On November 22, 1820, the New York Evening Post ran a perfunctory book ad that was none too particular in its typesetting:
WILEY & HALSTED, No. 3 Wall street, have just received SYMZONIA, or a voyage to the internal world, by capt. Adam Seaborn. Price $1.
As literary landmarks go, it’s not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. Although one might point to the crushingly dull “A Flight to the Moon,” from 1813, that text is more of a philosophical dialogue than a story, and what little story it has proves to be just a dream. “Symzonia; Voyage of Discovery” is boldly and unambiguously sci-fi. The book takes a deeply weird quasi-scientific theory and runs with it—or, more accurately, sails with it, all the way to Antarctica.
“Symzonia” is narrated by Captain Seaborn, who outfits a steam vessel for Antarctic exploration and hires a crew for a voyage that he is worryingly unforthcoming about. As the sealer forges ever farther south, beyond the reach of maps, and the compass spins wildly, the crew passes a shipwreck of alien construction and becomes terrified by a mammoth beast on the shore. The rumblings of mutiny begin. “We shipped with you, sir, for a sealing voyage; not for a voyage of discovery,” his first officer complains. Seaborn presses onward anyway. “I could not tell him of my belief of open poles,” he admits, “affording a practicable passage to the internal world, and of my confident expectations of finding comfortable winter quarters inside; for he would take that as evidence of my being insane.”
It is a timely sort of madness. “Symzonia” pivots off the widely circulated hollow-earth theories of Captain John Cleves Symmes, Jr., a hero of the War of 1812. The idea of a hollow earth was not new—the astronomer Edmond Halley, among others, argued for the earth being composed of nesting spheres—but Symmes added a compelling twist. He claimed that there were openings at the earth’s still undiscovered poles, and that an ambitious expedition could actually enter the internal world.
That is exactly what the narrator of “Symzonia” finds, and more. The earth proves to have a subbasement utopia of pale, wise beings who fear and marvel at their visitors. Symzonians live in a quasi-socialist society, dwell in houses whitewashed with liquified pearls, travel in airships, and are governed by a council of worthies and a “Best Man.” Captain Seaborn, proudly recounting the outer world’s valiant deeds of conquest, unwittingly horrifies them. The Symzonians suspect that “Externals” like Seaborn are the descendants of a depraved race exiled from Symzonia thousands of years earlier. Inevitably, the explorers are ejected from this paradise; and Seaborn, back home, is swindled out of what seal pelts he did procure, and is reduced to selling his tale.