March to Other Worlds Day 4 To the Center of the Earth by Greig Beck

March to Other Worlds Day 4 To the Center of the Earth by Greig Beck

For the fourth day of the March, I’d like to turn deep into our planet with Greig Beck’s fascinating To the Center of the Earth. Beck has a knack for reinterpreting classic tales and making them modern and fresh with twists in discovery that make them uniquely his own. In this volume, he gives the reader a second look at Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, where two teams of cavers separately seeking to win a prize by going lower than any cavers have gone before sneak into a closed off cave system in Russia. One of the teams, however, has a much more ambitious plan than the other. They have uncovered evidence—some of it going back 500 years—that this cave system is actually an entrance to a hollow earth and as a result, as they descend deeper and deeper, both teams get a heck of a lot more than they bargained for.

 

In classic Beck style, the author spices things up by thinking quite carefully about how the ecology of a hollow earth would diverge from that of the rest of the planet. So we do not encounter dinosaurs but something far more unexpected and frightening. Also, unlike Verne, Beck has never been afraid to kill off his cast so once again the novel quickly moves into territory in which the question is who, if anyone, will survive the horrors he has created for his readers.

 

Yet the novel is not completely about the danger. Some of the elements are simply fascinating—even delightful—to think about. For example, there are tubes shooting deep into the earth in which gravity fluctuates. This permits the cavers to actually descend meaningful distances into the planet—one of many surprises which makes this adventure a wonderfully unique experience.

 

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