The Wump World is a 1970 children's storybook by Bill Peet.
The peaceful wumps (creatures that look like a cross between a sheep and a groundhog) live happily in their untouched green world until a new race, the Pollutians, arrive and begin industrializing it. Will the poor wumps ever get their planet back?
This book contains examples of the following tropes:
- Aliens Are Bastards: The Pollutians are a race of alien invaders who seize and then ruin the land that belonged to the wumps.
- Beneath the Earth: When the Pollutians arrive, the wumps hide in caves, going deeper and deeper and living off of fungi as the Pollutians spread over and despoil the surface world.
- Green Aesop: The story demonstrates how terrible it is that the Pollutians destroy the greenery and pure air that the planet had before they came. The happy ending consists of them taking off for another planet, the Wumps discovering a green patch they left untouched, and nature beginning to reassert itself over the ruins.
- Herbivores Are Friendly: The wumps are completely nice animals that run and hide when the Pollutians arrive, rather than attacking, and they eat grass (or other plants or mushrooms, while hiding underground).
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The Pollutians are suffocating from their own actions polluting the air and water of whatever planet they're on. When they run out of planets to colonize, they're sure to be doomed to extinction.
- Ignored Aesop: The Pollutians don't get the message that they need to preserve natural resources. They ruined their home world, then they colonize on Wump World, ruin it as well and set off to do the same to a third planet.
- Last Fertile Region: The Pollutians take over an idyllic world and pave it pole to pole, driving the titular Wumps underground, but when they move on, the plants regrow from one little park.
- Meaningful Name: The Pollutians pollute every planet they settle.
- Pokémon Speak: The Wumps are named after the sound they make.
- Reclaimed by Nature: The peaceful, grass-eating wumps are driven underground when an alien race called the Pollutians arrives and begins building all over the planet. Eventually, they smog it up so much they have to leave... but it turns out they haven't completely destroyed the greenery, and in time it begins to grow back over the cities.
- Signature Sound Effect: The wumps are named for their habit of making "wump" noises when excited or alarmed.
- Villainous Badland, Heroic Arcadia: An unusual example, in that the Badland and Arcadia are the same place at different points in time. Before the arrival of the Pollutians, the wumps' planet sports lush green grass and clear water as far as the eye can see. The Pollutians transform the planet into a smoggy concrete wasteland after taking over. The happy ending consists of nature overtaking the ruins of their cities.
- Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: The wumps regain their home world by simply waiting for the Pollutians' society to self-collapse and force them to retreat elsewhere in space.
