Professor Lidenbrock decodes a runic cipher hidden in a medieval manuscript and concludes, against all geological sense, that it’s a map to the center of the Earth via an Icelandic volcano. Verne knew the science was implausible even in 1864 — he includes a prehistoric ocean, giant mushroom forests, and living dinosaurs along the way — but the implausibility was never really the point.
What Verne is actually interested in is the descent itself: layer after layer of rock read as layers of geological time, so that going down becomes, quite literally, going backward through the history of the planet. It’s an adventure novel disguised as a popular geology lecture, and one of the earliest works of fiction to treat ‘deep time’ as something a reader could travel through like a landscape.
It’s collected here alongside three more of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages — proof that Nemo’s ocean and Phileas Fogg’s globe were only two of the directions Verne sent his readers.
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