Niels Klim's Underground Travels

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Niels Klim's Underground Travels (1741) is a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel written by Ludvig Holberg, a Norwegian-Danish dramatist, historian, and essayist, born in Bergen, Norway. It was his first and only novel. It describes a utopian society from an outsider's point of view, and often pokes fun at diverse cultural and social topics such as moral, science, sexual equality, religion, governments, and philosophy.

[edit] Plot summary

The novel starts with a foreword that ensures that everything in the story is a real account of the title character's exploits in the Underworld. The story is set, according to the book, in the Norwegian harbor town Bergen in 1664, after Klim returns from the university in Copenhagen, where he has studied philosophy and theology and graduated magna cum laude. His curiosity drives him to investigate a strange cave hole on the mountain above the town, which sends out regular gusts of warm air. He ends up falling down the hole, and after a while he finds himself floating in free space.

After a few days of orbiting the planet which revolves around the inner sun, he is attacked by a gryphon, and he falls down on the planet, which is named Nazar. There he wanders about for a short while until he is attacked once again, this time by an ox. He climbs up into a tree, and to his astonishment the tree can move and talk (this one screamed), and he is taken prisoner by tree-like creatures with up to six arms and a face right below the branches. He is accused of attempted rape on the town clerk's wife, and is put on trial. The case is dismissed and he is set by the Lord of Potu (the utopian state in which he now is located) to learn the language.

Klim quickly learns the language of the Potuans, but this reflects badly on him when the Lord is about to issue him with a job, because the Potuans believe that if you perceive a problem at a slower rate, the better you can understand and solve it. But, since he has considerably longer legs than the Potuans, who walk very slowly, he is set to be the Lord's personal courier, delivering letters and suchlike.

During the course of the book, Klim vividly chronicles the culture of the Potuans, their religion, their way of life and the many different countries located on Nazar. After his two-month long circumnavigation on foot, he is appalled by the fact that men and women are equal and shares the same kind of jobs, so he files a suggestion to the Lord of Potu to remove women from higher positions in society. His suggestion is poorly received and he is sentenced to be exiled to the inner rim of the Earth's crust. There he becomes familiar with a country inhabited by sentient monkeys, and after a few years he becomes emperor of the land of Quama, inhabited by the only creatures in the Underworld that look like humans. There, he marries and fathers a son. But again he is driven from hearth and home due to his tyranny and as he escapes he falls into a hole, which carries him through the crust and back up to Bergen again.

There, he is mistaken by the townsfolk to be the Wandering Jew, mostly due to a lingual misunderstanding (he asks a couple of young boys where he is in quamittian, which is Jeru Pikal Salim, and the boys think he talks about Jerusalem). He learns that he has been away for twelve years, and is taken in by his old friend, mayor Abelin, who writes down everything Klim tells him. He later receives a job as principal of the college of Bergen, and marries.

[edit] Trivia

• Holberg knew that the satirical content of the novel would cause an uproar in Denmark-Norway, so the book was first published in Germany, in Latin. By doing this, he got a broader audience than he would have gotten in the homeland. The novel made him widely acclaimed across Europe.

Actually the publisher Preuss published the Latin edition and a French translation and a German translation in Copenhagen, all in 1741.

• The book is significant in the history of science fiction being one of the first science-fiction novels in history, such as Johannes Kepler's Somnium (The Dream, 1634), Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656), Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).
• It is one of the first science fiction novels to use the Hollow Earth concept.
• In one chapter, Klim refers to Pliny the Elder and his Naturalis Historia when he feels that his descriptions of the Underworld inhabitants would seem too incredible for other humans to believe.
• There are a few characters in the book that were actual persons. Niels Klim (d. 1690) was employed at 'Korskirken' in Bergen as bellringer. He was also a retailer of books and a publisher. Klim's friend, Mayor Abelin, was also a real person named Rasmus Chistenson Abelin, and he was mayor of Bergen in Klim's lifetime. If they were friends in real life, is unknown.