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mmcirvinProf. Otto Lidenbrock, an excitable, aged geologist and bibliophile who possesses a Cliff Stoll-like level of general energy, holds court in his house in Hamburg where he is training his nephew Axel in the sciences. One day he discovers a cryptic note apparently hidden in a medieval runic manuscript by the 16th-century Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm. Deciphering the note in a somewhat ridiculous manner, he finds that Saknussemm claims to have descended to the center of the Earth via a passage beneath an Icelandic volcano. The proper crater can be identified by a peak's shadow pointing at it at a certain time of year. There's nothing for it but to go, as immediately as possible, so they can witness the shadow at the appropriate moment (a common characteristic of Jules Verne protagonists is a perpetual sense of urgency).
Young Axel, who is also the boyfriend of Lidenbrock's goddaughter Graüben (1), figures this is probably a suicide mission but also feels a need to demonstrate his manhood before he can marry Graüben. So Lidenbrock and Axel head off to Iceland. In Reykjavik (a much smaller town than it is today) they acquire a guide, an impassive, taciturn eiderdown-gatherer named Hans. The three of them will end up descending far beneath the surface of the Earth to a strange hidden world...
As usual, spoilers follow.
Of the major "Extraordinary Voyages", I think Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of the earliest, and, from the perhaps unfair vantage point of our age, the silliest, since it rests on a free extrapolation of discredited theories. But it's a lot of fun, a generally light adventure except for a couple of darker episodes. It's also one of the earliest appearances of the idea that an underground world might be full of extinct prehistoric animals.
The book is told in the first person from Axel's perspective and is divided into three main sections. The first is a surprisingly leisurely travelogue that takes the adventurers through Denmark to Iceland, where they have to trek a long distance over land with their guide Hans to get to the Snæfellsjökull ("le Sneffels"), a volcano on a peninsula jutting out into the sea from Iceland's western coast. The best and most atmospheric bit here is their evening lodging with local peasants with a gigantic number of children, who climb all over them at dinner while they dine under the house's smoke-hole. This section feels much more realistic than the rest of the story, which has the effect of softening up the reader a bit to accept everything that follows--a time-honored technique in fantastic fiction.
The second main portion is the descent beneath the Earth, through Saknussemm's hidden, winding tunnel beneath one of the craters of the Snæfellsjökull. The expedition seems frankly a bit under-prepared and aided by some extraordinary lucky breaks. After an initial wrong turn that nearly kills them all from thirst, they find that Saknussemm's passage runs next to a hidden spring that can be accessed through the tunnel wall, providing them with a steady supply of drinking water.
Light in these tunnels is provided by an invention that Jules Verne would return to in 20,000 Leagues: my old friend the "Ruhmkorff apparatus", a portable, battery-powered fluorescent electric light that seems to last an extraordinarily long time on a charge. As in the later book, Verne mostly ignores the possibility of high air pressure having deleterious effects on his characters, and they've got enough preserved food to last them once they're assured of water to drink.
Nor are they gradually cooked by increasing heat, which surprises Axel since he subscribes to the theory we now know to be more or less correct, that the Earth has some source of internal heat that causes temperatures to rise gradually beneath the uppermost layers of the crust. It doesn't surprise Lidenbrock, as he believes the Earth has no internal heat source whatsoever, and that volcanoes such as the Snæfellsjökull are powered by transient chemical reactions involving alkali metals and water--a radical theory of the early 19th-century chemist Humphry Davy. Whether Davy is ultimately right or not, the book never reveals, but the question at least remains open.
After a well-done bit of surreal psychological horror in which Axel becomes temporarily separated from the others and stranded in darkness, we arrive at the third section, which is apparently one of the earliest appearances of a trope that would become beloved in cheeseball science fiction of the 20th century: The Lost World! Saknussemm's passage leads to a vast underground cavern, conveniently and dramatically lit by an aurora-like phenomenon, containing a sea full of prehistoric creatures hitherto believed extinct. Hans proves well-versed in building rafts, and they go on a sea voyage. We don't, interestingly, encounter dinosaurs. We do encounter a Plesiosaurus and an Ichthyosaurus, having a big old kaiju battle in the middle of the sea. There are live mammoths, giant mushrooms, fossil beds full of extinct proto-human skeletons, and a fleeting glimpse (Verne loved his fleeting glimpses of things he couldn't 100% justify) of a strange hominid giant.
They don't literally get to the exact center of the Earth. Instead, finding their continued downward passage blocked, they try using way too much explosive in a Mythbusters-like fashion, and what follows is frankly ridiculous even by the standards of what's already happened, but Verne had to come up with some way of their getting back so he could explain how Axel could tell the story.
This book is light and fluffy compared to 20,000 Leagues or even From The Earth to the Moon, but it's a lot of fun. The interplay between impatient, bullheaded Otto Lidenbrock, the skeptical and often terrified but eager Axel and cool cucumber Hans is entertaining. My cousin Beth Fogarty thinks that Hans's seeming lack of surprise at anything that happens suggests that the locals in Iceland knew about Saknussemm's passage all along. I like that interpretation.
(1) "Graüben" apparently in no way resembles a name any German-speaking person would actually have. Verne's grasp of foreign names is sometimes a bit shaky.
Young Axel, who is also the boyfriend of Lidenbrock's goddaughter Graüben (1), figures this is probably a suicide mission but also feels a need to demonstrate his manhood before he can marry Graüben. So Lidenbrock and Axel head off to Iceland. In Reykjavik (a much smaller town than it is today) they acquire a guide, an impassive, taciturn eiderdown-gatherer named Hans. The three of them will end up descending far beneath the surface of the Earth to a strange hidden world...
As usual, spoilers follow.
Of the major "Extraordinary Voyages", I think Journey to the Center of the Earth is one of the earliest, and, from the perhaps unfair vantage point of our age, the silliest, since it rests on a free extrapolation of discredited theories. But it's a lot of fun, a generally light adventure except for a couple of darker episodes. It's also one of the earliest appearances of the idea that an underground world might be full of extinct prehistoric animals.
The book is told in the first person from Axel's perspective and is divided into three main sections. The first is a surprisingly leisurely travelogue that takes the adventurers through Denmark to Iceland, where they have to trek a long distance over land with their guide Hans to get to the Snæfellsjökull ("le Sneffels"), a volcano on a peninsula jutting out into the sea from Iceland's western coast. The best and most atmospheric bit here is their evening lodging with local peasants with a gigantic number of children, who climb all over them at dinner while they dine under the house's smoke-hole. This section feels much more realistic than the rest of the story, which has the effect of softening up the reader a bit to accept everything that follows--a time-honored technique in fantastic fiction.
The second main portion is the descent beneath the Earth, through Saknussemm's hidden, winding tunnel beneath one of the craters of the Snæfellsjökull. The expedition seems frankly a bit under-prepared and aided by some extraordinary lucky breaks. After an initial wrong turn that nearly kills them all from thirst, they find that Saknussemm's passage runs next to a hidden spring that can be accessed through the tunnel wall, providing them with a steady supply of drinking water.
Light in these tunnels is provided by an invention that Jules Verne would return to in 20,000 Leagues: my old friend the "Ruhmkorff apparatus", a portable, battery-powered fluorescent electric light that seems to last an extraordinarily long time on a charge. As in the later book, Verne mostly ignores the possibility of high air pressure having deleterious effects on his characters, and they've got enough preserved food to last them once they're assured of water to drink.
Nor are they gradually cooked by increasing heat, which surprises Axel since he subscribes to the theory we now know to be more or less correct, that the Earth has some source of internal heat that causes temperatures to rise gradually beneath the uppermost layers of the crust. It doesn't surprise Lidenbrock, as he believes the Earth has no internal heat source whatsoever, and that volcanoes such as the Snæfellsjökull are powered by transient chemical reactions involving alkali metals and water--a radical theory of the early 19th-century chemist Humphry Davy. Whether Davy is ultimately right or not, the book never reveals, but the question at least remains open.
After a well-done bit of surreal psychological horror in which Axel becomes temporarily separated from the others and stranded in darkness, we arrive at the third section, which is apparently one of the earliest appearances of a trope that would become beloved in cheeseball science fiction of the 20th century: The Lost World! Saknussemm's passage leads to a vast underground cavern, conveniently and dramatically lit by an aurora-like phenomenon, containing a sea full of prehistoric creatures hitherto believed extinct. Hans proves well-versed in building rafts, and they go on a sea voyage. We don't, interestingly, encounter dinosaurs. We do encounter a Plesiosaurus and an Ichthyosaurus, having a big old kaiju battle in the middle of the sea. There are live mammoths, giant mushrooms, fossil beds full of extinct proto-human skeletons, and a fleeting glimpse (Verne loved his fleeting glimpses of things he couldn't 100% justify) of a strange hominid giant.
They don't literally get to the exact center of the Earth. Instead, finding their continued downward passage blocked, they try using way too much explosive in a Mythbusters-like fashion, and what follows is frankly ridiculous even by the standards of what's already happened, but Verne had to come up with some way of their getting back so he could explain how Axel could tell the story.
This book is light and fluffy compared to 20,000 Leagues or even From The Earth to the Moon, but it's a lot of fun. The interplay between impatient, bullheaded Otto Lidenbrock, the skeptical and often terrified but eager Axel and cool cucumber Hans is entertaining. My cousin Beth Fogarty thinks that Hans's seeming lack of surprise at anything that happens suggests that the locals in Iceland knew about Saknussemm's passage all along. I like that interpretation.
(1) "Graüben" apparently in no way resembles a name any German-speaking person would actually have. Verne's grasp of foreign names is sometimes a bit shaky.