Fantastic Planet
by Stefan Wul
translated by Anthony Georges Whyte
Creation Oneiros
1957, reprinted 2010
Fantastic Planet is a 2010 English translation of French scifi author Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en serie. Avid followers of the blog might remember that I read the graphic novel adaptation of Wul's book Trapped on Zarkass awhile back.
Fantastic Planet is also the English language title of La planete sauvage, the 1973 animated film adaptation of Oms en serie, which has kind of attained cult movie status in the US. That film is the first way I encountered the story, and after reading the book it was based on, I think the cartoon might be the best version of the story.
I missed my chance to buy my own copy of this book when it first came out, and now it's basically not available for sale at any price. Fortunately the ILL office at my library was able to borrow a copy for me! The book itself seems surprisingly cheaply made, considering. The author's name is misspelled on the cover. The aliens who are called 'Draags' in the original, the film, and the back cover, are for some reason called 'Traags' in the text. And there are maybe a dozen places where the space between two words is missing, combining them intoone.
I missed my chance to buy my own copy of this book when it first came out, and now it's basically not available for sale at any price. Fortunately the ILL office at my library was able to borrow a copy for me! The book itself seems surprisingly cheaply made, considering. The author's name is misspelled on the cover. The aliens who are called 'Draags' in the original, the film, and the back cover, are for some reason called 'Traags' in the text. And there are maybe a dozen places where the space between two words is missing, combining them intoone.
Fantastic Planet follows the life of a human named Terr on the alien planet of Ygam. Terr is short for 'terror,' but also obviously a pun on the French word for earth, terre. Ygam is the home of the giant Draags, compared to whom humans are tiny, probably the size of a GI Joe or Barbie. The Draags call humans 'Oms' - again, a pun; the French word for humans is hommes - and they keep us as pets. Pet Oms are believed to be unintelligent, although most can learn a bit of the Draag language. Terr inadvertently listens to a lot of his owner's daughter's audio school lessons and learns much more than usual.
Terr flees his owner's home and starts living in a giant tree in the city park with a colony of wild and feral Oms. His ability to read immediately helps the colony's scavenging efforts, and soon he sees a sign announcing the 'deomization' of the park, allowing them to flee to safety in time. Terr eventually becomes the leader. The Oms move into an abandoned Draag city, commandeer a trio of boats, and sail to an uninhabited continent, where they build a new city.
All the while, the Draag government slowly becomes aware of the growing size and intelligence of the wild Om population. They're aware of where we came from, and fear us becoming a rival, or even the new dominant species of their planet. Terr and the others repeatedly outmaneuver the Draags, repurposing their own technology to use against them. After achieving military detente, Terr asks for equality (and freedom for any remaining pet Oms), not dominance.
I mentioned that compared to humans, the Draags are giants. They also live their lives on a different scale. One Ygam day is equivalent to 45 earth days. Thus, each hour for the Draags is like two days for their pets. From the Draags' perspective, they live at the same pace that humans live on Earth, in terms of their lifespan and how much they do in a day. And so from their perspective, the Oms aren't just tiny, but quick, napping and waking constantly throughout each day, maturing quickly, and living for only a fraction of the Draag lifespan, usually only a year, at most two. The Oms succeed in part because they're far more intelligent than the Draags believe (even though they've lost their language, culture, history to enslavement), but also because they simply do everything much more quickly. Whenever the Draags decide at the end of the workday to do something tomorrow morning, the Oms have two or three weeks to run away in time.
There are two things I like about the way Wul approaches this. The first is that he establishes the basic difference in scale but doesn't get bogged down in details or realistic consequences. I associate this way of doing things with European scifi, and American literary authors dabbling in speculative fiction. Sometimes the looseness of this approach annoys me, but it really works here. Someone like Greg Egan would surely have spent several chapters explaining the imaginary physics and its implications, and any number of authors influenced by hard scifi, or like, Brandon Sanderson's systematic approach to writing about magic, would've felt honor bound to pantomime rigor. But Wul's more fantastical style works in this case.
The other thing I like is that although we're following human characters, the book is organized around Draag time. Journeys and other projects are described as taking hours or days or weeks - when what's unspoken is that this represents days, months, or years of human time. But the Oms think in the same terms and units as their captors. They themselves think of having children as 'breeding,' and when hundreds or thousands die in a single moment, the survivors act as though their own lives have no more significance than ants crushed underfoot. It's a little hard to explain how Wul does this, but when you're reading, it feels like the events are happening really quickly, even though we follow Terr from birth to old age. I would argue that it's this aspect of his storytelling, more than anything else, that distinguishes Fantastic Planet from any other 'aliens conquer humans' stories.
Considering the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of finding a copy of this to read, alongside the very faithful weirdness of the animated adaptation, I recommend just watching the film.
Terr flees his owner's home and starts living in a giant tree in the city park with a colony of wild and feral Oms. His ability to read immediately helps the colony's scavenging efforts, and soon he sees a sign announcing the 'deomization' of the park, allowing them to flee to safety in time. Terr eventually becomes the leader. The Oms move into an abandoned Draag city, commandeer a trio of boats, and sail to an uninhabited continent, where they build a new city.
All the while, the Draag government slowly becomes aware of the growing size and intelligence of the wild Om population. They're aware of where we came from, and fear us becoming a rival, or even the new dominant species of their planet. Terr and the others repeatedly outmaneuver the Draags, repurposing their own technology to use against them. After achieving military detente, Terr asks for equality (and freedom for any remaining pet Oms), not dominance.
I mentioned that compared to humans, the Draags are giants. They also live their lives on a different scale. One Ygam day is equivalent to 45 earth days. Thus, each hour for the Draags is like two days for their pets. From the Draags' perspective, they live at the same pace that humans live on Earth, in terms of their lifespan and how much they do in a day. And so from their perspective, the Oms aren't just tiny, but quick, napping and waking constantly throughout each day, maturing quickly, and living for only a fraction of the Draag lifespan, usually only a year, at most two. The Oms succeed in part because they're far more intelligent than the Draags believe (even though they've lost their language, culture, history to enslavement), but also because they simply do everything much more quickly. Whenever the Draags decide at the end of the workday to do something tomorrow morning, the Oms have two or three weeks to run away in time.
There are two things I like about the way Wul approaches this. The first is that he establishes the basic difference in scale but doesn't get bogged down in details or realistic consequences. I associate this way of doing things with European scifi, and American literary authors dabbling in speculative fiction. Sometimes the looseness of this approach annoys me, but it really works here. Someone like Greg Egan would surely have spent several chapters explaining the imaginary physics and its implications, and any number of authors influenced by hard scifi, or like, Brandon Sanderson's systematic approach to writing about magic, would've felt honor bound to pantomime rigor. But Wul's more fantastical style works in this case.
The other thing I like is that although we're following human characters, the book is organized around Draag time. Journeys and other projects are described as taking hours or days or weeks - when what's unspoken is that this represents days, months, or years of human time. But the Oms think in the same terms and units as their captors. They themselves think of having children as 'breeding,' and when hundreds or thousands die in a single moment, the survivors act as though their own lives have no more significance than ants crushed underfoot. It's a little hard to explain how Wul does this, but when you're reading, it feels like the events are happening really quickly, even though we follow Terr from birth to old age. I would argue that it's this aspect of his storytelling, more than anything else, that distinguishes Fantastic Planet from any other 'aliens conquer humans' stories.
Considering the difficulty, verging on impossibility, of finding a copy of this to read, alongside the very faithful weirdness of the animated adaptation, I recommend just watching the film.
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