Subterranean Fiction - Literature

Literature

• In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy poem Inferno, Hell is a vast underground cavern and the narrator travels through the center of the Earth and out the other side.
• In Ludvig Holberg's 1741 novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Niels Klim's Underground Travels), Nicolai Klim falls through a cave while spelunking and spends several years living on both a smaller globe within and the inside of the outer shell.
• Giacomo Casanova's 1788 Icosaméron is a 5-volume, 1,800-page story of a brother and sister who fall into the Earth and discover the subterranean utopia of the Mégamicres, a race of multicolored, hermaphroditic dwarfs.
• An early science-fiction work called Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery by a "Captain Adam Seaborn" appeared in print in 1820. It obviously reflected the ideas of John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and some have claimed Symmes as the real author. Some researchers say it deliberately satirized Symmes's ideas, and think they have identified the author as an early American author named Nathaniel Ames (see Lang, Hans-Joachim and Benjamin Lease. "The Authorship of Symzonia: The Case for Nathanial Ames" New England Quarterly, June 1975, page 241–252).
• Faddei Bulgarin's short satirical tale "Improbable Tall-Tale, or Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1825) describes three underworld countries: Ignorantia (populated by spiders), Beastland (populated by apes), and Lightonia (populated by humans, with a capital called Utopia).
• Edgar Allan Poe used the idea in his 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He also touches on it in his short stories "MS. Found in a Bottle" and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall."
• Although it is often suggested that Jules Verne used the idea of a partially hollow Earth in his 1864 novel, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, his characters actually descend only 87 miles beneath the surface where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe. There is no indication in the novel that Verne intended to suggest that the Earth was in any way hollow, partially or otherwise.
• Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was originally titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel The Coming Race was an account of the Vril-ya, an angelic subterranean master race.
• Mary Lane's Mizora (1880–81) combines the hollow-Earth theme with feminism.
• James De Mille's novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published in 1888 but written prior to the author's death in 1880, depicts a subterranean land with inverted values.
• Pantaletta: A Romance of Sheheland by Mrs. J. Wood (1882)
• George Sand used the idea in her 1884 novel Laura, Voyage dans le Cristal, in which giant crystals could be found in the interior of the Earth.
• Interior World, A Romance of Illustration a New Hypothesis of Terrestrial Organization by Washington L. Tower (1885)
• William R. Bradshaw's science fiction novel The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892) is a utopian fantasy set within the hollow Earth.
• The protofeminist utopia Etidorhpa (1895) by John Uri Lloyd is also set within a hollow Earth.
• The concept was mentioned in Wardon Allan Curtis's 1899 short story "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie."
• An underground Nome Kingdom is featured in several of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, notably the Ozma of Oz (1907), Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) and Tik-Tok of Oz (1914).
• Willis George Emerson's science-fiction novel The Smoky God (1908) recounts the adventures of one Olaf Jansen who traveled into the interior and found an advanced civilization.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote adventure stories (beginning with At the Earth's Core in 1914) set in the inner world of Pellucidar including at one point a visit from his character Tarzan. Burroughs's Pellucidar has oceans on the outer surface corresponding to continents on the inner surface and vice versa. Pellucidar is lit by a miniature sun suspended at the center of the hollow sphere, so it is perpetually overhead wherever one is in Pellucidar. The sole exception is the region directly under a tiny geostationary moon of the internal sun; that region as a result is under a perpetual eclipse and is known as the Land of Awful Shadow. This moon has its own plant life and (presumably) animal life, and hence either has its own atmosphere or shares that of Pellucidar
• The Russian geologist Vladimir Obruchev uses the concept of the hollow Earth in his 1915 scientific novel Plutonia to take the reader through various geological epochs.
• A deliberately tunneled-out Earth occurs in Charles R. Tanner 1930's SF short story "Tumithak of the Corridors".
• Morgo the Mighty by Sean O'Larkin was serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. It featured the adventures of a Tarzan like character in a network of giant caverns beneath the Himalayas. The caves are ruled by a cowled magician and populated by primitive men, giant intelligent bats, giant warring ants and giant killer chickens.
• Tam, Son of the Tiger by Otis Adelbert Kline from 1931 features the adventures of Tam (another Tarzan like character) in a subterranean world beneath Asia.
• C. S. Lewis's 1953 novel The Silver Chair (part of The Chronicles of Narnia) takes place partly in Underland, a subterranean kingdom plotting to conquer Narnia. At one point, the Lady of the Green Kirtle attempts to brainwash the protagonists into believing that the world above ground does not exist.
• The Third Eye (1956) by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa mentions contact with advanced beings living in the center of the Earth.
• The End of the Tunnel (aka The Cave of Cornelius) (1959), by Paul Capon. Four boys in England get trapped in a cave by a landslide, and by following the cave, they encounter a forgotten civilization.
• Dark Universe (1961) by Daniel F. Galouye. A post-apocalyptic science fiction novel where to clans live deep underground and are descendants from humans who escaped an old war.
• City of the First Time (1975), by G.J. Barrett. British survivors of an atomic holocaust venture downward into the earth through a series of caves and encounter two other races, survivals of previous extinctions.
• A Hollow Earth featured in the children's "Choose Your Own Adventure" novel The Underground Kingdom (1983).
• The history of the Hollow Earth theory is explored in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, alongside a wide range of other pseudo-scientific and conspiracy theories.
• Rudy Rucker's novel The Hollow Earth appeared in 1990, and features Edgar Allan Poe and his ideas. Rucker claims in an afterword to have transcribed the novel from a manuscript in the University of Virginia library; the call number given is that of a copy of Symzonia.
• The novel Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth by Max McCoy (1997) expands on the legend of an advanced civilization in the Earth's interior.
• The short story "Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley continues the journey of Frankenstein's creature through a hollow Earth.
• In Jeff Long's 1999 novel The Descent and its 2007 sequel Deeper, a vast labyrinth of tunnels and passages underlying the Earth is inhabited by a brutal species of once-civilized but now degenerate hominid, Homo Hadalis.
• The 2000 novel Abduction by Robin Cook includes the concept of a third world under the sea called "Interterra."
• Underland (2002) by Mick Farren has the vampire hero Victor Renquist traveling to a hollow Earth populated by Nazi scientists, subjugated proto-scientific lizard people, and a fungus addicted race of sub-vampires.
• The City of Ember (2003) and its sequels by Jeanne DuPrau describe a city built underground to survive a nuclear holocaust.
• Against the Day (2006) by Thomas Pynchon makes extensive mention of the Earth's interior as a place to be explored, positing inner-Earth seas. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon also uses the idea of a Hollow Earth as the planet's final holdout for magic against the calculations of the surface's most eminent men of science.
• In Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness (2007), the characters undertake a journey to find a hole into the hollow Earth.
• John Hodgman's 2008 book More Information Than You Require says the hollow interior of the Earth as the home of the subterranean Molemen. In the center of this Hollow Earth is a small, red sun.
• The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins tells the story of a war between the humans and the rats in a location under New York City called the Underland.
• The Battle of the Labyrinth, the fourth book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, revolves around the protagonists' attempts to navigate the Labyrinth, a confusing, supernatural maze under the United States.
• Eoin Colfer's series of Artemis Fowl books focus on crimes committed by or against the Fairy-folk who live beneath the earth's crust in a technologically advanced society.
• Tunnels, a series of books by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams, takes place in a hollow Earth with an interior sun, in which multiple civilisations exist within and beneath the crust.
• The Dark Elf Trilogy, by R.A. Salvatore was the first of the Forgotten Realms books to describe the underground world of the Dark Elves called The Underdark. This greatly helped popularize underground settings in fantasy RPGs.