Journey to the Center of the Earth

A Hamburg professor decodes a runic note in a sixteenth-century book, concludes that a passage to the interior of the earth opens at the bottom of an Icelandic volcano, and takes his reluctant nephew and an Icelandic guide down it. What they find is a subterranean sea with weather, prehistoric animals still living in it, and a way out through a different volcano. The pleasure of the book is its method — barometers, thermometers, geology arguments, and a descent measured the whole way down.

Context: a16z set Verne against Wells as “an infra maximalist and an open optimist,” someone who built on the real science of his day to imagine plausible machines and accomplishments, and whose work is “fundamentally about exploring the unknown, pushing the frontiers of human experience, and turning engineers into heroes.” This is the earliest of the four Verne titles they list.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — where this is listed, in the classics tier.
• Jules Verne — the author.
• From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days — the other three Verne titles on the list.
• H. G. Wells — the contrast the list draws between them.
• Science Fiction — the genre.