The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist’s Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life by Nathalie A. Cabrol

Discouraging recap of our quest for certainty

Nathalie A. Cabrol, a French-American astrobiologist, is the director of the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute (SETI = Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is very much qualified, therefore, to write about the latest research on extraterrestrial life. Her book The Secret Life of the Universe was published in 2023. These days, it’s hard to keep track of all the piecemeal press releases about exoplanets, unmanned space probes, Mars rovers, and such. I hoped to find in Cabrol’s book a comprehensive and intelligent recap of what we know about the possibilities of life within and without our solar system. She does a fine job of summarizing the present state of knowledge in this area. This book is generally organized from the Earth outwards, from Venus and Mars to other bodies in our solar system, and then on to the recently discovered exoplanets beyond.

Although we’re talking about other planets and stars here, astrobiology relies much on geology and meteorology—the workings of water, ice, gases, volcanism, and plate tectonics, for example. Since the life forms are unknown, Cabrol’s work, at least as revealed in this book, is more about studying environments that might be conducive to life rather than speculating about the life itself. She has deliberately written this book to be accessible to a wide audience whenever possible. In general, the text is less challenging than articles in Scientific American or National Geographic; it’s more on the level of USA Today. There are passages, however, where complex chemistry can’t be dumbed-down enough, and the lay reader may find it tough going.

In addition to filling Sagan’s role at SETI, Cabrol also tries to fill his shoes as an inspirational science communicator, but she is less successful at that. This book is educational, but it doesn’t generate a lot of excitement or a great deal of hope. As someone who cares about science and wants to learn more about the universe, I am hopeful that in my lifetime we will discover extraterrestrial life—by that I mean evidence of microbial life elsewhere in our solar system. After reading Cabrol’s book, however, I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon. She points out lots of possibilities for life in our solar system, but also gives plenty of examples of why confirmation is impossible. We’ve had landers on Mars for 50 years, and we still don’t have a definitive yes/no answer on life there. For almost every other body in the solar system, Cabrol says again and again that there may be life miles beneath the surface. Given how many years and dollars it takes to develop exploratory space missions, it’s unlikely we’ll be digging that deep in the near future.

Exoplanets, and their diversity of environments, offer more hope of finding life of some kind, at whatever stage of development, but we’re nowhere close to sending a probe over light years of distance. Our only hope of discovering interstellar life is if it discovers us first. Cabrol briefly discusses UFOs, or UAPs, but that’s really outside the scope of this book, and she’s a skeptical in that department. More coverage is given to the SETI program, which is actually a number of different programs under the SETI umbrella. Not much luck there yet, either. Cabrol then goes from disappointing to depressing by closing the book with an environmentalist tirade that reminds us that we’re on the verge of rendering ourselves extinct anyway.

Scientists who take on the role of educating the public—Sagan, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and so on—generally try to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in the reader, hoping to spark their interest in the workings of the universe. Cabrol tries to do the same here, but this reader was just left feeling hopeless and kind of bored.

The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates

An exemplary narrative for armchair explorers

Henry Walter Bates (1825–1892) was an English naturalist. His area of expertise was entomology, the science of insects, but in the 19th century scientists were allowed to be generalists, so he made discoveries in other areas of biology as well. In 1842, Bates embarked on an expedition to explore the Amazon rainforest and gather specimens of the animals and plants that live there. Upon completing an expedition, 19th century naturalist-explorers would compile volumes of scientific texts describing the species they brought back with them. In addition, many would publish a narrative account of their travels intended for a general audience of non-scientists. In Bates’s case, the popular memoir he wrote of his South American journey is The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863.

This Amazon expedition started out as a joint undertaking with fellow British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is now better-known than Bates for having formulated the theory of evolution about the same time as Charles Darwin. Once in Brazil, Wallace and Bates seem to have often split up and conducted their own research, and Wallace returned to England several years before Bates. It’s hard to tell how much time the two spent together. Bates only mentions “Mr. Wallace” a few times in this memoir. That’s not unusual for scientific memoirs of this period, however. There seems to have been a gentleman’s agreement that each explorer would talk about himself and leave his traveling companions to write their own books. Wallace published his account, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, in 1889.

Bates’s mode of operation was to travel up the Amazon to a certain city, acquire a house on the outskirts of town, and live there for a few years. From these home bases, he would make hiking or boat trips deeper into the wilderness to explore and gather specimens. In this memoir, Bates’s explorations center around three main locations: Pará, near the Amazon delta (today there is a state named Pará, but the city is named Belém); Santarém, several hundred miles further up the river; and Ega (now called Tefé), a small village on the upper Amazon near the Peruvian border. The Amazon region was already somewhat “civilized” by this time. Bates interacted mostly with Whites (Portuguese) and Mamelucos (people of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous heritage, the Brazilian equivalent of Mexico’s Mestizos), but he did encounter some Native tribes living a relatively untouched existence, as well as Blacks of African descent, both slaves and free. Despite the extent of Portuguese colonization, very few European scientists had explored the Amazon by this time, so new, undescribed species were ripe for the picking. In the book’s introduction, Darwin states that Bates collected specimens of 14,712 species, about 14,000 of them being insects, and about 8000 of those species (not just insects) being previously “unknown to science.”

The problem with a lot of exploration narratives of this era is that despite attempts at accessibility for a popular audience, they end up being too academically scientific. Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), though still widely read and highly regarded, is a difficult read for the non-scientist, as is Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814). Bates, however, really strikes the perfect balance between travel memoir and scientific text. He really armchair travelers a vivid impression of what the Amazon region was like in these frontier days, but if you’re interested in biology, there’s also plenty of good stuff in here about the bugs, birds, monkeys, reptiles, and plants of Brazil. You also learn a great deal about the people of Brazil—communities of all different races and levels of economic and cultural development. While Bates was certainly not the anti-colonial liberal that Alexander von Humboldt was, he does not display a great deal of expected Victorian-era racism in this memoir. He does have a tendency, however, to judge people by their level of “civilization” and view those living further in the bush as dumb hicks, regardless of race. All in all, the strengths of Bates’s writing add up to an exemplary exploration narrative. For those who envy the lives of these pioneering naturalists—traveling to exotic lands, studying the natural environment, and discovering “new” species—Bates’s book is a dream come to life.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

Ma Kettle’s Travelin’ Bookstore

American author Christopher Morley (1890–1957) wrote or edited more than a hundred published books, but he’s probably best remembered for his first two novels, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop (1919). In Greek mythology, Mount Parnassus is the home of the muses, and thus the word “Parnassus” has come to be used as a metaphor for anything related to education, literature, and the arts. In Parnassus on Wheels, Parnassus is the name of a bookstore in the form of a horse-drawn wagon that travels the countryside bringing literature to rural readers.

Parnassus on Wheels opens with a brief preface addressed to David Grayson, a popular author of the time, who wrote Adventures in Contentment and The Friendly Road, both of which served as inspiration for this book of Morley’s. Right from the get-go, therefore, the reader knows he’s in for the same kind of wholesome, homespun, lighthearted fiction for which Grayson was known. The character of Andrew McGill in Parnassus on Wheels, perhaps a fictional equivalent of Grayson, is a successful author and a bachelor who lives on a farm in the Long Island area of New York State with his sister Helen, who serves the role of his housewife, managing his domestic affairs. One day while Andrew is away, a traveling salesman pulls up to the McGill farm, driving the aforementioned Parnassus bookmobile. The proprietor of this traveling bookshop, Roger Mifflin, is not just looking to sell books but also to sell his entire business—wagon, books, horse, dog, and all. Helen decides to buy Parnassus, partly to stick it to her brother, who takes her for granted, and partly just to experience some adventure in her life for a change. She heads out onto the road with her new business. Mifflin accompanies her for the first day to show her the ropes of bookselling.

The spunky heroine of Parnassus on Wheels is not the typical beautiful young woman one usually finds in popular literature of this period. Helen is 39 years old, and by her own admission, “fat.” She also seems the unlikely owner of a bookstore since she opens the novel with an attitude that don’t take to no book-learnin’. The novel itself gives mixed messages about literacy. Morley’s clearly preaching the love of books, but in almost an anti-intellectual way. A century ago, it would have been difficult for rural Americans to get their hands on books, so Parnassus is a solution to that problem. It brings the bookstore to those who live nowhere near a bookstore. The message that Morley imparts through Helen in this novel, however, is that reading is good for people as long as they don’t challenge themselves. Country folk should stick to popular literature like Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and cookbooks. Shakespeare would be a stretch for them, and they should stay away from philosophy or poetry.

Morley’s biggest mistake in writing Parnassus on Wheels is that he gives away the ending in the preface, so you spend the whole novel waiting for the inevitable to happen. Nevertheless, this book is moderately entertaining. Helen and Mifflin are likable characters. Everything that happens in the plot is utterly predictable, but you don’t mind so much because it’s clear that the novel was meant to be light, dumbed-down fare and never strives to be anything deeper. I certainly prefer Morley’s writing to Grayson’s. I put both authors into a literary category I call, “chicken soup for the soul,” which is not a compliment, but not necessarily an insult either, as long as you know up front what you’re in for.

Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers and Katherine Rothkopf

The beautiful book his work deserves

The modernist painting style of cubism is generally considered to have been invented jointly by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907. Most art aficionados, if questioned for a third artist in that movement, would call up the name of Juan Gris. In fact, though Gris followed in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, some (myself included) consider Gris to have been the one who really took cubism to its creative apex. Gris pushed the stylistic experiments in form, structure, and color farther than his better-known contemporaries, and in the process managed to produce many beautiful paintings. Even those who can’t stand cubism (and that’s probably the majority of the world’s population) might very well enjoy looking at a Juan Gris painting.

The still life, usually an arrangement of objects on a table, was a common subject matter for cubist artists and a particular specialty of Gris’s. Now his work in that area gets its deserved recognition with the beautifully produced coffee table book Cubism in Color: The Still Lifes of Juan Gris, edited by Nicole R. Myers of the Dallas Museum of Art and Katherine Rothkopf of the Baltimore Museum of Art. This book was published in 2021 by Yale University Press to coincide with an exhibition of Gris’s still lifes organized by those two museums.

This book is not intended to be a comprehensive biography or retrospective on Juan Gris. That has already been done at least twice, by Antonio Gaya Nuño in 1986 and by Christopher Green in 1992. This book is meant to focus solely on Gris’s still lifes, but it nevertheless does contain a biological overview and a fair share of scholarly content on Gris’s work. The assortment of essays included, however, is a bit random. Myers delivers a truly excellent essay examining how Gris went about planning and executing his still life paintings. For anyone who paints or draws, this chapter reads like a behind-the-scenes exposé into Gris’s methods and materials. Another essay is a string of brief institutional histories of every Spanish museum that owns a work by Juan Gris. It’s hard to see how that’s useful; wouldn’t a list have sufficed? Another essay explores the influence of Gris on abstract artists in South America. The connection feels only tenuously established, but this chapter did bring to my attention some Latin American artists with whom I was previously unfamiliar.

While the essays are hit-and-miss, the images strike the bullseye time and time again. The text divides Gris’s tragically brief career into five distinct stages. All of those stages are well-represented by selected artworks, and one can clearly see Gris’s progression as an artist over time. The paintings are all beautifully reproduced, most of them appearing at full-page size. The photography of the artworks and the quality of the printing are impeccable. When it comes to art publications, Yale University Press always makes a quality product.

I still think Green and Gaya Nuño’s books are better overall volumes on Gris’s life and career, but Cubism in Color is a great addition to the literature on Gris’s art. I doubt any art lover would ever say, “I’m of fan of Gris, but I don’t like his still lifes.” Still lifes were so integral to his thought and vision as an artist. This book celebrates Gris’s innovative visual experimentation and sublime talent for composition. His still lifes deserve a great showcase in print, and that’s what they’re given here.

Flowers, 1914

The Violin, 1916

Still Life with a Bottle of Bordeaux, 1919

The Open Window, 1921

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson

More concerned with words than birds

W. H. Hudson was born in Argentina to a family of English and Irish heritage. He grew up in South America, emigrated to England in his early thirties, and published his first book in his early forties. Despite his late start, however, Hudson became a prolific author and published about four dozen books, mostly nonfiction but also a few novels (Green Mansions being his best-known work). Hudson was a naturalist who studied the plants and animals, particularly birds, of his native Argentina and later did the same in England. His book Birds and Man, published in 1901, is a series of essays about birds. In this volume, he’s only writing about English birds, not those of South America.

Hudson may have literally wrote the book on Argentine Ornithology (1888), but the books that I’ve read by him make it hard for me to believe he was a scientist. He writings come across more like the work of an avid birder with literary aspirations. What surprised me about this book, and why I dislike it, is because I learned almost nothing about the birds discusses, other than Hudson’s “artistic” descriptions about what they look or sound like. Each chapter focuses on a particular species, family of birds, or bird-related subject, within which Hudson will rattle off a string of anecdotes. These usually take the form of “I once saw a bird do this . . . It made me feel this way . . . That reminds me of a poem . . .” This book is not about the birds, it’s about Hudson’s feelings, and him showing off how he can relate those feelings through flowery language. 

This is not the first time reading a Hudson book has left me somewhat irritated (see also Idle Days in Patagonia). He seems like the kind of writer who one day decided, “I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to write x thousand words a day . . .” whether he has anything interesting to say or not. Here in Birds and Man he shows no interest in educating the reader about birds. Rather, Hudson is trying to earn his place among the great British essayists like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. One way to get there, he thinks, is to reference poets—Wordsworth, Tennyson, Cowper, etc.—any chance he gets. Despite his attempts to flaunt his erudition, Hudson is just not that good of a writer to belong in such company, and most of this book ends up being an utter bore. 

As a birder, Hudson also sports a very snobbish, know-it-all attitude towards those who aren’t his equals in bird knowledge. There is no sense of him welcoming amateur birders into the fold. Anyone who doesn’t fly into fits of ecstasy at hearing the song of the Wood Wren is a Philistine. Those with pet parrots are simpletons. Those who can’t name the species in their local woods are idiots. Hudson complains a lot in this book about taxidermy. He prefers living birds to stuffed ones. He thinks dead birds belong in specimen drawers where only ornithologists can view them. He hates museum displays of stuffed birds, from which the public might actually be able to learn about and appreciate birds, thus becoming less of the Philistines he despises so much.

One interesting matter he discusses is how English bird species have been driven to extinction or endangered status because so many collectors want to have glass cases full of pretty stuffed birds in their living rooms. There are also a couple mildly amusing stories about a pet owl and some pet parrots. Other than that, I found this book to be a complete waste of time. I’m a birder; I enjoy books about birds, but I did not enjoy this one.

Marcus Aurelius: A Life by Frank McLynn

More historical context than biography

British historian and author Frank McLynn has written over two dozen books of history and biography including books on Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Carl Jung. His biography Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor was published in 2010 and has since been rereleased as Marcus Aurelius: A Life. Marcus is often cited as the best of all the Roman emperors (or at least the least cruel and crazy) and is highly regarded as a paragon of leadership and wisdom. In this in-depth life history, McLynn sets out to investigate whether Marcus actually deserves such praise.

Besides being a Roman emperor, Marcus was also a philosopher. Many regard him as perhaps the closest anyone has come to the ideal of the philosopher-king that Plato put forth in his Republic. Marcus’s brand of philosophy was Stoicism, and he is considered one of the big three of that school (along with Epictetus and Seneca) because of his book Meditations, a classic Stoic text. If you’re considering reading McLynn’s biography because you are a modern disciple of Stoicism, prepare to be disappointed. McLynn despises Stoicism, calling it “nonsense” and “gibberish.” He thinks Marcus’s philosophical pursuits were a waste of time. Marcus should have concentrated on military and economical matters, as McLynn mostly does in this book. To McLynn’s credit, however, he does give some thoughtful and intelligent discussion to Marcus’s views on philosophy and religion, at least three solid chapters worth, plus a relentlessly negative appendix on Stoicism. Although tens of thousands of books have been published disputing contradictory views on Christian theology, McLynn thinks any time two Stoics disagree with each other, such inconsistency renders the whole school of thought null and void. I don’t agree with everything (or much) that McLynn has to say about Stoicism, but he’s certainly done his research, and I learned a lot about Marcus from this analysis of his philosophical thought.

The biggest complaint I have about McLynn’s biography of Marcus Aurelius is that only about a third of the book is actually about Marcus Aurelius. As the book opens, we get biographies of other figures who were connected to Marcus: a chapter on Hadrian, a chapter on Antoninus Pius, one on Lucius Verus, and maybe two on Fronto, Marcus’s tutor. McLynn provides historical context about what was going on in Rome at the time of Marcus’s reign, but he goes way overboard with it. For example, when he informs us that a war against the Parthians was underway during Marcus’s reign, we then get a complete detailed history of Rome’s relations with the Parthians going back two or three centuries, then a discussion of the Parthians themselves—their governmental structure, internal conflicts, the various nations and peoples surrounding them—then a primer on the organization of the Roman military, before we ever even get to talking about Marcus. After all that, what Marcus actually did about the Parthians, I couldn’t tell you. The Germanic tribes get a similar background treatment, but then you actually do get a pretty detailed blow-by-blow account of Marcus’s relations with them. McLynn sometimes wanders pretty far afield in his digressions, particularly towards the end of the book. In a book about Marcus Aurelius, did we really need the whole life story of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?

McLynn’s books have achieved a wide popular audience, but if this book is any indication, he writes with the scholarly rigor of a historian. This is not Marcus Aurelius for Dummies. Part of the historian’s job is to bust myths, and McLynn does some of that here. Given all the adulation that has been heaped upon Marcus over the centuries, the truth can’t help but be less flattering than the legend. McLynn points out that life was not so fine under the Marcus administration, and of all the Roman emperors, he was one of the most severe in persecuting Christians. McLynn certainly does admire Marcus as a leader, and he shows his respect for his subject by conducting a fair and thorough character analysis, neither a panegyric nor a hatchet job. He should have narrowed his focus more tightly on the man himself, however, instead of cramming in so much extraneous detail.

The Great Hunger by Johan Bojer

Norwegian naturalism

Norway’s Johan Bojer is known as one of that nation’s important realist authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bojer garnered enough critical respect to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Several of his novels were translated into English in the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s. He is known for writing novels about Norwegian immigrant life in America, but his novel The Great Hunger, published in 1916, takes place entirely within Norway.

Peer Troen is a typical boy growing up in a small town in Norway. Troen is not his birth name, however. Peer is the illegitimate child of a prosperous former military officer from Christiania (today’s Oslo), Captain Holm, who pays the Troen family to board and raise his son. Peer’s mother was a prostitute, so his father, though friendly enough, refuses to claim him as a son. In fact, Captain Holm has another, legitimate family, and admitting that Peer exists would be an embarrassment to them all. Though Peer is certainly not happy being disowned, he learns to come to terms with his lot in life. He dreams of becoming a priest, at that time an upper-class profession requiring higher education. When both his parents die, however, there is no one left to pay the Troen family for his upkeep. Peer finds out his father was not as wealthy as he thought, and his inheritance is paltry. Peer is dropped into a life of poverty, but he still manages to work his way through engineering school in hopes of succeeding in a career.

The title of the book is both literal and figurative. While there is no mass famine here, the story does deal with the poverty and hunger of one Norwegian family. The “hunger” in question, however, more pointedly refers to the desire of humans to create, accomplish, and/or conquer and to leave behind a legacy for posterity. Bojer asks the question is enough to simply enjoy life? Are love and happiness the purpose of our existence? Peer seems to think so, for a while anyway. But can a man, or mankind, be truly satisfied with blissful complacency? One of Peer’s close friends begs to differ, asserting that the irresistible force of evolution imparts to everyone a Promethean drive to create, build, and strive toward progress, even at the expense of comfort and joy. This novel is chiefly concerned with the conflict between these two attitudes toward human nature and the meaning of life.

The Great Hunger is strongest in its first act, when it adheres most strictly to the tenets of naturalist literature. Peer must deal with the hand that’s dealt him by his heritage, and through him Bojer realistically depicts the struggles of poor and working class life in Norway. At about the halfway point, the novel starts to get more didactic and preachy, as if Bojer were delivering a sermon. This sermon, however, is a secular one that appeals to my personal freethinking inclinations. Bojer makes many openly atheistic statements that are a breath of rationalistic fresh air. By the early 20th century, more Scandinavian writers were penning literature from an atheist viewpoint, such as Bojer in Norway and Jens Peter Jacobsen and Johannes V. Jensen in Denmark.

I was less impressed with the later chapters of the book. For a while, it seems like Bojer is going to follow up on Peer’s bastard upbringing. Peer becomes friends with his own half-brother, who is unaware that they share the same father. That plot thread is never followed through, however, and remains inconclusive. The ending of the book in general is rather week, but adhering to realism often means that expectations of closure remain unsatisfied, much like real life itself. Nevertheless, I found Bojer to be a writer certainly worth investigating further, and I’m sure this won’t be the last of his books that I’ll read.

In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne

Short story of a utopian America

“In the Year 2889” is a short story by Jules Verne. Many literary scholars now consider this story to be the work of Michel Verne, son of Jules, but it was published under Jules Verne’s name. It is common knowledge that Michel carried on the family business by writing some “Jules Verne” novels after his father’s death. Michel never produced a classic like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or Around the World in Eighty Days, but the quality of his work is likely on a par with some of his father’s more mediocre offerings. “In the Year 2889” was published in the February 1889 issue of The Forum, an English-language magazine, while Jules was still very much alive. Reportedly, a New York newspaper editor asked Jules to write a story depicting the world a thousand years in the future, and apparently Jules delegated that task to Michel.

The story takes place in America on the 25th of September, 2889. It depicts one day in the life of George Washington Smith, a wealthy media mogul and founder of the Manhattan Chronicle. In the 29th century, the “media” in use is the telephote, something similar to our internet in that it delvers live streaming of events, on-demand news, and video communication with family and friends. Smith, a sort of Rupert Murdoch of his age, wields enough power and influence that his enterprises stretch beyond communications to include industry, finance, and politics. As such, he is consulted by various parties for his opinion on matters of world import. Through such conversations, the reader gets a glimpse into the global politics of this future millennia. Familiarly, America and Russia are the current superpowers, with China on the rise.

Some of Verne’s predictions in this book have proven to be prescient: the internet and media empires, as already mentioned; also chemical and biological warfare, scientifically processed foods and home delivery of meals, and various systems for harnessing clean energy from the environment. Others of his prophecies are as of now still rather pie-in-the-sky in nature, yet nevertheless have since shown up in many a science fiction story: the colonization of other planets in the solar system, ubiquitous flying cars, and the ability to freeze human beings in suspended animation for thawing back to life at a later date. To readers of the 21st century, some aspects of Verne’s future forecast seem rather quaintly cautious. The narrator reports with evident satisfaction, for example, that human life expectancy has risen from 37 to 52 years.

Being a short story, and not a very long short story at that, none of these ideas is really developed very thoroughly. The text is simply a rapid-fire stream of sketchy projections. In some ways, however, that’s a relief from some of the more ponderous utopian epics from the early years of the sci-fi genre. “In the Year 2889” is brief, and it may not be entirely realistic, but it is fun. Whether it was written by Michel Verne or not, this story is totally in keeping with what one would expect from Jules, and fans of the father will enjoy this work by the son.

The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer by Oscar Micheaux

Memoir of an industrious Black homesteader

Oscar Micheaux is best known as a pioneering Black filmmaker. He produced, wrote, and directed at least 40 films—some silent, some talkies—from 1919 to 1948. Prior to embarking on his film career, however, Micheaux first expressed himself through literature, publishing three books in the decade of the 1910s. His first published volume, 1913’s The Conquest, is sometimes referred to as a novel, but it reads more like an autobiography of the first 30 years of Micheaux’s life. Micheaux published the book anonymously, and the narrator’s name has been changed to Oscar Devereaux, but the events depicted in the book closely parallel those of Micheaux’s life. The names of other persons in the book have been likewise slightly altered, and the names of towns and cities are sometimes changed or abbreviated (for example, M—pls equals Micheaux’s hometown of Metropolis, Illinois).

Micheaux/Devereaux was born on a farm in Illinois, where his parents eked out a poor living. His grandparents were slaves; his father illiterate. Oscar, however, believed that through hard work and education he could better himself. He refuses to accept that his race should disqualify him from success comparable to his White counterparts, and he sets his sights on being a landowning farmer. He works for a few years as a porter on Pullman railroad cars, bouncing all over the country and even through Mexico and as far as Argentina. Through his travels, he discovers an attractive land opportunity in South Dakota and files for a homestead claim. For a few years, Devereaux is the only Black farmer in this region of South Dakota. Through his hard work, he earns the respect of his neighbors and adds more parcels of land to his holdings.

Along with Micheaux’s ambition and success comes an arrogance that’s evident in his writing. He expresses contempt for many of his own race—rich and poor alike—for being, as he sees it, lazy, short-sighted, and frivolous. He declares himself a progressive in the mode of Booker T. Washington and considers the vast majority of Blacks to be reactionaries. Micheaux also seems to think he’s God’s gift to women. When he finally does settle down with a partner, he talks about the relationship as if it were a business deal and has some rather unfavorable things to say about his significant other. At one point in the book, Micheaux/Devereaux falls in love with a White woman of Scottish extraction. The relationship itself is not surprising, but the fact that he wrote about it so candidly, in 1913, is quite surprising. He discusses some instances of interracial marriage on the South Dakota prairie, but chooses not to go that route himself.

The Conquest may be a valuable document of the African American experience, but much of what Micheaux relates could apply to the experience of farmers and homesteaders of any race or ethnicity. If you’re expecting stories of racism or discrimination, there’s almost nothing of that here. Much of the book concerns the homesteading process and Westward expansion. Micheaux goes into great detail about land laws, the claims process, and financial dealings. He also chronicles at length how several small towns in South Dakota competed for a railroad line and economic dominance in the region. As a document of this era, this will likely prove a treasure trove of information for historians, but sometimes such real estate business can become boring to the general reader. In addition, a great deal of The Conquest is about Devereaux’s love life, through which we get realistic glimpses into different classes of Black Society, both rural and urban, during this time period. The conclusion of The Conquest makes you wonder if the only reason Micheaux wrote this book was to get the last word in a quarrel with his in-laws.

When Americans think about African American literature, we generally think about critically acclaimed modernist writers from the Harlem Renaissance or afterwards—Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright. Often forgotten, however, are the African American authors of the earlier realist, naturalist, and muckraking eras who documented Black life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though film may be Micheaux’s claim to fame, The Conquest proves he deserves to be mentioned alongside pioneering African American literary luminaries like Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior by John Kricher

Basic overview with pretty pictures

Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996) was an American artist and naturalist who was probably the most important figure in the development of birding as a hobby, pastime, and/or obsession. His line of Peterson Field Guides has grown beyond ornithology to over 50 volumes examining diverse aspects of nature and ecology (not all authored by Peterson). In 2015, the Peterson Institute started adding a series of Peterson Reference Guides to their line of books. The Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, written by John Kricher, was published in 2020.

I expected these Reference Guides to be for advanced birders who want to delve deeper than what’s found in the typical field guide, perhaps something along the lines of Kenn Kaufman’s Advanced Birding, also in the Peterson line. I found the Peterson Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, to be surprisingly basic. Most of the information imparted in this volume can likely be found in the introductory chapters of a good field guide—the opening pages that most people ignore because they just look at the bird pictures. The way Kricher delivers the information is also not ideal. The book is intentionally written for a beginning-birder, non-scientific audience, but that doesn’t stop the text from being at times confusing and often boring.

The first half of the book provides some valuable information on bird anatomy. Those lessons are not aided, however, by the absence of diagrams in this book. That is likely a conscious choice on the part of the publisher: If we put a lot of pretty photographs in the book, that will attract general readers, but if we include diagrams, that will scare general readers away. They’ll think the book is too intense for them, like a textbook. So everything is written out by Kricher in prose paragraphs, even when that’s not the most appropriate way to deliver the information. The chapter on different stages of molting, for instance, is quite difficult to comprehend, when a simple table or chart would have made it so much easier to understand and remember. But if we put a table in the book, we’ll scare away those general readers! If you just want a general book on birds and the cool things they do, full of pretty pictures, then I would recommend David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds.

The most difficult aspect of writing or reading a book like this is that the general subject of birds, even just North American birds, encompasses an incredibly broad and diverse range of species and behaviors. The result of this is that most of the text reads like “Some birds do this. Some birds do that.” The only solution for that is to consult a book with specific behavioral information on every individual species, such as Kaufman’s Lives of North American Birds. That book is truly a reference guide, while Kricher’s is really more of a primer. Kricher tries to solve the problem of diversity by providing many examples. The trouble with this approach is that the book consists almost entirely of examples with very few principles or conclusions drawn. I also don’t like the fact that Kricher talks about himself so much in this book: I once saw this, or I once banded such-and-such a bird. I’m from the Northeast, so we’re mostly going to talk about Northeastern birds. I don’t really care what your personal perspective is. I want to learn about the birds, and not just the birds with which you have some kind of personal connection.

I have seen the Peterson Reference Guide for Sparrows and for Woodpeckers, and they seem to be more of what I expected from these Reference Guides. Those books appear to be deeper and more thorough in nature, simply because they’re not expected to cover every bird species imaginable. (and the publisher allowed some diagrams!) In general, the Peterson Field Guides are great; I’ve derived much joy and learning from them. This particular Reference Guide to Bird Behavior, however, is not one of the Institute’s better-thought-out offerings.

Heartbreaker by Mike Campbell with Ari Surdoval

Soft-spoken guitarist with much to say

Mike Campbell may not be a household name, but you’d probably recognize his face if you saw it. He’s the guy who stood next to Tom Petty for about the past 50 years. Campbell is the guitarist for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as well as Petty’s band from the early 1970s, Mudcrutch. He is also a sought-after session musician, songwriter, and recording producer. Since Campbell’s autobiography, entitled Heartbreaker, was published in 2025, you can add bestselling author to that list. This book is really an excellent rock memoir, even though I’m not a zealous Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fan. I like their music, but I don’t have all their lyrics memorized or know Petty’s life story. I’m actually a bigger fan of Campbell than I am of Petty. Campbell’s probably one of the top ten living guitarists in rock, and I like the work he’s done with other artists like Bob Dylan, Don Henley, Stevie Nicks, and others. I really enjoyed Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary film about the Heartbreakers, Runnin’ Down a Dream. This band has one of the better rags-to-riches stories in rock. Bogdanovich’s take on the band is a lot more sunshiny than Campbell’s account. Here in Heartbreaker, you get to see a darker side of Tom Petty. Campbell clearly loves and admires Petty, and would die for him, but he relates how Petty at times could be egotistical, vindictive, and, well, petty.

The bulk of Campbell’s account focuses on his and Petty’s early career. Before you ever even get to the Heartbreakers, about a third of the book is spent on Mudcrutch. If anybody still thinks rock and roll is a “money for nothing” profession, they should read Campbell’s recollections of how he and his bandmates had to claw their way to the top. As Campbell relates, he was dirt-poor to begin with, when growing up in Gainesville, Florida. At first, choosing to devote his life to a rock band did not improve his financial situation any, though his malnourishment kept him out of the Vietnam War. Even after the Heartbreakers had a half dozen hits getting frequent radio airplay, and their album Damn the Torpedoes went triple platinum, Campbell was still in financial dire straits. Such is the musician’s plight when your name is not the one in front of the band. Not until Campbell wrote the music to Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” did he reach a level of financial security where he could reliably pay his mortgage.

Of course, from such humble beginnings things took off considerably. Campbell eventually did get to live the life of a rich and famous rock star. Despite his tremendous success, Campbell comes across as very humble, grateful, and down-to-earth. He talks as if he’s an average-joe, unassuming working stiff who’s just as amazed as we would be when members of the Beatles, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, or Bob Dylan show up on his doorstep asking for his help. You get some very entertaining and candid behind-the-scenes insights into all of the rock luminaries that Campbell has rubbed elbows with. As a Dylan fan, I really enjoyed Campbell’s humorous and revealing stories about touring and recording with Dylan.

Heartbreaker delivers everything fans could ask for in a rock memoir. I assume Campbell’s coauthor Ari Surdoval is responsible for how well-written this book is. The way the stories unfold is quite skillfully done, captivating, and addictive. Campbell covers the recording of every album, every touring milestone, every band personnel change, every interior personality conflict, and every record company business deal. Not being a musician myself, there’s more here about guitars and playing them than I can understand. Drugs are discussed as a fact of the rock and roll life, not as a badge of honor nor a cross to bear, neither glorified nor scorned. The consequences of drugs are plainly evident in some of the book’s sadder moments—the death of Petty and of bassist Howie Epstein. Overall, however, Campbell’s memoir is a life-affirming celebration of music and friendship, full of humor and poignancy. I read a fair amount of these classic-rock autobiographies, and Heartbreaker is a superb addition to the genre.

Tartarin of Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet

Underwhelming adventures of a comical hero

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) is a beloved writer in his native France but not so familiar to American readers. He is considered a naturalist writer, but his works tend to be lighter and more humorous than contemporaries like Emile Zola or Joris-Karl Huysmans. Daudet was born in the South of France, and his novels and stories are often set in that region of the country. One such novel is Tartarin of Tarascon, published in 1872. This book must have achieved some degree of success in France because it spawned two sequels: Tartarin on the Alps and Port Tarascon.

Tarascon is a department in the French region of Provence, near the Mediterranean Coast. Daudet describes it as a quaint, bucolic locale where hunting is the primary pastime. One resident of this district is Tartarin, a short, stocky, he-man who reads adventure novels and dreams of exploring exotic lands. He has never left Tarascon, however, and has never done anything to distinguish himself as particularly intrepid. Nevertheless, as a big fish in a small pond, the other hunters of Tarascon regard him as somewhat of a local hero. One day the circus comes to town, bringing with it a caged lion. When Tartarin steps up to the cage to regard the beast, he is heard to mutter something along the lines of, “I’d like to take a crack at one of those.” The folks of Tarascon inflate this comment into a rumor that Tartarin is planning a trip to Africa to hunt lions. After a while, the rumor becomes so insistent that Tartarin feels the only way he can save face is to make the rumor a reality.

The problem is, Tartarin is somewhat of a coward. Daudet describes him as having two personalities—part Don Quixote, the romantic hero, and part Sancho Panza, the cautious everyman. He is ill-equipped with the courage required to make an international voyage, much less hunt the king of the jungle. Feeling obligated, however, to do so, he embarks on a boat to Algeria.

This all sounds like the set-up for a funny slapstick comedy about a clumsy sad sack who stumbles his way by dumb luck through dangerous situations. The humor here, however, has not aged well, and the gags don’t inspire much laughter anymore. The jokes are so simplistic that I wondered if this were perhaps written for children. Daudet spends too much time convincing us of Tartarin’s insignificance and ineptitude. By the time he gets to anything resembling an adventure, more than half the book has already gone by. Things don’t really pick up a whole lot once Tartarin arrives in Africa, either. The hardest part about shooting a lion is finding one. Eventually, the novel is wrapped up with an ending that just feels silly and pointless.

If the plot is so sluggish, what’s the main attraction here? The character of Tartarin does inspire some sympathy. He’s an underdog the reader can root for. French readers likely would have recognized him as a certain stereotypical type of Southerner. English-language readers probably won’t get that connotation but will still recognize Tartarin as a familiar type of lovable loser who bites off more than he can chew. Such satire is not enough to bring any laughter or excitement to the proceedings, however. Like drifting down a lazy river, this book just kind of coasts along, and the ride ultimately feels inconsequential.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Star Wars stole from Dune; now Dune steals from Star Wars

I’m a huge fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune saga, the original six novels that were published during his lifetime. I have read each of those books at least three times. For many years, however, I have purposely avoided reading any of the posthumous prequels or sequels put out by his son Brian Herbert. Brian’s takeover of the Dune franchise has always seemed to me a shameless nepo-baby move. Can Brian Herbert even write? I don’t know. I’ve never read anything written solely by him, except for his biography of his father, Dreamer of Dune, which I found disappointing. A smart move by Brian, however, was to team up with prolific sci-fi author Kevin J. Anderson. The recent Dune movies have renewed my enchantment with Frank’s fictional universe. Since I keep running into Brian’s Dune books in used book stores, I finally broke down and read one.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad was published in 2002. It’s not the first Dune book that Brian Herbert and Anderson wrote, but it’s the first book chronologically in Dune history. The Butlerian Jihad is referenced in Frank Herbert’s books as a historic event having happened about 10,000 years in the past. It was then that mankind rose up against artificial intelligence and destroyed and outlawed computers and robots, which is why you never see any droids in the Dune books. Frank Herbert never sketched out the details of that landmark event, thus leaving his son the opportunity to write that history. I believe Frank Herbert named the jihad after Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, an 1872 novel that presages a similar revolt against AI. In this Dune prequel, however, the jihad is named after a Butler family: Manion Butler is the political leader of the free humans, and his daughter Serena Butler is a prominent politician who inspires the humans to rebellion.

All of the familiar Dune planets are involved in this story, as well as a few new ones, including Earth. The groups and families that you would expect to be living on those planets, however, is much jumbled from the original Dune books. Cultures can move around a lot in 10,000 years, apparently. Because the Butlerian Jihad is in many ways the genesis of the Dune universe, Herbert and Anderson get to play with a lot of origin stories in this book. Here we get the origin of the spice trade, the Fremen, worm-riding, the Tleilaxu, possibly the Bene Gesserit (too soon to tell), and the Holtzman shields that characters wear to protect themselves in battle. We even get the origin of glowglobes, as if anyone was clamoring for that. Tio Holtzman, the creator of the Holtzman Effect, is a character in this novel, as are Aurelius Venport and Norma Cenva, who are mentioned in God Emperor of Dune as the creators of the foldspace technology that made the Spacing Guild possible (They haven’t invented that yet). Two of the major characters are an Atreides and a Harkonnen, but they are a far cry from the roles their families play in the original Dune. The treatment of the Atreides name is rather disappointing here compared to the illustrious history of the family that Frank Herbert hinted at in his books.

When George Lucas made Star Wars, he stole a lot of ideas from Dune. This book, however, reads as though Brian and Kevin stole some of those ideas back. This reads a lot like a Star Wars novelization. There’s a Luke Skywalker-type character and a Princess Leia-type character; not so much a Han Solo, though. The story is about a rebellion against an evil empire run by armored overlords. The Luke figure is the Darth Vader figure’s son. This is mostly typical interplanetary war fare without any of the philosophy or religious undertext one expects from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Anything that’s original in this book came out of Frank’s head, not Brian and Kevin’s.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad certainly isn’t boring, but it’s neither as deep nor as awe-inspiring as Daddy Herbert’s books. I got more enjoyment and intellectual stimulation from The Dune Encyclopedia (1984), a non-canon expansion of the Dune mythos to which Frank Herbert gave his blessing. Which brings up another point: I’m not a fan of the way Brian Herbert has kept such a tight fist on the Dune legacy for so many years. If he had opened up the Dune universe to more licensing, as was done with the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, the result would have been a lot more novels, comics, TV shows, etc. set in the Dune world. Many of those productions would have been non-canon and maybe downright bad, but, like those of Star Wars and Star Trek, the Dune characters would probably be household names by now. Even if Brian Herbert’s name on this book makes it “official,” I don’t think he and Anderson have done any better than many other sci-fi writers would have done. Despite my lukewarm reaction to this entry in the Dune saga, however, it’s probably got me hooked enough to at least read through this Butlerian trilogy.

Là-bas (Down There) by Joris-Karl Huysmans

Shock lit from a Zola protégé

Émile Zola, founder of the French literary school of Naturalism, was often castigated by his contemporary critics for including vulgar and disgusting subject matter in his novels. Much of what was considered vulgar and disgusting in the late 19th century, however, we today would just consider realism. One of Zola’s more prominent literary protégés, however, seemed to take such criticism as a challenge and proceeded to actively court controversy and deliberately shock readers with the decadent and gruesome content of his writings. Joris-Karl (or J. K.) Huysmans (1848–1907) was the author of À rebours (Against the Grain) and Là-bas (Down There or The Damned). The latter book, published in 1891, deals with the subject of Satanism in France.

In Paris, a writer named Durtal is working on a biography of a historical figure named Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), a French baron who fought alongside Joan of Arc. Gilles de Rais was tried and executed for abducting, torturing, raping, and murdering at least 140 children. According to Durtal, these heinous crimes, which Huysmans describes in graphic detail, were acts of Satanic worship. Durtal feels that in order to truly understand Gilles de Rais, he must delve into the activities of contemporary Satanists. His investigation leads him through a series of friend-of-a-friend referrals that bring him closer to rubbing elbows with real live devil worshippers in one of their Satanic ceremonies.

Much of the story is told through dinner conversations between Durtal and his friends des Hermies, a physician; Carhaix, a church bell-ringer; and sometimes Gévingey, an astrologer. It is to these listeners that Durtal relates much of the history of Gilles de Rais that he has uncovered. When Durtal is not dining with these companions, the story turns to his love life. He receives a letter from a secret admirer, a fan of his work, and begins an amorous correspondence with her. What comes out of the conversations between Durtal and his friends is a nostalgia for medievalism in preference to the modern world. Even though they’re not satanists, they enjoy dabbling in superstitions and the occult because such matters harken back to those earlier times. A lot of supernatural conspiracy theories are brought up at the dinner table, and it’s always somewhat unclear whether Huysmans actually believes this stuff, or if these are just the thoughts of his fictional characters. It was always clear where Zola stood on religion, but I don’t know Huysmans well enough to judge his supernatural inclinations.

Judging from Là-bas, Huysmans seems to want to be the Marilyn Manson of French literature. The way he’s written this book reminds one of those heavy metal bands that try really hard to be louder, harder, and more demonic than everyone else. Even for libertine France, there is a surprising amount of indecent and risqué content for 1891: semi-graphic sex, sacrilege and blasphemy, bodily functions and feces, mass murders, rape, sodomy, pedophilia, and, of course, a lot of talk about the devil. Even when Huysmans isn’t discussing one of these topics, he goes out of his way to digress gratuitously into some off-putting subject, such as food sanitation. There is a sexual affair in this book between Durtal and a married woman, but Huysmans doesn’t even make it titillating. Instead, he describes it as the most annoying, ungratifying, and pointless love affair imaginable.

There’s a lot that’s unpleasant about Là-bas, but it is interesting. Sometimes it reads like classic Zola-esque naturalism, and sometimes it reads like a 1970s Satanic B-movie. It’s rarely boring, which is more than I can say for Huysmans’s À rebours, but I can’t really recommend this as a great work of literature.

Icarus; or, The Future of Science by Bertrand Russell

Pessimistic outlook on scientific progress

Bertrand Russell won the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature, even though he was not a literary writer. He was a philosopher and mathematician who broke through to a wider general audience as a public intellectual. His essay Icarus; or, The Future of Science was published in 1924 as a 72-page book. The London publisher Paul Kegan produced a series of 110 books called To-day and To-morrow, consisting of short volumes containing essays that speculate on the future. The first book in this series was Daedelus; or, Science and the Future by J. B. S. Haldane. Russell’s Icarus, published six months later, is a response to Daedelus. The two authors were not in total disagreement. Both expressed doubts that some recent scientific advances were actually beneficial to mankind, but overall Haldane was the more optimistic of the two. In general, Haldane thought scientific advances would elevate the happiness of the common man, while Russell predicts that only the powerful will reap the benefits of progress.

Russell opens Icarus by stating he’s not going to talk much about the biological sciences. That’s not his department, and Haldane already covered that topic sufficiently in Daedelus. Strangely, however, Russell then goes on to talk mostly about biological sciences: genetics, eugenics, birth control, and anthropology. The longest chapter discusses changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Russell really doesn’t discuss technology much at all, but rather focuses on how our modern industrial and commercial society has spawned a revolution in organization, both in terms of efficiency and ubiquity. The result is that people now have less control over their lives than they did in, say, the 17th century, since much of our existence is regimented by organizational bureaucracy and government oversight, from our lives at work to the media we consume to the education of our children. Russell goes on to argue that science may very well be the downfall of liberalism and democracy.

Science would increase mankind’s happiness and health, Russell argues, if man were a rational being, rather than an emotional and greedy animal. Rapid scientific progress upsets the comfort zone between man’s desires and living conditions. In addition to the mythical metaphor of Icarus, Russell offers the analogy of how wolves become accustomed to periods of starvation; as a result their evolutionary descendants, domestic dogs, overeat every chance they get. It would be interesting to hear Russell’s take on the current (human) obesity epidemic, something he does not predict here.

I suspect that Icarus may have been delivered as a lecture before it was published in book form. That’s how it reads, anyway. The two books, Daedelus and Icarus, comprise a sort of debate in print, a point/counterpoint. Much of what Russell predicts for the future has already come to pass—declining birth rates, global economy, media empires, the arms race, and a general dumbing down of humanity. He presents some really interesting ideas here, but the obvious fault of the book is its brevity. It would have been a more productive work if Russell had had more room to develop his arguments, but the format of the To-day and To-morrow series confined it to a brief discussion. There aren’t enough pages for him to really convince you of anything. This is a thought-provoking work, but more thoughts are provoked than satisfied. Perhaps Russell delves deeper into these topics in other books, and I have yet to discover them.

Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground by Ludvig Holberg

18th-century sci-fi from a Danish Voltaire

Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground or Niels Klim’s Underground Travels is a science fiction novel published way back in 1741. It was penned by Danish author Ludvig Holberg. The edition I read included a brief biography of Holberg, which makes him out to sound like Denmark’s version of Voltaire. He was that Scandinavian nation’s pre-eminent man of letters in the 18th century, an Enlightenment freethinker who, besides this one novel, also wrote books on philosophy, history, and law, as well as plays and poetry. Niels Klim’s Journey, Holberg’s only novel, is very much in the same vein of satirical sci-fi and fantasy literature as Voltaire’s Micromegas (1752) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

The story takes place in 1664. Niels Klim, a recent graduate of a Copenhagen university, returns to his hometown of Bergen in Norway. Near that city is a mountain with a mysterious hole in it, from which warm air emanates. Someone should really investigate that hole, so Niels volunteers to lead an expedition. He enters the cave with a small team of men. While rappelling into a chasm, Niels’s rope breaks, and he falls for a very long time.

It turns out that the Earth is a hollow shell. Inside is an inner space complete with a small sun and a planet about 600 miles in circumference, named Nazar. Niels lands on this planet and finds himself in the kingdom of Potu. The citizens of Potu are intelligent, speaking trees. Unlike trees we know, they are not stationary, and can walk using their roots, but not quickly. They welcome Niels into their society and, due to his long legs, they give him the job of courier-general. The Potuans include many races, essentially different species of tree, each with its own peculiar characteristics and personality traits. In addition to Nazar, Niels also explores what Nazarians call “the firmament,” actually the interior surface of the Earth’s sphere, which also bears nations and their inhabitants. There he encounters civilizations of beings resembling animals of the surface world, but possessing language, the ability to walk upright, and human-like hands.

In total, Niels spends twelve years in this underground universe. Unlike Gulliver, who visited about a half dozen different lands in his travels, Niels seems to encounter a new race of beings every few pages, each with their own strange quirks. I’m sure many of these fictional peoples are meant to satirize different nations and polities of Holberg’s day. Not being an 18th-century Dane myself, I’m sure much of that satire was lost on me. For today’s reader, however, Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground does make for more accessible and humourous reading than Voltaire’s satires, such as Candide or Zadig. Even if you don’t know the politics of the time, you can enjoy Holberg making fun of various types of people and systems of government. There is a land where gender roles are reversed, for example. The women are sexual predators, and the men are expected to be chaste virgins and slut-shamed if they aren’t. Thus, Holberg points out some of the ridiculous double standards placed on women of his time. Another land is inhabited by philosophers and academics who are so focused on their search for knowledge that they have abandoned all personal hygiene and social graces. Each little country Niels visits has its share of comedic surprises.

With this novel, Holberg inaugurated the hollow-Earth subgenre of science fiction, from which would arise Symzonia (1820), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867), Mizora (1881), A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), The Smoky God (1908), and At the Earth’s Core (1914), among others. Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground deserves respect as a pioneering work in science fiction, but it’s not just some stodgy old vintage antique that belongs in a museum display case. After all these years, it’s still fun to read.