The Hidden World by Edmond Hamilton

Like a giant replica of some strange anthill was this unutterably alien world hidden here at the heart of earth’s colossal shell, and as we sank downward through its levels in the great well, pausing in our vain search at level after level, gazing across those swarming levels, we could make out vast mechanisms and contrivances some of which were quite incalculable in purpose, others being more or less clear in principle at least to our watching eyes.

In our last episode we read a story by Clare Winger Harris from the Fall 1929 issue of Hugo Gernsback's Science Wonder Quarterly, a caper about a guy in a love triangle who replaced most of his body with mechanical components.  I commented on how attractive the magazine was, adorned with a ton of compelling illustrations by Frank R. Paul, and mentioned the included story by Edmond Hamilton, one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Today let's read that Hamilton piece, which seems long enough to deserve its own blog post--when it was reprinted it was billed as a novel.  Note: Do not confuse Hamilton's 1929 Science Wonder Quarterly story "The Hidden World" with Stanton Coblentz's 1935 story from Wonder Stories "In Caverns Below," which for book publication in 1957 was retitled The Hidden World.  We read that Coblentz piece back in 2015.

Feel free to read this 1929 printing of Hamilton's "The Hidden World" along with us at this internet archive link or here at luminist league.

The inhabitants of an East African village on the equator report seeing rise from the ground a blue shaft of light that reaches fifty feet into the sky and then vanishes after a minute.  Twenty days later, islanders in the Dutch East Indies, again on the equator,  claim to have witnessed a similar phenomena.  Three weeks after that a cruise ship with 1000 passengers is about to cross the equator near Panama and they too see a blue shaft of light leap up 50 feet into the air, this time from below the surface of the water.  Again, the column of light endures only one minute.

Our man characters are four scientists based in Manhattan, two geologists and two physicists who all work at the same Foundation and even live in the same apartment.  This is like some kind of male wish fulfillment fantasy, spending all day every day with three other guys with the same exact interests (I guess women isn't one of their shared interests.)  The narrator is one of the physicists.  Most people in the scientific community think the newspaper stories of the light shafts are a hoax or reports from mixed up people of mundane meteors, but the senior member of the four chums has calculated from those newspaper articles where and when the fourth shaft of light will appear and he proposes all four of the Manhattanite bachelors be there when that fourth column of light arises in the jungles of Brazil.

Our four intrepid NGO employees are there with an array of equipment--cameras and spectrometers and fluoroscopes and more--at the fork where two rivers meet in the Brazilian jungle when the fourth shaft of light appears.  Moments after the column of light has vanished there is an explosion and a perfectly circular hole appears in the earth, 500 feet wide and immeasurably deep.  From this shaft that leads deep into the Earth emerges a fleet of spherical aircraft 25 feet in diameter.  Our narrator and the other physicist are able to find concealment, but the geologists are in the open and seized by the disintegrator ray-wielding individuals who emerge from the spheres, slow clumsy people seven feet tall with boneless, sack-like bodies, tentacles, and a single huge eye.  Hamilton calls these people "flesh-creatures" or "flesh-monsters," which I found annoying, as we human beings are also flesh creatures, aren't we?, but that is what he sticks with.

The geologists are taken down the shaft in one of the flying spheres, while the physicists must wait for hour after hour, perspiring in the heat, unable to leave cover as hundreds of the white sack-people stand guard on foot nearby and hover in their spheres overhead.  With no water or food, the scientists lapse in and out of sanity!  When sane, they theorize on the nature of the technology of the alien race.  Then, the next day, desperate, they launch a scheme to distract the crew of one of the spheres that sits on land near the shaft, seize the sphere and fly it down into the shaft.

Two spheres pursue our heroes, and there is a dog fight in the shaft which the representatives of the human race win by using that trick I saw on Battlestar Galactica as a kid, hitting the brakes so the two monster-piloted craft pass by and can be shot in the back.  The scientists continue downwards, mile after mile, and it grows dangerously hot, but they find the air conditioner controls before expiring from the heat of the molten inner surface of Earth's crust.

The scientists find that Earth is hollow, with a surface crust like a thousand miles thick.  The inner part of that crust is glowing molten rock, a "thundering, roaring sea" of lava, casting light and heat upon a planet 3000 miles in diameter that rotates in the center of Earth's empty core.  The gravity that keeps the H2O on the Earth's outer surface is generated by the center of the crust, and so also keeps the lava on the inner surface.  The inner world generates its own gravity, of course, but less than that humans experience on the outer surface, and the scientists notice that the white sack-people, slow and clumsy up in Brazil, seem sprightly enough on the surface of their own world, which is covered in a single huge densely populated city above which swarm thousands of the spheres going hither and thither on their occupants' business.

The physicists fly around the city, which is built, 100 levels deep, of transparent metal so that the heat and light from the "roof" 1,500 miles above can radiate all the way down to the lowest levels.  Our eggheads study the city's marvelous operations, the endless array of big high tech industrial machines which, for example make food from rock by rearranging the atomic structure of matter to form any desired element.  All the time, of course, they are looking for their friends, and they finally come upon them when the join an armada of spheres that have been summoned to a huge lecture hall.  The supervisory class of the inner world attends the speech in their spheres--I guess its like a drive in movie.  As we readers expect, the topic of the speech, given by the leaders of the race of flesh-creatures, is the two geologists recently captured, who are paraded out onto the stage under heavy guard.  

After the speech the physicists are able to figure out where the geologists are imprisoned and to sneak up on and kill their guards. (The low gravity here gives them great strength and agility, like John carter on Mars or Kal-El on Terra.)  The door to the cell proves impossible to open, however.  They will have to ambush the next group of guards who come by after those guards have opened the door to the cell.  In the meantime, the geologists tell the story of their treatment at the hands of these boneless subterranean people.

The flesh-creatures used a ray machine to write into the geologists' brains fluency in their language in hopes of interrogating the surface men and thus learning of the human race's ability to oppose the invasion the sack-people had planned.  In the course of the interrogation, the geologists learned all about the history of this mysterious race.  We get a speculative astronomy and geology lesson (the formation of the planets and the inner and outer Earth, according to the flesh-people's scientists) and then speculative biology, covering the evolution of life on this inner sphere.  And then we get the reason why the flesh people seek to conquer the surface world--predictions that their little inner sphere is going to break up due to natural causes, the resulting fragments then pulled up into the lava ocean that surrounds this inner region.  This cataclysm will occur very soon.  The blue light columns were like periscopes, looking for a suitable place to use a disintegrator ray to dug the shaft through which the inner world armies could invade the surface world.  Obviously these immigrants cannot coexist with us surface world natives and will disintegrate us, every one.

"The Hidden World" can be split into three parts.  The first part Hamilton writes with gusto that is infectious, and is pretty entertaining.  The mystery of the blue lights, the four bosom buddies' prep for and examination of the light when it comes, the appearance of the flesh creatures and the capture of the geologists, the seizure of the flying machine by the physicists and their exploration of the world within our world is all fun.  Sure, there are problems.  For example, Hamilton's city is made of transparent metal so our heroes can see everything that is going on, but in an adventure story like this, the heroes have to sneak around and hide from people and ambush people, and such behavior is hard to believe in an environment in which walls, floors and ceilings are all transparent.  A typical adventure story could solve this problem by having the protagonists don captured uniforms, but the seven-foot tall and very wide aliens go around naked.   

Still, the first third of "The Hidden World" is entertaining.  But then comes the long encyclopedia article about the inner world and its inhabitants, which is boring and repetitive and really drags.

In the third part of the story the four humans outfight the guards who come to drag the geologists before the rulers  second time to demand the humans act as guides for the invasion force, which is set to leave in hours.  In their stolen sphere the four men escape, then block the shaft to the surface, battling hundreds and hundreds of spheres of the vanguard of the invasion force that is trying desperately to get through the shaft before their little planet explodes.  Hamilton describes this battle in repetitive detail, and it drags.  His explanation as to how one sphere can outfight hundreds is that the gunners of the invasion force are blinded by the light of the lava ocean and can't get a bead on the stolen flying machine which lurks a few feet within the shadows of the shaft.  Anyway, the scientists use their stolen vehicle's disintegrator rays to annihilate one enemy charge after another, like the British at Waterloo bating back one French cavalry charge after another, destroying hundreds of spheres, all the while dodging a fusillade of ill-aimed rays.  When the hundred spheres that are up in Brazil, guarding the exit of the shaft, come down to help, we get one of those scenes we have seen a hundred times in cartoons and Star Wars movies in which two of the bad guys' units, in this case two squadrons of one hundred spheres each, suffer a head on collision because the good guys got out of the way just in time.  Eventually the little planet explodes, and the blast and debris wipe out all the spheres and seal the shaft, our people only barely escaping up the shaft as it collapses.  Our sense of wonder ending is that, with the technology of the sphere, human society is about to be radically changed.  (Cross your figures that the disintegrator ray technology remains an American monopoly.)

"The Hidden World" has nine chapters, and up through chapter five or six I expected to give it a positive review.  So much of the first half of the story is full of exciting images of vast alien vistas and hairsbreadth escapes and spectacular violence that it is fun to imagine it all in your mind, like you are watching a Lucas or Spielberg film.  But then comes the overly long speculative science lectures, and then the overly long final action sequence.  And of course the story's characters have zero personality and no human feelings or relationships.  Hamilton says they are scared and tells us three times that their faces turn white, but we don't feel it.  "The Hidden World" is a good example of the strengths and weaknesses of pre-Golden Age science fiction--lots of science, lots of ideas, a big big canvas in which entire worlds and civilizations are threatened and destroyed, but a severe lack of some traditional elements of literature and popular entertainment, like memorable characters you can identify with or which otherwise generate emotions in the reader.  A story like "The Hidden World" reminds you of how critical to the success of Edgar Rice Burroughs is the fact that Tarzan and John Carter have personalities, have voices and inner lives.

So, we're just going to award "The Hidden World" with a rating of "Acceptable."  Lots of it is cool and fun, but it is repetitive and would benefit from being cut down by like 25 or 30%.  

"The Hidden World" was reprinted in 1950 in the first issue of a magazine edited by Sam Merwin, Jr., Fantastic Story Quarterly, that largely consisted of reprints.  The issue includes brand new illos for "The Hidden World" by the great Virgil Finlay, however, that are worth a look.  In the 21st century, "The Hidden World" has reappeared in the second volume of Haffner Press' The Collected Edmond Hamilton, an anthology of Hollow Earth Tales, and a "Double Novel" in which Hamilton's epic of the doom of the flesh creatures' stablemate is Dwight V. Swain's You Can't Buy Eternity.