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Neanderthal Planet is a science fiction short story by Brian Aldiss. It was first published in 1969, and later as part of the collection, Neanderthal Planet , in 1970.
In a futuristic Manhattan, AIs have become intelligent and independent of humans. Able to think and communicate with both great precision and speed, they find humans and their problems primitive, backward, and largely uninteresting. The 19,940 existing humans are kept on a reserve, out of the AIs' way, and are largely ignored except for when they wander into the surrounding domain of the machines.
One human, Anderson, is an author. He escapes the zoo in an act of defiance, despite knowing that the effort is futile and that the AIs cannot understand the significance of his act. He is captured by the Chief Scanner robot, who affects the name "Euler". Before Euler can return the tranquillised Anderson to the other humans, his superior, Dominant, insists that they interview Anderson. The AIs wish to understand his behaviour, and use Anderson's last published story, "A Touch of Neanderthal", as a point of discussion.
Thus begins a story within a story. Anderson tells of Nehru II, a planet with a harsh environment, settled by humans, which has fallen out of contact with Earth and does not respond to any messages. The main character, also named Anderson, is sent to discover the problem, because he had personally known one of the settlers. On the planet, he glimpses a baby woolly rhinoceros, despite its species being long extinct. He subsequently meets a number of sub-human savages, startling but largely harmless, and two relatively normal humans, Stanley A. Menderstone and Alice. They are living as recluses in a wooden building in the remains of the only settled village.
Menderstone and Alice are, at first, reluctant to divulge why the settlers seem to have regressed into such a primitive state. Staying the night, Anderson sneaks out and finds his old friend, now playing the role of tribal chieftain among the savages. In horror, Anderson flees back to the house, where he hallucinates that a steel metal rod transforms into a snake and attacks him.
Eventually, Alice reveals what has occurred on the planet. Humankind, she says, is a hybrid race, a mixture of the original Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Some people have more of one element in them than the other. Earth had purposefully not allowed sophisticated equipment be sent with the original settlers of Nehru II in an attempt to make them dependent so they could not possibly rebel in the future, but as a result the settlers found themselves in conditions not unlike prehistoric Earth, having to contend with the environment, shape simple tools, and make fire from basic materials. As a result, those with a stronger Neanderthal element within themselves began to become dependent on it to survive, and regressed into a more Neanderthal state of being. Alice and Menderstone happen to have less Neanderthal in them, so they remained as they are.
Shocked, Anderson escapes the house, in a desperate attempt to get to his ship and leave the planet. On the way, he hallucinates other animals and events, supposed to be a racial memory of prehistoric times, and finds himself unable to handle artificial objects, repulsed by their alienness. Alice again finds him, and explains that now that the Neanderthal part of his mind has taken hold there is nothing that can stop it. Although at first frightened and resistant, Anderson finds himself seeing his environment, once harsh and untamed, as beautiful and idyllic. Despite his early statements to the contrary, he eventually abandons his clothes and weapons and runs to join the blissful Neanderthals in the forest.
Euler and Dominant demand to know the meaning of this story, which Anderson is unable to give, insisting that it was nothing more than a bit of fancy. When pressed, Anderson relents that it might represent the inability of a society to truly move onto a higher, more advanced mode of life when the presence of the primitive still holds it back.
Over the next week, the AIs disappear entirely. Back at the human zoo, Anderson and his wife Sheila discuss the event. Although Sheila congratulates him on tricking the AIs to leave, Anderson says that he truly feels that humans were holding them back. They communicated in English, had anthropomorphic designs, took personal names, and a host of other inefficient idiosyncrasies due to their history with humans. By abandoning their trappings of humanity, the AIs have finally had the push they needed to become abstract entities, something incomprehensible to the humans as it has nothing at all in common with them.
The Savage Land is a hidden prehistoric land appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. It is a tropical preserve hidden in Antarctica. It has appeared in many story arcs in Uncanny X-Men as well as other related books.
"People Are Alike All Over" is episode 25 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is the second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction "trilogy" by Douglas Adams, and is a sequel. It was originally published by Pan Books as a paperback in 1980. The book was inspired by the song "Grand Hotel" by British rock band Procol Harum. The book title refers to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, one of the settings of the book. Elements of it are adapted from the radio series, primarily the Secondary Phase, although Milliways itself, Arthur and Ford's final fate come from Fits the Fifth and Sixth of the Primary Phase.
"The Ugly Little Boy" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the September 1958 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction under the title "Lastborn", and was reprinted under its current title in the 1959 collection Nine Tomorrows. The story deals with a Homo neanderthalensis child which is brought to the future by means of time travel. Robert Silverberg later expanded it into a novel with the same title published in 1992.
The caveman is a stock character representative of primitive humans in the Paleolithic. The popularization of the type dates to the early 20th century, when Neanderthals were influentially described as "simian" or "ape-like" by Marcellin Boule and Arthur Keith.
The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; the planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction.
Subterranean fiction is a subgenre of adventure fiction, science fiction, or fantasy which focuses on fictional underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface. The genre is based on, and has in turn influenced, the Hollow Earth theory. The earliest works in the genre were Enlightenment-era philosophical or allegorical works, in which the underground setting was often largely incidental. In the late 19th century, however, more pseudoscientific or proto-science-fictional motifs gained prevalence. Common themes have included a depiction of the underground world as more primitive than the surface, either culturally, technologically or biologically, or in some combination thereof. The former cases usually see the setting used as a venue for sword-and-sorcery fiction, while the latter often features cryptids or creatures extinct on the surface, such as dinosaurs or archaic humans. A less frequent theme has the underground world much more technologically advanced than the surface one, typically either as the refugium of a lost civilization, or as a secret base for space aliens.
The Neanderthal Man is a 78-minute, 1953 American black-and-white science fiction film produced independently by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, as Global Productions Inc., from their own original screenplay.
Only Human is a BBC Books original novel written by Gareth Roberts and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was published on 8 September 2005, alongside The Deviant Strain and The Stealers of Dreams. It features the Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler and Captain Jack.
The Land That Time Forgot is a fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Caspak trilogy. His working title for the story was "The Lost U-Boat." The sequence was first published in Blue Book Magazine as a three-part serial in the issues for August, October, and December 1918. The complete trilogy was later combined for publication in book form under the title of the first part by A. C. McClurg in June 1924. Beginning with the Ace Books editions of the 1960s, the three segments have usually been issued as separate short novels.
Can of Worms is a science fiction comedy film and is part of the Disney Channel Original Movie lineup. It premiered on Disney Channel on April 10, 1999, and is based on the novel of the same name by Kathy Mackel, which was a Young Reader's Choice Nominee in 2002 and a nominee for the 2001 Rhode Island Children's Book Award. It is also the first Disney Channel Original Movie to be rated TV-PG.
"Fun and Games" is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 30 March 1964, during the first season.
Neanderthals have been depicted in popular culture since the early 20th century. Early depictions conveyed and perpetuated notions of proverbially crude, low-browed cavemen; since the latter part of the 20th century, some depictions have modeled more sympathetic reconstructions of the genus Homo in the Middle Paleolithic era. In popular idiom, people sometimes use the word "Neanderthal" as an insult - to suggest that a person so designated combines a deficiency in intelligence and a tendency to use brute force. The term may also imply that a person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as the terms "dinosaur" or "Yahoo".
The Best of L. Sprague de Camp is a collection of writings by American science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp, first published in hardback by Nelson Doubleday in February 1978 and in paperback by Ballantine Books in May of the same year as a volume in its Classic Library of Science Fiction. The book was reprinted by Ballantine in May 1986. It was reissued in trade paperback and ebook editions by Phoenix Pick in December 2014. It has also been translated into German.
The Sky People is an alternate history science fiction novel by American writer S. M. Stirling. It was first published by Tor Books in hardcover in November 2006, with a book club edition co-published with the Science Fiction Book Club following in December of the same year. Tor issued paperback, ebook, and trade paperback editions in October 2007, April 2010, and May 2010 respectively. Audiobook editions were published by Tantor Media in January 2007.
Ancient astronauts have been addressed frequently in science fiction and horror fiction. Occurrences in the genres include:
Caprona is a fictional island in the literary universe of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Caspak Trilogy, including The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss. They were published as serial novels in 1918, and collected in book form in 1924.
The Neanderthals in Gibraltar were among the first to be discovered by modern scientists and have been among the most well studied of their species according to a number of extinction studies which emphasize regional differences, usually claiming the Iberian Peninsula partially acted as a “refuge” for the shrinking Neanderthal populations and the Gibraltar population of Neanderthals as having been one of many dwindling populations of archaic human populations, existing just until around 42,000 years ago. Many other Neanderthal populations went extinct around the same time.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a 2014 non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. The book argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction. In the book, Kolbert chronicles previous mass extinction events, and compares them to the accelerated, widespread extinctions during our present time. She also describes specific species extinguished by humans, as well as the ecologies surrounding prehistoric and near-present extinction events. The author received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the book in 2015.
"Throwback" is a classic science fiction short story featuring atavism by L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction for March 1949. It first appeared in book form in the collection A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales ; it later appeared in the anthology Apeman, Spaceman. The story has been translated into Italian and German.