Plutonia (novel)

Plutonia (Плутония) is an early science-fiction novel by Russian academician Vladimir Obruchev. It was written in 1915 in Kharkov and first published in the original Russian in 1924.

Plot

The title Plutonia refers to the novel's setting in a lost land. It is an underground world having its own sun, called Pluto for the Roman god of the underworld. The terrain is marked by dramatic geographic features and inhabited by monstrous animals and primitive people. These are essentially the animal and plant life of previous geological periods in their natural surroundings. As the characters venture deeper into the underground area, they encounter more and more ancient life forms, back to dinosaurs and other Jurassic species.^[1]

Background

The descriptive passages are made more credible by Obruchev's extensive scientific knowledge of geology and paleontology.^[2]

In translation

Besides English, the novel has been published in numerous foreign languages: Spanish (1953), Finnish (1954), Ukrainian (1955), French (1955), Hungarian (1956), Romanian (1956), Latvian (1957), Portuguese (1960), and Polish (1966).^[3]

See also

• Hollow Earth
• Lost world (genre)
• Pellucidar

References