14 September 2012The idea of a kingdom under the Earth is not a new one. In fact the idea has been around for about 200 years, and we have seen this exotic idea even appear in roleplaying games, so it is no surprise that Packard would have a Choose Your Own Adventure based on a hidden world beneath our feet. I remember that TSR released a campaign called Hollow World where it turned out that the planet was hollow and you could travel down into this new world for a whole new experience. The funny thing is, and I suspect that they stole the idea of Jules Verne , who had dinosaurs hidden in the caverns under the earth, that the societies in the underground kingdom were much more primitive than the ones on top.Now, some have suggested that Journey to the Centre of the Earth deals with the idea of a hollow earth, but this is not the case. The idea that Verne explores is that the Earth does not get hotter the closer you get to the core, meaning that the underparts of the Earth are riddled with caverns, and creatures that used to roam the surface disappeared down there. However, anybody who has actually read the Verne novel will notice that the story really only has the heroes descend into the Earth and then come back out again: they really don't spend all that much time exploring the place, but rather trying to find their way out as soon as they find themselves in these labyrinthine caverns.As with this gamebook, I am not sure of what actually happened. It has been a long time since I have read it and unfortunately I have only found a couple in my parents back shed, none of which are any of the later books. Maybe there are some others in that shed, but some how I doubt it. Anyway, I have noticed that there is the idea that the sun in this underground world is dark, and if my memory serves me correctly, it is a black hole. Now that would simply not work. The reason I say this is because if the world was hollow, and there was a black hole at the centre, then the world would simply collapse in on itself. Secondly, nobody would be able to survive in the underground world because the gravitational pull would not be towards the ground, but away from it, so anybody in the underground kingdom would be sucked towards the black hole (though I suspect that this black hole would be much weaker than we calculate them to be, and would also account for the Earth's gravitational pull).There is another idea known as the Dyson Sphere . This is where an artificial world is built around the sun and completely encapsulating it. The Doctor Who novels explored this concept in The Also People . My concern with this is that there is no way for the sun's energy to escape, so pretty much everything on the inside of the sphere would be burnt to a crisp. This is not me being a kill-joy, but rather being a bit more of a realist. While I do like my science-fantasy, I also like it to be somewhat believeable simply because while at many times suspension of disbelief is necessary for most, if not all, novels, there are times when even that does not work.