The Hollow Earth by Rudy Rucker

It's a Huckleberry-Finn-steampunk adventure! But it isn't light-hearted fluff. The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia may be light-hearted but it is also Southern Gothic sf with racism, rape, drug use and the generally dodgy characters that Rucker loves to fill his fiction with. And add to this historical characters, most especially Edgar Allen Poe and his marriage to Virginia, his thirteen year old cousin.

Like Poe's 1883 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which this book is an alternate retelling, Rucker puts the story forward as an manuscript written by another, in this case Mason Algiers Reynolds. Mason, a naive 15 year old Virginian farm boy at the beginning of the novel, who with his companion Otha (his slave) and his dog Arf, manages to get himself in a hell of a lot of trouble as soon as he ventures off his father's farm. On the run, he seeks employment with his favourite author who works at the Southern Literary Messenger.

Here is where Rucker strikes gold because this author, Edgar Allan Poe, better know as Eddie Poe, is not only a great writer. He also a drunk, drug addict, racist kook who is helping a friend outfit his expedition to Antarctica to prove John Cleves Symmes' (dubious even at the time) Hollow Earth theory. Rucker seems to specialize in these odd, disreputable characters who operate at the margins of society, so I take it with a grain of salt of how much of this is the historical Poe and how much of this is just how Rucker sees the world. Anyways it is great fun, a welcome change from the usual Heilien/Stephensonian/Strossian supermen. Rucker's dudes are fuck-ups, sometimes smart, always self-destructive.

Rucker's take on the Hollow Earth benefits from some equally kookie, if far more respected modern science via Einstein, and ends up being far more fantastical than Poe's more symbolic tale. As well, the haunted darkness of Poe's psychology is allowed to air here, in sort of an all-accepting hippie/70s California, 'we're not judging you, man' sort of way. Yeah, that defuses Poe's vexing power, but now we are in Rucker-land. Light up and enjoy dude.