“On the central planet, Klim discovers a happy and prosperous utopian land of intelligent, mobile trees. In his subsequent travels around the planet Klim encounters many bizarre varieties of intelligent trees, and each species forms a separate social grouping. It is these sections of the novel that have earned Klim a place in the history of utopia. But in the final sections of the work Holberg turns from utopia and social satire to fantasy: Klim is expelled from the utopian land of Potu to the underside of the earth’s crust which is inhabited by many other fantastic creatures, all of which – plant and animal species alike – are intelligent and gifted with speech; and then he discovers a race of human savages, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were barbarous and uncivilized”. http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/10/10/stories-of-a-hollow-earth/ |