In Ludvig Holberg's 1741 novel Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum ( Niels Klim's Underground Travels), Nicolai Klim falls through a cave while spelunking and spends several years living on both a smaller globe within and the inside of the outer shell.In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy poem Inferno, Hell is a vast cavern and the narrator travels through the center of the Earth and out the other side to Purgatory.Map of the Interior World, from The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892) A less frequent theme has the underground world much more technologically advanced than the surface one, typically either as the refugium of a lost civilization, or (more rarely) as a secret base for space aliens. The former cases usually see the setting used as a venue for sword-and-sorcery fiction, while the latter often features cryptids or creatures extinct on the surface, such as dinosaurs or archaic humans. Common themes have included a depiction of the underground world as more primitive than the surface, either culturally, technologically or biologically, or in some combination thereof. In the late 19th century, however, more pseudoscientific or proto-science-fictional motifs gained prevalence. The earliest works in the genre were Enlightenment-era philosophical or allegorical works, in which the underground setting was often largely incidental. The genre is based on, and has in turn influenced, the Hollow Earth theory. Subterranean fiction is a subgenre of adventure fiction, science fiction, or fantasy which focuses on fictional underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface.
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