" 

He's quickly rushed to trial. Dr. Zaius, the orangutan Minister of Science and Defender of the Faith (in a nice satirical touch), is hell bent on having Taylor put down, and his chimp patrons censored.

See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
Just a tad on the nose, but it does emphasize the film's satirical intent.

This anti-human attitude just makes Taylor, the devout misanthrope, earnestly wonder why Dr. Zaius fears and hates him so. He should just ask his earlier self.

Taylor views man as weak and pathetic; everything he says about humanity drips with scorn, from his disgust for his fellow astronauts to his sneering contempt for the weakness of a long dead man who once possessed ancient artifacts (a pacemaker, spectacles) that the apes unearth.

Near the end of the film, Cornelius, at the behest of Dr. Zaius, reads from The Sacred Scrolls:

"Beware the beast Man for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair for he is the harbinger of death."

Whereupon Charlton promptly goes out and discovers his destiny, and the truth: he was home all along. Man is indeed the harbinger of death, and by the megaton.

Taylor is an arrogant, smug narcissist. A self-made God. As Grouchy Marx might say, he is someone who 'would never belong to any club that would have him.'

And humanity, ages ago, delivered on Taylor's low expectations.

He ends the film pounding his fist helplessly into the surf, bowed before the crumbling remains of the Statue of Liberty.

It's an image laden with symbolism, and the scene is a slap in the face, a visual scream, a wake-up call for all humanity, demanding us to do better, to not let the writers, and ourselves, down. To prove we're better than what Taylor (and the writers) believe us to be.

That's one hell of a political statement for a mainstream film. Very, very few filmmakers have the guts or the belly fire to try and pull something like that off.

It’s one of the bleakest films in all of Hollywood history, except for its sequel, Beneath Planet of the Apes. Written by screenwriter Paul Dehn of Goldfinger fame, Beneath indulges in the macabre. At one point it even had a bestiality subplot. Compared to Serling, Dehn is lightning fast at laying down prose: he wrote the script for Escape from Planet of the Apes in a mere three weeks.

New York City, above and below. The buildings were made up of torn photos of New York landmarks.
They did this pic on the cheap.

This film is a mixed bag, as the first half recycles the first film with a different cast and lower budget. About half way through, freaky new elements are introduced: mutated humans living under the nuked remnants of New York City, who worship an atomic bomb kept in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Just as the apes are superficially barbaric but underneath like us, the superficially sophisticated mutants turn out to be barbaric. They represent the upper class intelligentsia during The Cold War, mouthing platitudes about peace and non-violence while hiding behind a shield of devastating nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the planet a thousand times over.

Brent, the Charlton Heston lookalike, discovers the truth.
No. That everyone was speaking English was most certainly not enough.

When musicals go bad: the infamous Hello, Dolly
subway station interrogation of Brent by telepathic troglodytes,
 who consider themselves 'the only reality in the universe'.

It’s all explicitly MAD. As the mutant leader and high priest Mendez says, corrupting scripture, "Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen."

They upgraded the Holy Hand Grenade.

The mutants view torturing people with 'psychic deterrents' as acceptable because they aren’t inflicting physical harm. It’s the sort of hair splitting that got the United States into waterboarding.

They’re also terrible singers.

For all their talk about being defenseless and peaceful, the mutants torture someone every couple of minutes.

Mutant reveals her inmost self unto her god, and you kind of wish she didn't.

As one of the mutants declares, "Mr. Taylor, Mr. Brent. We are a peaceful people. We don't kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”

And then he pulls the old ‘let’s you and him fight to the death’ while I watch, all morally pure and peaceful like. It's perverted and twisted and deeply hypocritical. It's barbarism meets passive-aggressive narcissism.

Charming.

And the 'true self' they reveal to their A-bomb is grotesque. According to Dehn:

"At first, we were going to have them really mutated with monstrous noses and three eyes, real horror figures, but we didn't think that would have been nice for the children and after a great deal of research, it was the makeup department that came up with the idea that if you had been radiated, all seven layers of your skin would have been destroyed, and all that would be left was this terrible network of veins."

On the other side, gorilla General Ursus delivers gems like ‘The only good human is a dead human!’ to much applause from his troops.

Yeah, totally a show for seven-year-olds. 

Touring the underground sites.

And just in case you missed the other political parallels, there’s a scene where chimpanzee pacifists try and stop the ape army as it marches to battle… with placards and a sit in! The only thing missing is John Lennon in ape makeup singing 'All we are saying is give peace a chance'. The filmmakers couldn’t bash home their point any harder if they waded into the audience armed with two-by-fours.

The oafish, militaristic apes and the insufferably smug mutants naturally come into conflict, and the end result (spoilers) is the end of the world.

Or rather, the end of the post-end world.

Bored of it all, Carlton Heston sets off the doomsday weapon in order to rid himself of the franchise, and the earth is reduced to a cinder hanging in space.

A narrator solemnly intones:

"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."

"Screw you guys, I'm off to make The Hawaiians!"

Hard to top when it comes to bleak endings. 

It's one hell of a pointed anti-war statement.

Screenwriter Dehn didn't want to go full nihilist originally (never go The Full Nihilist), preferring a bestiality angle:

"The plot of 'Apes 2' was suggested by the memorable last shot of 'Apes 1': the half-buried Statue of Liberty. This implied that New York itself lay buried beneath what the Apes called 'The Forbidden Zone'. It remained only to people the underground city with Mutants descended from the survivors of a nuclear bomb dropped on New York 2,000 years earlier, and, thus, to motivate a war between expansionist Apes and peaceable but dangerously sophisticated Mutants resulting in the final destruction of Earth… I wanted a more optimistic end to 'Apes 2' than the destruction of Earth by the Doomsday Bomb, but my own end, the birth of a child half-human and half-monkey, proved intractable in terms of make-up, and anyway it was thought that Man-Ape miscegenation might lose us our G certificate!" 

So there you have it: the world was blown up because of the failure of a makeup test.

The executives wanted the whole series killed off: 

"I was under strict orders not to produce a sequel. Fox said there would be no further sequels after this, kindly destroy the entire world and wind up the series. So I duly did this and as you remember at the end the world blew up, the screen went white and the earth was dead."

They came to their senses as soon as they saw the box office returns.

Ironically, the franchise’s success with sequels and merchandising led to more sequels and more movie franchises.

Way to go, Charlton! Total backfire.

It's worth noting that all the authority figures in the film are unsympathetic. Heston takes a pox on all your houses stance, Ursus believes the only human is a dead one, Zaius views man as a pestilence, and Mendez, the leader of the mutants, believes his entire people, 'the only reality in the universe', exist solely to guard an A-bomb.

Apes as universal symbols for class struggle: military, intelligentsia, and bourgeois.
Humans are The Other.

The most sympathetic characters are the chimps Zira and Cornelius. They represent the bourgeois, the decency of the American middle class, sticking up for the little guy while objecting to abuses of power by corrupt higher ups. Even so, Zira works in the zoo, performing Dr. Mengele like experiments on human beings. They are not free of sin, but they are willing to recognize, and work with, The Other.

General Ursus is motivated by more than hatred: drought has brought ape society to the brink of catastrophe. Starvation looms. He intends to conquer The Forbidden Zone in order to expand their food supply, against the objections of Dr. Zaius. It doesn't quite make sense as nothing grows in The Forbidden Zone, but then, no one would accuse Ursus of being brainy, and it does add some nuance to his character.

Zaius is probably the most interesting. He's intelligent and might be willing to negotiate, even cooperate, with humans, save for the secret knowledge he's privy to. Alone among the apes, he knows mankind once ruled the earth and 'made a desert of it'. The vast wastes of The Forbidden Zone are testament to mankind's destructive capability. As such, Zaius distrusts anything to do with us, and believes 'man is capable of nothing but destruction.' 

All things considered, an understandable point of view. Should man get a second chance after nuking the planet the first time around?

Dr. Zaius doesn't think so. He rejects Taylor's pleas at the end of Beneath Planet of the Apes, so the petulant Taylor blows the planet to smithereens. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. So there, you bastages: the refusal of a simple kindness by Dr. Zaius, his unwillingness to empathize with The Other, costs everyone their lives, and the planet to boot.

Another strong statement in a series filled with them.

The series raises the hopes of the audience repeatedly, and then, just when you think a happy ending is nigh, they punch you in the face and deliver the dark.

The characters would have made great contestants on Big Brother, they're so well designed to conflict with each other. Super intelligent mutants clash with jock gorillas, empathic chimps chaff under the rule of overbearing elitist orangutans, and put upon Brent gets razzed by the snarky, misanthropic Taylor.

The rest of the original Ape films rant on about human short-sightedness and stupidity until the studio starved their budget into oblivion. The last film looks like half of it was filmed in a local park, and the other half in the studio basement.

Interspecies romance blossoms.

The series is radical cinema posing as sci-fi pulp. If any filmmaker had decided to cover political issues like slavery as bluntly, at that time, they’d never have gotten their project funded. The studios would have toned it down, smoothed the rough edges, turned it into inoffensive pap and had everyone singing Kumbaya by the closing credits. By setting it in a fictional environment populated with people in ape outfits, they were able to skewer anything they wanted. It's post-apocalyptic South Park. Satire with real bite.

One of the perks of well done science fiction.

Generally regarded as the worst film in the entire ape franchise, save for Battle for Planet of the Apes, it's my second favorite of the original run, primarily because of the funky mutants and their stylish, tonal telepathy. Also, doomsday bomb. KABOOM!

I can live with the first half because the second has the tinnitus inflicting mutants and a cranky hero who blows up the planet in the ultimate 'screw-you-guys-I'm-going-home' moment.

That’s the kind of stuff that fries little kids brains.

It's Marxism meets monkeys, and it all ends with nihilism stomping hope in the face, forever.  

Brrrrr.

The stuff about the dog and cat plague… PFFT! Please. Like we'd really get three hundred pound gorillas as replacement house pets, especially after the visit of three hyper-intelligent apes from a future where humans are hunted for sport.

Seriously, no one could take the hint?

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is another classic post-apocalyptic look at human intolerance, as human survivors try to wipe out genetically superior successors. Rather bleak Darwinian logic motivates the old paradigm to try and kill off the new, in order to prevent itself from being relegated, in the long term, to extinction. They know that awaits them eventually. It’s a rather zero sum view of the world, but then, over ninety percent of all the species that have ever lived are extinct.

Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, on the other hand, is not particularly political. It’s a fun trip through a wild post-apocalyptic landscape with little in the way of sharp satirical edge, and that’s fine. It’s aimed at a rather young audience, but it's wildly imaginative and filled with non-stop action.