Ludvig Holberg’s A Journey to the World Under-Ground (originally Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum, 1741) is an 18th-century satirical fantasy in the tradition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. A Norwegian student falls through a hole in the earth and discovers a subterranean world inhabited by talking trees and diverse fantastical civilisations, each satirising a different aspect of European society. Published in Latin, it circulated widely across Europe and stands as a significant early work in the history of fantastic literature.
This free EPUB presents the English translation of Holberg’s remarkable proto-science-fiction novel in a clean reformatted edition. Readers interested in the roots of speculative fiction — in what imagination produced before the genre had a name — will find it a witty and surprisingly readable document from the early Enlightenment.