Free Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio by David Standish Page A

event discovered that this conjecture was right.
     
    Instead of falling all the way, he finds himself suspended in orbit. On consideration, he decides that’s fine—as a heavenly body he “would surely move with equal solemnity to a famished philosopher.” But then a flying monster approaches, a menacing griffin a little like the one that gives Dante a ride in the Inferno. “So great was my terror that, unmindful of my starry dignity to which I was newly advanced, in that disorder of my soul I drew out my university testimonial, which I happened to have in my pocket, to signify to this terrible adversary that I had passed my academical examination, that I was a graduate student, and could plead the privilege of my university against anyone who should attack me.” Niels’ jaunty insouciance gives the novel considerable charm, though it suffers from the defect common to all utopian fiction: the story repeatedly stops dead in its tracks to explain one or another set of customs. Niels harpoons the griffin and both fall to the planet Nazar below, where he is bothered by a bull and climbs a tree to get away. The “tree” proves to be the wife of the chief magistrate in a nearby city, and Niels finds himself jailed for assault. The creatures are cousin to those in the Forest of Suicides in the Inferno —trees with human heads on top and little feet on which they creep about. Nazar is a topsy-turvy utopia, or rather a bunch of them, where prevailing values on the surface are overturned. Niels spends much of the book traveling from country to country, each one devoted to its particular idée fixe. The novel adds Holberg’s voice to those of Montesquieu and Voltaire in their battle against religious fanaticism, the pious persecution and torture it leads to, doing so with humor, as Klim travels round the planet and encounters countries where the authorities cruelly suppress divergent views. The novel was quickly translated into French, English, German, Dutch, and Danish.
    A whimsical sort-of-subterranean English novel, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins by Robert Paltock, published in 1751, is, as a contemporary critic grumped in the Monthly Review, “the illegitimate offspring of no very natural conjunction betwixt Gulliver’s travels and Robinson Crusoe; but much inferior to the meaner of these two performances, either as to entertainment or utility. It has all that is impossible in the one, or improbable in the other, without the wit and spirit of the first, or the just strokes of nature and useful lessons of morality of the second.” Paltock probably figured that stealing from two best sellers at once doubled his chances at a hit, and Peter Wilkins has a certain mutant appeal. After seducing and marrying a servant girl—there are touches of Tom Jones , published two years earlier, as well—Wilkins signs on a ship, is taken as a slave by Portuguese in Angola, escapes with a resourceful black fellow slave, and has many adventures in Africa before stealing a ship with other English refugees.
    They become lost sailing south, where the ship, reaching the Antarctic, is inexorably attracted to a black lodestone mountain—the looming shadow of Mercator—and all but Wilkins are swept overboard. He begins exploring in a smaller boat, which is caught in a current and yanked down the drain of a maelstrom, bobbing up into an enormous underground cavern. Coming upon a small island, he sets up housekeeping à la Crusoe. Far luckier than Crusoe, who had only unsexy Friday for company, Wilkins meets one of the locals, a beautiful winged young woman with skin like the down of a swan. They marry, after a fashion, and live together for many years as a happy couple, raising several children, until she decides to visit her family. Wilkins helps the king thwart a plot to overthrow him, asking as reward that slavery be abolished and reading introduced to the peasantry—a little utopian nod here at the end. At the last, his wife