Hidden World

by Stanton A. Coblentz

A cliff overlooking tremendous galleries and caverns and, far below, two armies battling with powerful destructive weapons...this was the place into which Comstock and Clay had been thrust by what they thought was an earthquake. Here, below the desert - below the silver mine which the two had been exploring - were two hidden civilizations, deadly enemies, and the possessors of far-advanced scientific secrets.
Separated from his companion, Frank Comstock found himself captured by chalk-faced people and brought into a civilization that was both bewildering and awe-inspiring. For while the people of this Alice-in-Wonderland land of Wu appeared to be scientific geniuses, they looked and acted like madmen!

Also published as In Caverns Below

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Stanton Arthur Coblentz was an American author and poet. He received a Master's Degree in English literature and then began publishing poetry during the early 1920s. His first published science fiction was "The Sunken World," a satire about Atlantis, in Amazing Stories Quarterly for July, 1928. The next year, he published his first novel, The Wonder Stick. But poetry and history were his greatest strengths. Coblentz tended to write satirically. He also wrote books of literary criticism and nonfiction concerning historical subjects. Adventures of a Freelancer: The Literary Exploits and Autobiography of Stanton A. Coblentz was published the year after his death.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hidden World was serialized with the title In Caverns Below in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories magazine in the March - May issues in 1935, with illustrations from the legendary Frank R. Paul. Its next printing was also in a pulp magazine: Sam Merwin, Jr., included it in his Fantastic Story Quarterly's Fall issue in 1950. Avalon published it in hardback in 1957, and Airmont released the first of many mass-market printings in 1964 with an Ed Emshwiller cover that is an obvious homage to Paul. (Digression warning! Airmont books were famous back in the 1970s because they printed a zillion copies of seven novels that everybody had because they were found at every Kresge's and Woolworth's and Murphy's five-and-dime store in the country at a quarter a piece or five for a dollar. They were: The Tower of Zanid by L. Sprague de Camp, Lords of Atlantis by Wallace West, Invaders from Rigel by Fletcher Pratt, Day of the Giants by Lester del Rey, Hidden World by Stanton A. Coblentz, Conquest of Earth by Manly Banister, and The Duplicated Man by James Blish and Robert Lowndes. If you or your parents or grandparents read sf in the 1970s, I'll give you good odds that they had at least three or four of those seven. End of digression.) Hidden World is set in the near future world of 1951, and tells the story of Frank Comstock and Philip Clay, mining engineers who stumble into an underground world-at-war. It's a political satire, as the two warring nations, Wu and Zu, seem to represent capitalism and communism. It's a little heavy-handed at times, but remarkably better written than much of what Gernsback published in those years. The underground weapons and civilizations are well-described, and it's an interesting story.

[Muzzlehatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

My copy of this book is an Airmont paperback from 1964, retitled "The Hidden World" -- confusing because Coblentz also has a novel entitled "The Sunken World." Anyway, this is a pretty exciting and surprisingly modern (originally published in 1935) tale of the strife between two civilizations, one arch-captitalist and the other communist, seen from the point of view of a couple of American prospectors accidentally thrust into the underground world through an earthquake. The author sides with the leftist/Marxist society, interestingly enough. Much more serious and socially conscious than most American SF of the period.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty basic and obvious, but an interesting product of its time. It would be a good way to start a kid out on sci-fi - get their mind thinking along different lines. The writing style is similar to The Gods of Mars, just this side of pulp serial thriller. The most obvious themes are anti-racism and anti-war. You can't go wrong teaching a kid those lessons.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two civilizations under the surface of the earth are at war with each other. Pretty good.

[2Due · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an absolutely ridiculous story and I loved every single bit of it!
I went almost blindly into it and I was expecting something different, darker, more serious and with a lot of sci-fi shenanigans with robots and whatnot, instead I got something completely different.
First of all, it's written in first person and the style is incredibly fluid yet rich of details that never felt too cumbersone. The story follows two speleologists who got separated in a earthquake during exploration and both ended in a whole new world underground.
The protagonist is thrown into pure madness with wacky, colorful characters in a chaotic society where he showly gets integrated throughout a span of a couple of years.
Not only it's incredibly fascinating to see how weird this world is -technologically and socially-, but in so many points it was unbelievably funny, I was often laughing out loud for how absurd the situations were and how the protagonist reacted.
Despite being a product of its time, the topics are very modern to this very day and I honestly loved the satiric touch in the book.
Allow me to leave the Wikipedia page about this book here for a little more in depth information.
Very light read, a lot of fun and honestly a wacky adventure worth your time if you like the genre.
Will absolutely check out this author's other works!

[Tricia · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was a quick read at only around 120 pages.

It was an early sci fi about two miners who fall through a fissure into an underground world.

[Jerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, was well-punctured by H.G. Wells in The Country of the Blind. Here, in a very poor copy of Wells’s style, the aphorism is taken for truth, as two mining engineers descend to a land where people literally cannot see what is right in front of their faces. In order to read, they need to gain a wider perspective, so to speak, by placing writing (or anything else) far away, and then use binoculars to examine them.

If this makes no sense, it won’t be the first time in this clumsy, scattershot, and heartfelt satire.

I chose this to read now because I wanted an unabashedly classic cheap adventure. This appears instead to be a very clumsy satire, but it might just be a product of its times, the period between World War One and Two, when anti-war activists realized that war with Nazi Germany was inevitable, but still wanted to avoid any resistance to Nazi incursions. In Coblentz’s telling, two miners set themselves up as Fascist dictators in order to try and do good, but the people won’t let them.

From an adventure standpoint it is filled with blatant inconsistencies. For example, the ventilation machines bring fresh air down; that’s even how the Ventilation Company advertises it. Yet the people hate fresh air. And, for that matter, how did they survive before ventilation?

They have minimum guaranteed wages, and of course the people in power set theirs to be higher than the others. It’s Keynesianism on steroids, and in fact the author appears especially angry at the New Deal’s method of using government funds to increase production, and then more government funds to destroy what was produced.

Strikers in this underground threaten literal death, by turning off ventilation, if their demands aren’t met.

The upper class is made fun of by the author for not paying taxes, except that this is by law: only the lower classes pay taxes. In 1934/35, in the United States, the top rate, paid by the richest, was 63%, and the first thousand dollars—that’s $18,000 in today’s money—wasn’t taxed at all, at the federal level, at least. There is no sense that the satire is about loopholes.

War is wrong, FDR is wrong, the rich are wrong, and strikers are literally murderers. It is almost as if Stanton Coblentz were two people, and, combined, they hated all thought. The only ism that gets favored treatment by Coblentz is the ism of thoughtlessness.

It actually gets more interesting as it gets weirder and more unbelievable. In one of the few funny bits, the subterranean people are pasty white. They call the above-ground races *all* “colored peoples” because of this.

In some ways, Coblentz appears to forecast the future of the establishment in the United States. There are three classes in the underground, and the upper classes pride themselves on their uselessness. Then, immediately after describing this, the middle-class professor tells the main character that he needs to get back to researching the historical use of the comma.

News appears in print minutes after it is fabricated by gossipers, whereupon it is unassailable truth. In other words, he predicts the Internet.

Ultimately, however, I was promised underground armies battling with fantastically destructive weapons, but that lasted only a few pages. After that, I was given only ventilation politics and fat, wrinkled women.

Perhaps the satire is so deep, it satirizes itself.

[Jim Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Satirical SF, not at its best. 3rd rate George Orwell.

[Matthew Smonskey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those fun quick reads that encapsulate the goofy old style of science fiction.

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

While the general idea is nice, the story has some serious flaws. Even though it's age – first published in 1935 – might explain some of it, the inconsistencies are striking and numerable. The story tries to deliver a critique to contemporary society by creating analogies in the fictitious underground societies of the Wu en Zu. Most obvious are the similarities with communist Russia and the First World War. But Coblentz' analysis immediately appears to be shallow and incredibly dated. I find it hard to believe that even in its historical context this could be considered a well reasoned societal critique. Let u not forget that this from the same era that brought us '1984', and 'Brave New World'.
The author expresses inconsistent reasoning on several occasions. A striking example is from the first pages: our main character witnesses an execution by some electrical ray-gun. From the way this process is described it seems to be a relatively quick death. However the main character is made to say: “Having seen enough for one day, I sank down upon a stone bench, clasping my aching forehead with both hands, and wondering what I had done to fall among the most barbarous race ever known. True, they were advanced scientifically, but would any civilized people execute a man with a death ray? Would they not, rather, resort to humane devices, such as hanging or the electric chair?” (p. 21) The idea that the humanity of the death penalty lies in the way it is performed – rather than whether is being performed at all – is indicative of the feeble level of philosophical reasoning throughout the book.
Furthermore, Frank Comstock, the main character lacks any kind of logical personality. He changes his position on matters whenever it suits him/the story. First he mocks the shallowness of some girls trying to meet the beauty standards of the underground world. (More fat + more wrinkles = more beauty) But from the moment one of these girls finds him attractive and expresses the desire to marry, he breaks down in a crisis because of her ugliness compared to his own standards. Her ugliness is even enough for him to finally start contemplating an escape from this world he already repeatedly dubbed savage and barbarous.
Another weird change of mind happens when the workers of the Ventilation Company declare a strike. Frank was outraged when he first heard of the separation of the Wu society in three classes, where the Third Class lived in abject poverty. He insisted on the need for protective laws against their exploitation by the First Class. To his surprise the members of the Third Class accept their predicament as being the natural order of things. But several pages later, when the Third Class announces a strike if their wages and general living conditions are not enhanced, Frank willingly acts as an anti-strike combatant, priding himself on having protected the status quo.
These are just some examples of what, to me, are problems with the storytelling that age cannot excuse. Even when first published, these sorts of inconsistencies must have made for a shallow read and a rather uninteresting overall story line. It is this sort of storytelling that gives Sci-Fi it's reputation as not being serious literature. I therefore think that the current score highly unfortunately overestimates the real value of this work.

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A SiFi story from 1935, the golden era of the genre. The story is a total satirical work poking fun at the idiocy of the government and the lunacy of war and big business. Recommended