Ape and Essence
Aldous Huxley
 Ape and Essence is presented in its entirety, without remark by interruption, footnote or afterword. It begins with a vignette describing the destruction of the world by nuclear and chemical warfare at the hands of intelligent baboons - a critique of the human race (see more about these vignettes below). The two warring sides each have an Einstein on a leash which they force to press the button, releasing clouds of disease-causing gases toward each other. The story then advances to a time 100 years after the catastrophic events of World War III, which characters in the book refer to as "the thing", when nuclear and chemical weapons eventually destroyed most of human civilization. In the script's timeframe, radiation has subsided to safer levels and the New Zealand rediscovery scientists (New Zealand being spared from the bombings because it was "of no strategic importance") are sailing to California. Unfortunately, a strange society has emerged from the radiation and two of its men capture one of the scientists (Dr. Poole). Dr. Poole is introduced to an illiterate society which survives by "mining" graves for clothes, burning library books as fuel, and killing off newborns deformed by radiation (that is, newborns with over 3 pairs of nipples and more than 7 toes/fingers per hand) to preserve genetic purity. The society has also taken to worshipping Satan, whom they refer to as Belial, and limiting reproduction to an annual two-week orgy which begins on "Belial's Day Eve" after the deformed babies are "purified by blood." The story climaxes during the purification ceremonies of Belial's Day Eve with an intellectual confrontation between Dr. Poole and the Arch Vicar, the head of the Church of Belial (much like the confrontation John the Savage has with Mustapha Mond in Brave New World). During the conversation the Arch Vicar reveals that there is a minority of "hots" who do not express an interest in the post-World War III style of reproduction, but they are severely punished to keep them in line. In exchange for his life, Dr. Poole agrees to do what he can as a botanist to help increase their crops yields, but about a year later he escapes with Loola in search of the community of "hots" that is rumored to exist North of the desert. The script—and the novel—end with Dr. Poole and Loola in the desert north of Los Angeles, breaking their trek by a tombstone which bears the author's name of Tallis, the dates 1882-1948, and three lines from the antepenultimate verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy on the death of John Keats. Lest Loola find it sad, Dr. Poole, happily possessed of a duodecimo Shelley, reads her the poem's penultimate verse: That Light whose smile kindles the Universe That Beauty in which all things work and move That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love, Which through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.