What Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined in his novel, At the Earth’s Core, may not seem that impressive by today’s standards. If you’re well-versed in the sciences at all, you know the basic premise is impossible. And even if you are not so well-versed, you have probably seen so many weird stories with strange creatures that this is just one more. But at the time (1914) few authors had dared to go so deep down into the bowels of our world. And if this story does not seem unique today, it is because it has been imitated so many times.
Jules Vernes novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867), had shown readers a world below our world, one with caverns large enough to encompass subterranean oceans, beaches, jungles, even islands, a world where creatures, long extinct on the surface, still thrived. I think it’s fair to say he never got the reader quite to the center, as the issue of gravity never comes up. But make no mistake, Verne got there first. And it seems pretty obvious that Burroughs had read Verne’s novel, and was inspired to publish his own take on the premise.
But Burroughs’ version of the Earth’s interior was a very different one. Like Verne’s interior, Burroughs’ is deep within the Earth and has strange prehistoric creatures. But Burroughs shows us an inverted world where the sun overhead is the core, and the world is an inside-out globe surrounding it, where the sun is always at zenith, and night never comes. It’s a world where time doesn’t exist, or at least is very difficult to track, where the Mahars, monsters descended from early pterosaurs, use telepathy and fear to rule over the Sagoths, their ape-like servants, and a population of stone age humans.
If, like me, you have a craving for weird, this all scores delightfully high on the weirdness scale.
Burroughs never really explains how it is that gravity is inverted on the inside. Using the style of writing of his time, he simply tells us that it is so, as witnessed by the protagonist, who is nether able nor obligated to account for it. It simply is the case. One might argue that this (among other things) makes the story fantasy rather than science fiction, but at the time, with what was and was not known by the average reader (or writer for that matter), I think we can let it slip under the velvet rope.
As in so many of his books, the hero, a headstrong young man (of course), falls in love with the princess (of course), wins her heart with his courage, and wins her hand in battle. I will probably do a sizeable post in the future, discussing certain genres of sci-fi and fantasy and their sometimes satisfying and also problematic themes of masculinity and barbarism. For now let’s just acknowledge it and move on.
At the Earth’s Core is a treat you should not deny yourself. I’ve read it several times now, and will almost certainly read it at least a couple more times before I die. It speaks to the child in my own core, who still believes that another hidden world might be accessible via the crawl-space under the house, or the loose panel in that one downstairs closet.
It’s fun.
