This book contains discussions on two main subjects: 1) people who, over the last few centuries, truly believed in a hollow earth, for scientific, religious or other reasons, and 2) fictional stories about adventures beneath the earth's surface; over half the book is about this latter category. The author devotes much space in discussing the authors of and the personages in the various fictional stories and in summarizing the plots; he also includes his personal comments (literary criticism). The author also tries to relate these plots to the social and political climates during the times in which the stories were written. The final chapter deals with modern day, i.e., twentieth century, hollow earth beliefs by some people, as well as (science fiction) novels and movies whose adventurers chance upon a strange mysterious world within the bowels of the earth. The book is well-written and witty. It would likely appeal to sociology buffs as well as, perhaps, literary critics.

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 Palmer into the pulp magazine _Amazing Stories_, and caused a sensation. Poor Shaver, however, had a history of being hospitalized for paranoia, and believed that his stories were telling the truth. Fantasy novels are one thing, but basing one's life and religion on the fantasy is another. Possibly the most peculiar person in this book which is full of peculiar people is Cyrus Teed, who through his religious alter-ego Koresh was able to inform the late nineteenth century world that not only was the Earth hollow, we were living on the inside of the hollow shell, not the outside, and the Sun and stars are somehow in the center. "To know of the earth's concavity is to know God, while to believe in the earth's convexity is to deny him and all his works." The Koreshan Unity Foundation still gets the word out.

Hollow Earth notions prove to be a dreadfully wrong-headed idea whose time has never come but still comes repeatedly in various forms. It is a little disheartening to know that such a bad concept has continued to take hold of people's imaginations and pocketbooks; type "Hollow Earth" into a Google search, and you will get millions of hits, and few of them reflect the sort of high-minded but amusing view which Standish has taken in his valuable book. The flying saucer tinfoil-hat types have signed on, as have the New Agers, and, if Standish's examples here mean anything, so will all the subsequent fringe groups.