Subterranean fiction

Literature

• In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy poem Inferno, Hell is a vast cavern and the narrator travels through the center of the Earth and out the other side to Purgatory.
• In Ludvig Holberg's 1741 novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum, Nicolai Klim falls through a cave while spelunking and spends several years living on both a smaller globe within and the inside of the outer shell.
• Giacomo Casanova's 1788 Icosaméron is a 5-volume, 1,800-page story of a brother and sister who fall into the Earth and discover the subterranean utopia of the Mégamicres, a race of multicolored, hermaphroditic dwarfs.
• An early science-fiction work called Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery by a "Captain Adam Seaborn" appeared in print in 1820. In the story, Captain Seaborn leads a group of travelers into the concave inner surface of the Earth. There, they discover an inner continent, which they name Symzonia after John Cleves Symmes, Jr. The story obviously reflected the ideas of Symmes, and some have claimed Symmes as the real author. Other researchers say it deliberately satirized Symmes's ideas, and think they have identified the author as an early American author named Nathaniel Ames.
• Faddei Bulgarin's short satirical tale "Improbable Tall-Tale, or Journey to the Center of the Earth" describes three underworld countries: Ignorantia, Beastland, and Lightonia.
• Edgar Allan Poe's nautical science-fiction tales "MS. Found in a Bottle", The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and "A Descent into the Maelström" all feature Hollow Earth elements.
• Although it is often suggested that Jules Verne used the idea of a partially hollow Earth in his 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, his characters actually descend only 87 miles beneath the surface, where they find an underground sea occupying a cavern roughly the size of Europe.
• Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was originally titled Alice's Adventures Under Ground.
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1871 novel Vril.
• Mary Lane's Mizora combines the hollow-Earth theme with feminism.
• James De Mille's novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published in 1888 but written prior to the author's death in 1880, depicts a subterranean land with inverted values.
• Pantaletta: A Romance of Sheheland by Mrs. J. Wood
• George Sand used the idea in her 1884 novel Laura, Voyage dans le Cristal, in which grotesque monsters are found in the interior of the Earth.
• Interior World: A Romance Illustrating a New Hypothesis of Terrestrial Organization by Washington L. Tower
• Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's "Mission de l'Inde en Europe" was published in 1886 as a "true" story about Agartha. He withdrew it from the print and it was released again by Gérard Encausse in 1910.
• John O. Greene's utopia The Ke Whonkus People describes an 11,000 year-old subterranean civilization at the North Pole, circa 1886, with a "fine climate" and "highly civilized people."
• William R. Bradshaw's science fiction novel The Goddess of Atvatabar is a utopian fantasy set within the hollow Earth.
• Will N. Harben's Land of the Changing Sun is a utopian fantasy set within a 100-mile wide cavern found below the Atlantic Ocean 200 years prior and settled. The settlers found the atmosphere very rejuvenating, and also build an artificial changing sun to light their world. Two balloonists, an American and an Englishman, discover this world.
• Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd is set within a hollow Earth.
• In the sociologist Gabriel Tarde's only literary work, Underground Man , Humanity escapes a second apocalyptic ice age by delving under the earth and reforming society with Art as its central value.
• Charles Willing Beale's 1899 novel, The Secret of the Earth tells of the adventure of two brothers who build an anti-gravity airship and travel to the hollow Earth. There they find several lost races, and learn that mankind originated in the hollow Earth, but the unruly types were exiled from the hollow Earth. They then exit via the South Pole opening and crash on an island in the South Pacific, from which they send off a log of their adventures which forms the novel.
• The concept was mentioned in Wardon Allan Curtis's 1899 short story "The Monster of Lake LaMetrie".
• In NEQUA or The Problem of the Ages a visit in a sailing ship is made to Altruria, a society inside the earth. This feminist utopian science fiction novel was published in 1900 in Topeka Kansas. Jack Adams listed as the author, was a pseudonym for A. O. Grigsby and Mary P. Lowe, both newspaper publishers.
• An underground Nome Kingdom is featured in several of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, notably Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and Tik-Tok of Oz.
• Willis George Emerson's science-fiction novel The Smoky God recounts the adventures of one Olaf Jansen who traveled into the interior and found an advanced civilization.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote adventure stories set in the inner world of Pellucidar, including at one point a visit from his character Tarzan. Burroughs's Pellucidar has oceans on the outer surface corresponding to continents on the inner surface and vice versa. Pellucidar is lit by a miniature sun suspended at the center of the hollow sphere, so it is perpetually overhead wherever one is in Pellucidar. The sole exception is the region directly under a tiny geostationary moon of the internal sun; that region as a result is under a perpetual eclipse and is known as the Land of Awful Shadow. This moon has its own plant life and animal life and hence either has its own atmosphere or shares that of Pellucidar.
• The Russian geologist Vladimir Obruchev uses the concept of the hollow Earth in his 1915 scientific novel Plutonia to take the reader through various geological epochs.
• The World Below by British science fiction author S. Fowler Wright was a major novel of 1929, and important in the history of science-fiction as a bridge between the scientific romance and the pulp era. It is set in the far-future in which Earth's dominant race lives almost entirely underground.
• A deliberately tunneled-out Earth occurs in Charles R. Tanner 1930's SF short story "Tumithak of the Corridors".
• Morgo the Mighty by Sean O'Larkin was serialized in The Popular Magazine in 1930. It featured the adventures of a Tarzanesque character in a network of giant caverns beneath the Himalayas. The caves are ruled by a cowled magician and populated by primitive men, giant intelligent bats, giant warring ants and giant killer chickens.
• Tam, Son of the Tiger by Otis Adelbert Kline from 1931 features the adventures of Tam in a subterranean world beneath Asia.
• The novel In Caverns Below by Stanton A. Coblentz posits an extensive populated network of caverns underlying the Basin and Range province in the North American southwest.
• The novel The Secret People by John Wyndham features prisoners held captive in a labyrinth of caves by an ancient race of pygmies dwelling beneath the Sahara desert.
• In the Middle-earth books by J.R.R. Tolkien, the kingdom of Angband and its predecessor Utumno are deep underground, under mountains called Ered Engrin; they are home to Orcs, monsters and Morgoth the Dark Lord. Also, the Dwarves and even elves live underground – the underground realms of Moria and Erebor and cities like Nargothrond and Menegroth play a major role in the stories.
• While investigating a haunted mound in Oklahoma, the protagonist of H. P. Lovecraft's novella The Mound discovers a Spanish explorer's account of his travels in a subterranean civilization named K’nyan.
• Richard Sharpe Shaver's The Shaver Mystery stories are about ancient civilizations still living in caverns beneath the Earth surface
• Into a Strange Lost World, a novel for children by Richard Hough, tells the story of two airmen who are shot down in the Second World War and descend into an underground world.
• C. S. Lewis's 1953 novel The Silver Chair takes place partly in Underland, a subterranean kingdom plotting to conquer Narnia. At one point, the Lady of the Green Kirtle attempts to brainwash the protagonists into believing that the world above ground does not exist.
• The Third Eye by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa mentions contact with advanced beings living in the center of the Earth.
• The End of the Tunnel , by Paul Capon. Four boys in England get trapped in a cave by a landslide, and by following the cave, they encounter a forgotten civilization.
• Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye. A post-apocalyptic science fiction novel where two clans live deep underground and are descendants from humans who escaped an old war.
• City of the First Time by G.J. Barrett. British survivors of an atomic holocaust venture downward into the Earth through a series of caves and encounter two other races, survivals of previous extinctions.
• Visages Immobiles by Raymond Abellio. Having discovered that New York was built on top of a massive hollow cavity, an architect devises a plan to build an underground city below Manhattan. The underground setting then becomes the scenario of the apocalyptic battle between a clairvoyant and an international terrorist.
• A Hollow Earth featured in the children's Choose Your Own Adventure novel The Underground Kingdom.
• The history of the Hollow Earth theory is explored in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, alongside a wide range of other pseudo-scientific and conspiracy theories.
• Rudy Rucker's novel The Hollow Earth features Edgar Allan Poe and his ideas. Rucker claims in an afterword to have transcribed the novel from a manuscript in the University of Virginia library; the call number given is that of a copy of Symzonia.
• The Dark Elf Trilogy by R. A. Salvatore was the first of the Forgotten Realms books to describe the underground world of the Dark Elves called the Underdark. This greatly helped popularize underground settings in fantasy RPGs.
• The novel Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth by Max McCoy expands on the legend of an advanced civilization in the Earth's interior.
• Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child features an underground civilization of humans beneath Manhattan.
• The short story "Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole" by Howard Waldrop and Steven Utley continues the journey of Frankenstein's creature through a hollow Earth.
• In Jeff Long's 1999 novel The Descent and its 2007 sequel Deeper, a vast labyrinth of tunnels and passages underlying the Earth is inhabited by a brutal species of once-civilized but now degenerate hominid, Homo Hadalis.
• The 2000 novel Abduction by Robin Cook includes the concept of a third world under the sea called "Interterra."
• Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series focuses on crimes committed by or against the fairy-folk who live beneath the Earth's crust in a technologically advanced society.
• Underland by Mick Farren has the vampire hero Victor Renquist traveling to a hollow Earth populated by Nazi scientists, subjugated proto-scientific lizard people, and a fungus addicted race of sub-vampires.
• The City of Ember and its sequels by Jeanne DuPrau describe a city built underground to survive a nuclear holocaust.
• The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins tells the story of a war between the humans and the rats in a location under New York City called the Underland.
• Tunnels is the first of a series of books by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams, taking place in a hollow Earth with an interior sun, in which multiple civilisations exist within and beneath the crust.
• Metro 2033 and Metro 2034 by Dmitry Glukhovsky are post-nuclear-apocalyptic novels which describe the last remaining humans fighting to survive in the metro system underneath Moscow with the surface being too irradiated for humans to survive.
• Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon makes extensive mention of the Earth's interior as a place to be explored, positing inner-Earth seas. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon also uses the idea of a Hollow Earth as the planet's final holdout for magic against the calculations of the surface's most eminent men of science.
• In Geraldine McCaughrean's The White Darkness, the characters undertake a journey to find a hole into the hollow Earth.
• Neal Shusterman's Downsiders is a story where a young boy living under New York City in a secret community becomes curious about the topside and adventure ensues.
• John Hodgman's 2008 book More Information Than You Require says the hollow interior of the Earth is the home of the subterranean Molemen. In the center of this Hollow Earth is a small, red sun.
• The Battle of the Labyrinth, the fourth book in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, revolves around the protagonists' attempts to navigate the Labyrinth, a confusing, supernatural maze under the United States.
• The Silo series narrates post-apocalyptic human life in a subterranean city extending one hundred forty-four stories beneath the surface.
• Kameron Hurley's 2017 novel The Stars Are Legion takes place on an alien world with various separate underground societies that the protagonist must work her way through on a long journey back to the surface.