Hollow Earth: The Long And Curious History Of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, And Marvelous Machines Below The Earth's Surface (2006)
About book Hollow Earth: The Long And Curious History Of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, And Marvelous Machines Below The Earth's Surface (2006)
I was optimistic when I said this was a little dry. And I'll say up front that I'm being unfair, because I'd picked this up in the hopes of finding a reading experience similar to that offered by In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, which is setting the bar pretty damn high.I have a soft spot for books about quirky real-life topics, and a fascination with the personalities behind paranoid, kooky Fringe Science or other "academic(al)" pursuits. So, this history of the notion that our planet is hollow should have been right up my alley: it stars self-proclaimed prophets, disaffected 1812 War vets, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jules Verne, with special guest appearances by Sir Edmund Halley (of comet fame) and Hitler (of World War II fame). And, as it must, it touches on UFOs and other batty topics. Should have been a slam-dunk for entertaining reading during my daily commute.Maybe I came in to the subject already too familiar with its more entertaining aspects, and expecting an elaboration of these mind-shattering truths. For instance, I already knew that the hollow earth is the secret home of our shape-changing lizard overlords, and that the Luftwaffe sent a squadron into the hollow earth in 1945 to obtain the lizards' UFO technology, and that because time runs more slowly inside the earth the Luftwaffe UFOs are going to emerge from the South Pole and wipe us out any day now. Doesn't everybody? And yet the book never even mentions this. What I'd hoped to get was a deeper understanding of these important and totally-not-made-up-by-insane-people truths. And to a limited extent, I did. For instance, I'd had no idea that Edmund Halley was a big proponent of the Hollow Earth. Interesting.Unfortunately for me, the book spends much of its time rehashing -- in brutally agonizing detail -- the plots of stories, novels, and movies that somehow involve the notion of a hollow earth. On one hand, this made for some deeply irritating reading as the subject matter continually veered away from the topic of interest; on the other hand, it made it possible to skip over long passages where the author needlessly included long excerpts from the works in question. So that's something. For this reader, the additional crumbs of insight gleaned from the historical context of a Poe story I already knew didn't redeem the slog through the plot synopsis. And while the discussion of the debate between progressivism and directionalism in 19th century geology was interesting, the subsequent rehash of the most boring parts of Journey to the Centre of the Earth was not. There's a reason I tend to skim whenever Verne kicks into encyclopedia mode. (Which he does from time to time. But that's a different review.) I have to give the book credit for taking a careful look at the evolution of the hollow earth mythos. It tackles the subject in chronological order, beginning with Edmund Halley in the late 17th century, and is organized into sections that reflect the prevailing motivations and attitudes during different "eras" of hollow earth belief. (This makes for some interesting insights, particularly in the era immediately following the American Civil War, which (apparently) saw utopian novels proliferate in the United States.)This organizational scheme was one of the selling points when I found this book in the store-- the organization is much like that of Arika Okrent's absolutely marvelous and disappointingly short In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and The Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language Only too late did I realize the false comparison. The latter book has the additional benefit of having been written by Arika Okrent. This book, alas, was not.So, where Okrent's book is infused with just the right mixture of wit, sly humor, and compassion for the misguided souls behind their frequently strange beliefs, Standish's approach to similarly misguided souls is one of self-conscious elbow-ribbing. I don't mind when authors insert themselves into a discussion of strange ideas, but when they do, I prefer a more subtle tone. But that's just me being unfair.The text is sloppy; it's repetitive in several places, and contradicts itself in several others. I didn't note any major gaffes, but several small and insidious errors that ought to have been trivial to avoid, and which continually undermined my belief in the author's authority.(It's important to maintain that illusion of authority, even (especially?) when writing about crackpottery. In my not so humble opinion.) For example, it misquotes the inscription on a tombstone which is visible in a photograph on the facing page. The difference is slight, but glaring, and disappointing when the evidence of sloppiness is staring me in the face. This is probably unfair of me, again, but my patience with this book has run a bit thin.Speaking of Cyrus Teed, the chapter on Koreshanity embodies my disappointment with this book. It begins promisingly enough, but veers away from the subject at hand. It devotes disappointingly little time to the relevant tenets of the faith (i.e., that we live on the inside of a hollow earth) to devote many pages to the history -- birth, brief rise, political machinations, and lingering decline -- of the Koreshan community in Estero, Florida. Rather than using these details as a world-building backdrop to an important chapter in the hollow earth mythos, the book relegates the hollow earth belief to a minor side note in the story of the Koreshan community. Which misses the entire point of the book, as stated on the front cover, back cover, and in the introduction. That the Koreshans carried out their own experiment in geodesy (and apparently proved to their own satisfaction that the surface of the earth is concave) seems almost irrelevant to the chapter. The author never brings the larger discussion of Teed and Koreshanity full circle (har, har) to the hollow earth. It isn't used to shed light on this belief. The author does include a surprisingly long bibliography, and appears to have gone to considerable effort to track down primary sources. I salute and respect that work: it must have been a thankless job, considering that some of the sources were mimeographed pamphlets. All in all, I think the fairest thing I can say is that this book committed the sin of not being the book I wanted it to be. Which isn't a sin at all. But it didn't entertain me during a traffic jam, and this is a sin for which I am less forgiving.
[my review from the September 2006 issue of FATE magazine]Last month, FATE featured a reprinted article on the Koreshans of Estero, Florida, an early-20th-century cult distinguished mainly by their belief that the Earth was a hollow sphere upon whose inner concave surface we all live. An odd cosmology, to be sure, but these followers of the former Cyrus Teed were hardly the first believers in a hollow earth. Journalist David Standish presents a history of the subterranean theme in science, pseudoscience, and literature in his new book Hollow Earth.Standish’s survey begins with the noted astronomer Sir Edmond Halley, who theorized before the London Royal Society in 1691 that the interior of the Earth was formed by a series of concentric spheres, with open space in between. Navigators of Halley’s time were much perplexed by the inconsistency of compass readings across different areas of the globe. If the Earth was a giant, solid magnet, why were there local magnetic variations, and why did the poles seem to move over time? Halley’s model answered this scientific puzzle by noting that each of the inner-earth spheres he proposed would have its own polarity. The interactions of these different poles created the observed variations on surface-level compasses.Given the theology of the time, it was unthinkable that potentially habitable places such as the inner spheres could be devoid of life. In light of God’s “Abundant Providence,” Halley argued that each of the inner globes, if they existed at all, had to be illuminated and occupied by all manner of living creatures.In 1818, Halley’s theories and others inspired John Cleves Symmes, a trader and former army captain living in the then-frontier town of St. Louis, Missouri, to campaign for an expedition to the unconquered territories of the inner earth, which he believed could be reached through enormous openings at each pole. Symmes lectured on this topic widely and unsuccessfully until his death in 1829. Though Symmes never pulled together a real-world expedition, his theories inspired fictional explorations of the hollow earth by no lesser writers than Edgar Allan Poe (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) and Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth).The hollow earth theme was kept alive by a number of lesser writers in the late 19th century (Standish lists nearly three dozen “hollow earth novels” published between 1880 and 1915, and summarizes a few representative examples), and Edgar Rice Burroughs kept the genre going into the 1940s with his tales of Pellucidar. In the late 1940s, the hollow earth was linked to the emerging UFO mythos through the stories of Richard Shaver in the Ray Palmer edited Amazing Stories.Standish describes his book as an exploration of “the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing — but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal.” Indeed it does, as numerous hollow earth websites bear witness. Standish’s review of contemporary, post-Shaver theories is a bit thin, but his rich presentation of the hollow earth background makes this essential reading for any fan of offbeat ideas.
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Meh. Great idea, bad execution. There's some fascinating stuff in the book but for some reason the author decided to take a tone of "can you believe these guys? only a fucking idiot would think there is a civilization at the center of the earth" instead of looking at them as products of their time. I'm not looking for some scholarly monograph, but often the author was a little too glib (the main problem is that he slides between serious, scholarly tone and a lazy blog-like tone, often in the same paragraph). Also, sometimes he would end paragraphs with something along the lines of "well, it's too complicated and I won't go over this idea here." Hey pal, you're the author, I'm the reader. Do your job.
—Tom
Does what it says on the tin! This is pretty much a survey of the literature, discussing the history of the hollow earth idea from Halley (of comet fame) through contemporary fringe websites. Along the way, Standish points out how the hollow earth idea has been a convenient blank space for people who wanted to project their thoughts about what was wrong (or right) with society at the time, and how the content of a hollow earth narrative changed as scientific understanding did likewise. Interesting bits, but the whole wound up a bit dry.Personally, I found my interest captured most thoroughly by the chapter on Cyrus Teed and his Koreshanity...society? cult? (No relation to the Waco, TX cult a hundred years later.) Relatively little of the chapter was about Teed's hollow earth theories; a lot of it talked about his attempts to build a society with his followers and create their own promised land. Possibly what I really wanted to be reading is a history of utopian movements! Off to see if I can turn up one of those with some searching.
—Laylah
If you are a true believer in the existence of a vast hollow interior of the planet on which we live, you will be very disappointed in this book. David Standish is not a believer and many times he breaks the fourth wall as an author to drive that point home.However, if you are interested in how the theory of a hollow Earth came about and, most importantly, are interested in how that belief saw itself worked out in literature throughout the ages, then you will enjoy this book very much.Highly opinionated, snarky, and many times quite amusing, Standish has done his homework (and the bibliography in the back of the book is nothing short of astounding) and he can speak with authority on the subject as he not only reviews the personalities and the history of true believers, but the works of those who chose the theme of the hollow Earth as the focus of their books, novels, films, and philosophies.
—Alan Loewen
