The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin Page A

Bottle” (1833), there is a gigantic whirlpool at the South Pole which swallows the narrator’s ship. And in “Hans Pfaall,” as the balloon rises above the North Pole toward the Moon, a sharply defined circular depression is seen in the ice “whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute blackness.” 58
    Verne’s party to the North Pole in Captain Hatteras consists of an American arctic explorer, a ship’s doctor, two sailors, and their leader, the Romantic English multimillionaire, Captain Hatteras, who is bent on being the first man to set foot on the North Pole. This central character is the impediment to Verne’s success. Although Verne cites many scientific facts as his party suffers through great realistic arctic hardships, his main character is not devoted to science. Rather, Captain Hatteras is a madman with an obsession akin to the mania of the stowaway in “A Balloon Journey.”
    Just as Poe’s Pym had found those strange open waters that were previously expected by Mary Shelley’s captain in the vicinity of the Pole, so do Verne’s explorers, who launch a small sloop they have brought with them by dogsled. Verne, no less than Poe, was fascinated by the Symmes Hole theory. His man of fact, the ship’s doctor, observes: “In recent times it has even been suggested that there are great chasms at the Poles; it is through these that there emerges the light which forms the Aurora, and you can get down through them into the interior of the earth.” 59
    However, here, as in subsequent Verne novels, the high Romantic expectations of his characters outstrip the actualities they are permitted to discover. This possibility of a Symmes hole is too wild and dangerous a mystery for Verne to contend with. Instead, like Poe, he shies away from it, and makes a non-transcendent substitution. In the middle of the eerie northern sea, Verne’s party comes upon a small island. On this island is a flaming volcano. It is the volcano that is the location of the North Pole.
    Captain Hatteras the Romantic will not be kept from his goal. Like his predecessor in “A Balloon Journey,” he is drawn to the fire. He rushes up to the lip of the volcano and is about to throw himself into the abyss when the American pulls him back to safety. Hatteras faints. When he returns to consciousness, he is hopelessly insane.
    And so the story concludes, as an old-fashioned Romantic cliché. This is certainly no improvement on Poe.
    Hatteras the Romantic destabilizes Verne’s story. With him running things, Verne is unbalanced from the beginning. No more than he will land on the sun will Verne enter a Symmes Hole or leap into a living volcano and then imagine what comes next. And certainly not with a madman like Hatteras at the center of his story.
    In his next novel, the third extraordinary voyage, however, Verne took the substance of Captain Hatteras and recast it. Journey to the Centre of the Earth, also first published in 1864, is the most imaginative SF story that Jules Verne ever wrote. In this story, in the course of pursuing fact down a rabbit hole into the earth, almost without realizing it, Verne’s travelers penetrate into what is undeniably the World Beyond the Hill.
    One vital recasting that Verne made in Journey to the Centre of the Earth was to make the leader of his expedition a dedicated man of science rather than a Romantic. Professor Lidenbrock the German geologist may have his little obsessions and rigidities, but he is no egocentric madman. Verne can trust his stability as he could not trust the unscientific judgment of Captain Hatteras. The Romantic in Journey to the Centre of the Earth is the narrator, Professor Lidenbrock’s ineffectual nephew Axel, who is much given to fainting.
    Once again, there is a volcano, but this time an extinct one located in the wastes of Iceland rather than at the