Pages : 296
Overall Mark : 6/10
While searching for his missing father, Anthony Julian embarks on a terrifying journey into the Earth’s interior. There he discovers a subterranean world where descendants of the Roman Army suffer under a totalitarian regime in which individualism is completely obliterated by telepathic means. Refusing to join this rigidly controlled society, Anthony must fight to save his father and find a route to the surface – or perish.
JOSEPH O’NEILL (1878-1952)
Joseph O’Neill was an Irish educationist and author. He worked as the Permanent Secretary to the Department of Education, Irish Free State, between 1923 and 1944. Although not strictly an SF writer, O’Neill used SF instruments to make cultural and political points with great eloquence. Land Under England (1935), about an underground world where citizens are controlled by telepathy, is a satire on Hitlerian totalitarianism.
VERDICT
This is a bit of an odd concept, and I’m surprised it was considered so highly. It seems to take two completely separate ideas; a lost Roman civilisation and a race of telepaths, and combines them in an unusual way that shouldn’t work, yet it does, I didn’t feel myself questioning the concept as I read, nor how these people became telepaths in the first place, which just goes to show that it must have been reasonably well written for me to not think of this when I was reading. Instead I became immersed in Anthony’s search for his father, a search that we pretty much know from the start is not going to be successful.
