Hollow Earth

[Dave Monroe]

Standish, David.  Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious
   History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical
   Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous
   Machines Below the Earth's Surface. New York:
   Da Capo, 2006.

Beliefs in mysterious underworlds are as old as
humanity. But the idea that the earth has a hollow
interior was first proposed as a scientific theory in
1691 by Sir Edmond Halley (of comet fame), who also
suggested that there might be life down there as well.
Hollow Earthtraces the many surprising, marvelous, and
just plain weird permutations his ideas have taken
over the centuries. Both Edgar Allan Poe and (more
famously) Jules Verne picked up the torch in the
nineteenth century, the latter with his science
fiction epic A Journey to the Center of the Earth. The
notion of a hollow earth even inspired a religion at
the turn of the twentieth century—Koreshanity, which
held not only that the earth was hollow, but also that
we’re all living on the inside. Utopian novels and
adventures abounded at this same time, including L.
Frank Baum’s hollow earth addition to the Oz series
and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar books
chronicling a stone-age hollow earth. In the 1940s an
enterprising science-fiction magazine editor convinced
people that the true origins of flying saucers lay
within the hollow earth, relics of an advanced alien
civilization. And there are still devout hollow
earthers today, some of whom claim there is a New Age
utopia lurking beneath the earth’s surface, with at
least one entrance near Mt. Shasta in California.
Hollow Earth travels through centuries and cultures,
exploring how each era’s relationship to the idea of a
hollow earth mirrored its hopes, fears, and values.
Illustrated with everything from seventeenth-century
maps to 1950s pulp art to movie posters and more,
Hollow Earth is for anyone interested in the history
of strange ideas that just won’t go away.

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/book_detail_redirect.do?imprintCid=DC&isbn=0306813734

And, as mentioned here recently ...

Fitting, Peter, ed.  Subterranean World: A Critical
   Anthology.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2006.

http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6723-X.html

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