If you missed the last one…
Welcome to the Human Zoo! This old SF idea has been bugging me for a while. How old is it? Who wrote the first one? I can’t give any definitive answer there but I suspect it starts with The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. The Eloi are kept in a pretty nice cage by the Morlocks before they get slaughtered for meat. Not quite a zoo though. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) flips this with animals turned into men. Herbert George inspired so many later writers that I think this is the wellspring.
For our purposes here, I think we have to narrow that idea a little, to specifically humans being held in captivity for the enjoyment of aliens. I am not including tales of incarceration. These aren’t prison stories. (We’ll do prison planets later.) The aliens should clearly see the humans as lesser species held for their entertainment. So Welcome to the Human Zoo! Stay awhile and enjoy the exhibits. Have some popcorn. Ride on the back of the men. Bring your children to the petting zoo.
The first story I found was “The Man From Beyond” by John Wyndham (under his real name, John Beynon Harris). This appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, September 1934. It was reprinted in Fantastic Story Quarterly, Summer 1950.
“The Human Pets of Mars” (Amazing Stories, October 1936) by Leslie F. Stone is more obviously about the topic. Isaac Asimov includes the story in Before the Golden Age (1974). He wrote of it: “This story, “The Human Pets of Mars,” does not hold up on rereading as well as many of the other stories in this book did, and I am keenly embarrassed by the simple-minded portrayal of the Blacks in the tale.”
For the tenth anniversary of Thrilling Wonder, Mort Weisinger had Howard V. Brown paint this cover. “The Story of the Cover” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939) has Ray Cummings, SF writer extraordinaire, explain it.
“Mating Time” (Startling Stories, May 1953) by Joseph Shallit deals with a natural question. In zoos, the keepers breed animals. Would this happen to humans too? An Adam and Eve story…but that’s a different post!
“Catch’em-All-Alive” (aka “Collecting Team”) (Super-Science Fiction, December 1956) by Robert Silverberg has a collecting team find themselves exhibits by the end of the tale. The fisherman becomes the fish!
“The Cage” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1957) by A. Bertram Chandler has the crew of the Lode Star trying to prove their intelligence to an alien species. Aliens judging the human race becomes another theme, perhaps most recently done on television with the character of Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“Now Let Us Sleep” (Venture SF, September 1957) by Avram Davidson has the Yahoos, borrowed skillfully from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, another case of a better race judging humans.
“Zoo” (Fantastic Universe, June 1958) by Edward D. Hoch has this master of Mystery fiction propose a traveling zoo that doesn’t go town to town but planet to planet. But who are the exhibits?
“Hiding Place” (Analog, March 1961) by Poul Anderson has the spaceship owners hiding among the exhibits. Who are the masters on board? (Space 1999 would steal this idea for one of their comics.)
Planet of the Apes (1963) by Pierre Boulle is not that close to the movie version, which really was more of a rant from Rod Serling. The 1968 movie does have humans in cages, though not so much as a zoo but for scientific experimentation.
“Undercurrents” (Analog, May June 1964) by James H. Schmitz is part of his Telzey Amberdon series. It is interesting that Schmitz could write space opera for the most technical of SF editors as late as 1964.
The Long Result (1965) by John Brunner has the concept of a Zoo ship, where passengers volunteer themselves for study by scientists.
Mind Switch (1971) by Damon Knight has a reporter at the zoo suddenly find himself no longer an observer but an exhibit.
Iron Cage (1974) by Andre Norton has Jony living among animals in an intergalactic zoo. Later humans show up and Jony must save his zoo friends from them.
Conclusion
The theme of the Human Zoo is often used to flip the script on our own obsession of keeping animals in captivity. The reader has instant sympathy for anyone placed in a cage. How would you like to spend your days in a twenty-by-twenty space? Science Fiction is well equipped to tackle this POV switcheroo.
Next time…Prison planets!
A different medium altogether, but this article recalled to my mind that episode of Twilight Zone in which the earth guy is put in a zoo by the aliens.
Roddy McDowell
Yep! A good one.
Many thanks for this feature. This theme is an interesting one. I’ll see if I can find some of these stories. However, regarding the book and film of Planet of the Apes (both of which I’ve always liked): I think the film retained quite a few aspects of the book, including the archaeological dig, the enigma of the origins of the ape society and its hidden debt to the destroyed human civilization, etc.
Yes, I thought of that Twilight Zone episode too.