The Odysseum by David Bramwell

Author:David Bramwell [Bramwell, David; Tinsley, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-473-68871-1
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2018-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Thompson is so convinced of the existence of this Inner Earth that he’s planning to travel there, despite also claiming to be ‘legally blind’, his retinas having been burned by an intense light at the time of his car accident. On 24 May 2003, he says, he will set out towards the Arctic on a mission to discover the ‘hole in the pole’ – an entrance that is both an actual ‘real hole’ and a ‘dimensional portal that merges into a higher vibration and frequency’.

To journey inside, he’s going to use a modified SoloTrek personal helicopter, a first-of-its-kind jetpack he’s already acquired thanks to private investment. Once inside the mantle, his backpack ’copter won’t even need fuel, as it will be powered by electromagnetic energy and navigated by the Inner Earth beings. The only problem he might face, he says, is that the hole is guarded by ‘inter-dimensional security’, taking the form of mechanical swarming bees, and they know that he’s coming.

Over the next hour Thompson’s monologues become ever more manic and unsettling. He even begins to refer to himself in the plural: ‘We’ve been really busy here,’ he says, repeatedly plugging his book, The Cosmic Manuscript, which he claims is flying off the shelves. He also starts to pepper his speech with hyperbolical statements: ‘I’m pretty much well known all over the world now,’ he tells Bell. ‘I don’t sleep, I just meditate.’ It’s becoming increasingly clear that Dallas Thompson is the type of guy you really wouldn’t want to get stuck in a conversation with on a night bus.

Soon after the radio interview, the media become interested in Thompson and his planned expedition. The Cosmic Manuscript apparently sells by the thousands. Two months later, our excitable radio guest reports to his Yahoo Group that he’s getting over 5,000 emails per day and, in an unexpected twist, announces that he’s decided to pull his supposed bestseller from sale. Shortly afterwards, Dallas Thompson disappears and is never heard from again.

BELIEF THAT THE Earth is hollow and populated by strange and brilliant beings has been bubbling away for centuries. It’s possible that the origins of such beliefs lie in shamanic traditions in which medicine men or women would recount to the community their heroic journeys into a mysterious netherworld. Here they would encounter both benign and hostile spirits, undergo death and rebirth, and finally return endowed with great powers. Certainly, the idea of a hollow underworld has inspired some of our best-known science fiction, including Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core (1914) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Common themes describe a land of endless subterranean caverns and tunnels, replete with woolly mammoths and pterodactyls, and crystal cities populated by lost races of humans. Curiously, the scientific hypothesis of a hollow Earth kept respectability up until the early 1800s, and many of the fantasy stories actually drew on these real theories as jumping-off points.

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