Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous

by David Standish

Book Overview

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 suggested that there might be life down there as well. Hollow Earth traces the surprising, marvelous, and just plain weird permutations his ideas have taken over the centuries. From science fiction to utopian societies and even religions, Hollow...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B007YXYCGY
• ISBN13: 9780306815331
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Nothing Hollow About This Book! Very Filling!

David Standish's Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations and Marvelous Machines Beneath the Earth Surface is an amazing book. When I first saw the cover, I didn't think I would be interested. Then I noticed the names that were thrown out with almost careless abandon. Jules Verne. Edgar Rice Burroughs. They weren't the names of scientists, although scientists are frequently and fairly referenced throughout the book, but I recognized those names at once. Verne and Burroughs, at one time or another, have been my favorite authors. I loved Verne's far-fetched adventures. Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea are the ones of his that I read the most. Burroughs, though, taught me an idealistic love because his heroes - John Carter and Carson Napier and David Innes - all fell in love with the most beautiful woman in two worlds. Not only did those women look great (especially the way Frank Frazetta drew them), but they were the bravest and fiercest women you could ever hope to meet. So Standish drew me in with one of my favorite "conspiracy" theories - that there is another world inside the one we live on as well as promising new dissertations about two of my one-time favorite authors. In fact, the hollow earth theory is still so popular there are a number of websites on the Internet devoted to it. I find it particularly amusing that Adolf Hitler believed in the hollow earth idea so much that he sent troops and expeditionary forces to uncover the entrances. Most speculation was that the openings to the hollow world were at the north and south poles. That's what drove most of the exploration in those areas. The book is one part scientific history, one part science fiction history, and one part sheer love of the whole hollow earth theory. Standish does an admirable job of keeping all these elements balanced. If the book and merely been a scientific history, I think I would've been put off. But he kept mixing it up with fact and fun. More than that, some of the theories the early signs is came up with about how the world worked are to die for. I sat down with the book with the intention of reading a chapter or two the first time. Instead, I blazed through over 80 pages of it without stopping. Standish has a really good sense of how much pure information to dump on a reader before reaching critical mass. He changes up from presentation of facts to speculation on his part so smoothly that you don't notice the transition. Before you know it, you're thinking right along with him and totally understanding where he's headed. Although the chapters are long, with all the illustrations and pictures involved they read quite quickly. I loved learning about the Royal Society's arguments over how the earth is constructed in the early days. And it was even more fascinating to see how many of the historically important people that we remember for other thi

Research plus contemporary viewpoint.

David Standish must have dug through hundreds of libraries and book stores to come up with this wonderful, humorous study of oddball science. By combining myth, geology, the fact that crackpots draw groupies, and a few centuries worth of pop culture, he shows us how legends, even religions, can sprout from the smallest bizarre concept. From Isaac Newton to Indiana Jones, the Earth's core to the heart of academia, Standish records our desires to create utopias and probe odd mysteries. Much info - much fun.

A fun title that promises to reach a wide audience

HOLLOW EARTH: THE LONG AND CURIOUS HISTORY OF IMAGINING STRANGE LANDS, FANTASTICAL CREATURES, ADVANCED CIVLIZATIONS, AND MARVELOS MACHINES BELOW THE EARTH'S SURFACE is for any who have loved Jules Vern, H.G. Wells, and imaginative history. From Sir Edmond Halley's 17th century theory of a hollow earth to account for magnetic pole flux to Hitler's search for an opening in the planet to use as a possible hideout, chapters chart speculations and manias from ancient civilizations to modern times, providing a lively survey not just of evolving beliefs, but of how they fostered changes. The forty illustrations include maps and movie posters and provide vivid accompaniment to a fun title that promises to reach a wide audience - and not just science fiction buffs. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

The Hollow Earth.

_Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface_ by journalist David Standish is a fascinating account of the various individuals who believed in or promoted the idea that the earth was indeed a hollow sphere. The idea that the earth may be hollow is very ancient and many ancient cultures believed in underground worlds. While modern science has shown this not to be the case, many have continued to believe in a hollow earth. This book traces that belief through history beginning with the astronomer and scientist Sir Edmund Halley (best known for his "Halley's comet") and onwards through the various adventurers and literary figures who maintained such a belief. Among other individuals covered in this book include Sir Edmund Halley, Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, L. Fank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Adolph Hitler, Admiral Byrd, Superman, and Pat Boone. All these individuals are linked together through their belief or involvement with the idea of a hollow earth. One of the earliest individuals to consider the idea of a hollow earth was the scientist and astronomer Sir Edmund Halley. Halley proposed the idea that three concentric spheres lay beneath the earth's surface, turning independently on a north-south axis, each smaller than the next. He explained his ideas to the famous London Royal Society which included among its members such famous scientists as Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren. Halley was so fascinated by his idea of a hollow earth that he had his last portrait made of him holding a picture of the concentric spheres which he believed made up the earth. Determining longitude proved problematic for scientists in the time of Halley, and thus he devoted himself to the study of magnetism. This study led to his formulation of a hollow earth model. It was this idea which placed Halley among the first individuals to ever consider the idea that the earth may be hollow. Following his discussion of Sir Edmund Halley, the author next turns his attention to John Cleves Symmes. Symmes was a captain in the United States Army who had fought in the War of 1812 (his father had been a Revolutionary War veteran and had given him a copy of a book of Cook's voyages which had spurred his interests). Symmes maintained a lifelong fascination with discovery and adventure and maintained that the earth was indeed hollow and habitable from within. He contended that there were holes at the polar regions which opened up into the hollow earth. The author traces the origins of the hollow earth beliefs in the United States through Cotton Mather, the puritan divine perhaps best known for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials, but also a scholar and naturalist of some renown. Another influence on Symmes was Sir John Leslie, a Scottish mathematician and scientist who argued that the earth was

A Wrong and Imperishable Idea

At last it can be told: The Earth is hollow and, depending upon which vision appeals to you, it has limitless amounts of valuable goods, monsters ready to attack us surface dwellers, goddesses reaching to bring us peace, or flying saucers doing who knows what. The Earth being hollow or containing unknown realms below us is perhaps not all that strange; after all, millions of religious believers think there is some sort of infernal region down there. But there has been a scientific (but mostly pseudo-scientific) tinge to such beliefs, charted in _Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface_ (Da Capo Press) by David Standish. With all the important concepts that have changed the world, Standish presents a book which he says "traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing." It is a story of curiosity manifested by science, but then changed in literature and philosophy in fantastic ways, a story that "weaves in and out of literature and what passes for real life, and veers into the charmingly delusional more than once." Surprisingly, one era after another has taken this wrong idea and transformed it, continuing its appeal. Beyond the religious ideas of the underworld, the workings of our planet's interior got their first scientific evaluation by none other than Edmond Halley, he of Halley's Comet. Halley imagined there were globes within globes in the Earth, spinning to make magnetic variations. Halley went on to say that his inner spheres could be populated by "animate beings" we could hardly imagine, deriving light from some source unknown. Halley's scientific start included speculation that would be taken to extremes by "hollow earthers", beginning with an original American thinker named John Cleves Symmes, who in 1818 broadcast to the world (starting with St. Louis) his circular in which he declared that the Earth was hollow, and that it was open at the poles. He wrote a novel on these ideas which seems to have been a model for all hollow Earth stories afterwards, including genuine literature like Poe's _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_. Standish has summarized the hollow Earth ideas presented in fiction from Jules Verne's _A Journey to the Center of the Earth_ and beyond the first Superman film, 1951's _Superman and the Mole Men_. Some of it sounds like worthy utopian imaginings, but most of it sounds downright silly. Standish has generously read even _Through the Earth_ of 1898, "arguably the most boring hollow earth novel ever", and so we do not have to look at it ourselves. The number of such novels dropped off in the twentieth century because polar explanations revealed no Symmes's holes, but Edgar Rice Burroughs set several stories in his underground world Pellucidar. Richard Shaver wrote strange tales of robots and titans within the Earth, and these were adapted by Ray Palme