The Journey Of Niels Klim To The World Underground

Author: Ludvig Holberg

Throughout the 18th century, there was a vogue for stories about other worlds inside our own. In time, these would give rise to Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but one of the first and certainly most influential of these stories was written by one of the leading figures in Scandinavian literature. In Holberg's utopia, Niels Klim falls through the Earth's crust and finds himself on another planet, which revolves around a sun inside our Earth. Here he encounters, in turn, a race of intelligent trees, of apelike beings, of jackdaws at war with the thrushes, even a country of string basses which communicate by music. Why it's on the list: A mixture of satire, fantasy, and an almost surreal invention, this is the first major example of a hollow Earth story, and one that would go on to be copied throughout Europe.