Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology (review)

The bizarre idea that our earth is hollow and perhaps populated inside has been put to effective imaginative use by writers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne to Rudy Rucker. The notion of a hollow earth had respectability as a scientific hypothesis among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century geologists. In the early nineteenth century, when most scientists no longer gave that hypothesis much credence, the American naval exploring expedition of 1838–42, sponsored by an 1836 act of Congress, was initiated to test John Cleves Symmes's theory that the earth 'is hollow and habitable within.' A beneficial unintended consequence of this expedition, which soon turned to less trivial pursuits, was establishment of the Smithsonian Institute to house collected specimens. Even now, belief in a hollow earth oddly persists among a lunatic fringe of no influence but (like flying saucer and alien abduction believers) of some interest to sociologists, satirists, and students of abnormal psychology. A niche in the overlapping histories of literature and of science is occupied by books and articles about hollow-earth proponents, their theories, and the literary uses of such ideas by writers of science fiction, fantasy, and utopias.

Peter Fitting's critical anthology contributes to existing scholarship on its topic by correcting errors in previous accounts and by making available a selection of relevant passages, many in his own translation to English. He concentrates on lesser-known and rare texts written before 1821 while also including judicious selections from more accessible works by such well-known later writers as Poe, Verne, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Taking bits and pieces from larger works is seldom a good practice, but here it is very helpful. People concerned only with tracing from a literary or scientific angle passages explicitly dealing with the idea of a hollow earth are spared the task of tracking down extremely rare books, while also in some cases having to translate them once found or having to winnow out a few pages from gigantic books otherwise irrelevant, such as Casanova's five-volume L'Icosameron. For each selection Fitting provides enough summary of the omitted material so that his readers can easily decide if for their purposes they ought to seek out and read the entire work. In this way Subterranean Worlds has the virtues without the usual tedium of an annotated bibliography.

Moreover, Fitting's introductory survey and subsequent remarks introducing each selection comprise an accurate concise history of the scientific and literary uses of ideas about a hollow earth. There is also a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary material, including references to many helpful websites. Fitting's introductions are elegant critical assessments in jargon-free prose with nice touches of wry humour that enliven his account. All this makes Fitting's anthology an excellent starting-point for neophytes. For advanced scholars, Subterranean Worlds is indispensable because in it Fitting includes very scarce texts that have more often been misquoted, misunderstood, or ignored altogether than carefully read. He corrects previous errors while providing evidence that sets the record straight. This anthology is based on sound scholarship and original research on neglected texts, all dished up with impressive erudition and appealing enthusiasm for a topic that Fitting too modestly describes as, for himself at least, 'somewhere between a hobby and an obsession.' In fact, works in many genres about subterranean worlds are important for historians of geology, fantasy, science fiction, and utopias. Subterranean Worlds advances knowledge in ways that make it valuable in itself and also as a signal aid and stimulus to further research that can now build on Fitting's contribution to the history of ideas about a hollow earth.