The world below

About the book

A professor's experiment claims to send objects half a million years ahead and return them almost immediately. Human volunteers make the process more troubling: disappearance does not always lead to a reassuring reappearance, and an attempt to investigate deepens the uncertainty. The narrator enters this future with practical equipment and limited confidence in the theories meant to explain it. Encounters with evolved beings then test assumptions about intelligence, violence, cooperation, and the relation between desire and moral judgment. This edition contains both The Amphibians and The World Below as its two books, allowing the journey to develop beyond its initial encounters. Wright uses adventure and speculation together, making the unfamiliar societies a challenge to the traveler's values as well as his survival.

• Evolution and difference
• Ethics of violence
• Human assumptions

Why read it

The future world's conflicts repeatedly turn the explorer's confidence in his own standards into part of the problem.

English two-book text, 1949 second impression carrying a 1929 copyright