Matthew Young (1)

Why is it that some people are fascinated by what lies under the surface of the earth.....or more to the point what MIGHT lie under the earth. Maybe it really harks back to our prehistoric ancestors and their ilk who wormed their way into pitch black caverns to draw animals in charcoal and oche on the walls of caverns. The association of the underworld with a spirit world ...and with hell.
Anyway, I confess, I am one of those people who are fascinated with this underworld. I track my own show more fascination back to adventure stories (especially those written by Enid Blyton) where an intrepid group of kids (and a dog) found their way into long abandoned or secret caves/tunnels to foil smugglers or gangsters or kidnappers.
My actual experience of the underworld is pretty limited, though I have been deep underground in coal mines in Asturias (Spain) and in Australia....and I must confess....some of the mystery and glamor wore off very rapidly when I heard and saw part of the walls of coal collapsing under the weight of a kilometre of rock above...with an almighty crack. At that moment, I reckoned that the coal miners deserved all the pay they were getting and then some.
But back to Chris Fitch's book. He's produced a fascinating grab-bag of examples of interesting stuff happening underground. A lot of it relates to caves or tunnels but there is also discussion of other curious things; trees in the Pando Forest in Utah that have cloned themselves and are linked underground by a root system into an area of 43 hectares ...a single tree in effect that may be 14,000 years old. Aztec buildings and ruins buried under modern Mexico City ...and an incredible flaming gas crater in Turkmenistan, accidentally created by Soviet gas explorers. You've just gotta love the story of the miners finding the ground collapsed into a crater which was burping methane and somebody thought it would be good idea to drop in a match and "burn it off in a few weeks". Half a century later, it's still burning fiercely. It's a good collection of stories ...and it's supported with some great diagrams and location maps. Many of the locations, I already knew about but many of them were totally new to me......the deepest high altitude cave for example....in Uzbekistan near to the Afghan border with a top to bottom depth of 939 metres....and still 2651 m above sea level.
Unfortunately, with many collection like this there is a limit (usually about 4 pages...and that includes pictures and a map) on the details about the places. Sometimes I found myself wishing for a bit more information but on the whole, I think Fitch has done a workman (should that be work-person)-like job and it's easy reading. Happy to give it four stars. show less

Very much in the style of Fitch's previous book Atlas of Untamed Places, this consists of short, richly illustrated chapters about various interesting places. This time, of course, the places are not wildernesses but caves, bunkers, tunnels and other underground spaces. A good fraction are natural caves - and I tended to find those the most interesting - but the majority are man-made structures, or collections of structures.

Fitch's research was perhaps a bit more superficial this time, as I show more noted more errors and oddities*, or maybe it just happened that there was a higher proportion of material here that I was familiar enough with to note the mistakes.

It's a pleasant read, though, and while better fact-checking would have been nice, half the value of a book like this is in making you aware of things and places you might want to learn about in more detail from more scholarly sources.

Due warning: the e-book edition I read was quite sloppily done. If you want to get this, I recommend getting the paper book.

* For example, "Qin" is said the have been the personal name of China's first emperor, whose burial complex is one of the subterranea covered. It is actually the name of his dynasty. show less

SUBTERRANEA by Chris Fitch

This has beautiful pictures of beautiful places, complete with a few pages that tell about what each place is when it was discovered and what if any, humans used it for. As a former caver, I have a great appreciation for the subterranean world.

I am sure I did not appropriately appreciate the splendor of this book since I had an electronic version. A hard or softcover version would be coffee table worthy, to awe family members and visitors, alike.

Highly recommend.

I show more consider myself fortunate to have received a complimentary copy of #subterranea from #netgalley I was under no obligation to post a review. show less

The wide variety of underground venues makes for interesting reading.