Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface
By David Standish
Da Capo, 304 pages,
$24.95
Danny Kaye got it, maybe. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” he sang. Indeed, there may well be two: one at the North Pole and one at the South Pole, where great swirling gyres lead to subterranean realms. All you need is to believe, as others did and do, in a hollow Earth.
Edmond Halley, the 17th Century English polymath for whom the famous comet is named, was a believer. Although hollow Earth is an ancient idea, it is with Halley that David Standish (who teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism) starts to trace the cultural history of “an idea that was wrong and changed nothing.”
If that sounds unpromising, don’t despair. It is only Standish glibly staying a step ahead of the naysayers, who are ready to abandon hollow Earth without a second thought. Because plenty of hollow-Earth writing is well-done, great fun (whether in fiction or desperate earnest) and fascinating as it morphs to meet the concerns of the day: utopianism, land-grabbing imperialism, the frenzy of polar exploration, Cold War paranoia, or fruity New Age speculation.
And who would say it’s not something to learn where Edgar Allan Poe found inspiration for “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (though Standish is inclined to see that story as a sendup of the mania for polar exploration and its sunny possibilities).
Standish proves a shimmering, informed guide through the literature of hollow Earth– sometimes a bit flippant (a Virgil wearing sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt and an occasional smirk)–but displaying a genuine care and admiration for those whose creations were scientifically, socially, or literarily worthy, or at least deeply, appealingly eccentric.
Halley is the one unquestionable scientist under Standish’s scrutiny. He fashioned his hollow-Earth theory to explain variations in the magnetic poles via three concentric, subterranean spheres rotating below the Earth’s surface. (He wasn’t far from current thinking, with its crust, mantle, outer core and inner core design, and their role in creating magnetic fields.) Halley also suggested the spheres were clean, habitable, well-lit places. As Standish writes, “science fiction writers have been thanking him ever since.”
Another true believer was John Cleves Symmes, who took 19th Century America’s polar fixation “one toke over the line” with his holes-at-the-poles theory. He tried to persuade Congress to foot the bill for a voyage to the far north (it declined), and he may have tried to convince his fellow citizens of the existence of a hollow Earth to die for with a book often attributed to him, “Symzonia,” the first homegrown utopian fiction (they didn’t buy it).
“Hollow Earth” brims with plot recapitulations, conveying the color and wonder of what’s inside: strong women, milquetoast men, evil creatures, awesome gizmos, magical forces, an unseemly amount of celibacy, all set against a backdrop that landscape artist Albert Bierstadt would have loved to paint. Sallying within was a varied crew: adventurers, professors, ne’er-do-wells. Author Edgar Rice Burroughs sent Tarzan to the Earth’s core in 1930, where he had a “beautiful existential moment.” Superman visited, as did Dorothy (when not in Oz); even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In the final chapters, Standish furiously tenders crack, vest-pocket critiques of later hollow-Earth books and movies, from pure drivel to one gem (Rudy Rucker’s 1990 novel “The Hollow Earth”), as they turn ever more dystopian, reflecting the alienation of urbanization and industrialization, and, ultimately, the dolor that attended splitting the atom.
Standish’s survey is smart and closely read, with an eye for playfulness. Still, remember that the deepest borehole (what one wag called “the world’s deepest boring hole”) has drilled only about 10 miles deep. For believers of empirical bent, there are miles to go before hollow Earth sleeps.
———-
Peter Lewis is a writer at the American Geographical Society in New York City.
