Niels Klim's Underground Travels

Author: Ludvig Holberg

Ludvig Holberg was a Norwegian philosopher and playwright whose only novel this was. A utopian satire that poked fun at a lot of contemporary issues, it would have created an uproar in Norway at the time, so Holberg published the book in Germany and in Latin, and in the process became the most widely acclaimed Scandinavian writer before Hans Christian Andersen and Henrik Ibsen a century later.One of the major works about another world in the interior of the Earth, the story follows the adventures of the title character who falls through a hole in the Earth's crust and ends up on another planet inside the earth where he encounters sentient trees and a strange utopian society where, among other curiosities, women are equal to men. He also visits a land on the inside of the Earth's crust ruled by intelligent monkeys.Why it's on the listHolberg's story of Niels Klim was a major influence on later books by Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne among others, so it has a very important place in the history of science fiction throughout Europe..