Customer Reviews

Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth: I Remember Lemuria & the Shaver Mystery

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Although it reprints I Remember Lemuria and The Shaver Mystery by Richard Shaver, almost half of Lost Continents and The Hollow Earth consists of original material by the maverick archaeological heretic and historian David Hatcher Childress. Childress spells out the lore regarding UFOs and Antarctica, the tunnel systems in South America and under-the-surface civilization in central Asia. Childress' perpetual circumnavigation of the globe and its mystery spots, as well as his love of rare books and obscure historical sources, make him uniquely valuable in placing the Shaver material in a real world context. He devotes one new chapter to the history of Shaver's volumionus a rant on underground beings called Deros and Teros channeled to a Pennsylvanian welder through his equipment and published in Ray Palmer's pulp magazines of the 1940s and 50s. It offers some biography of Shaver and Palmer, but also looks at the zines (Shavertron; Hollow Earth Insider) and subculture that evolved around hollow earth speculation, some of it intensely funny. Steamshovel readers waiting for the release of Maury Island UFO will find this important background reading, as Palmer played a key role in the 1947 events at Maury Island. (An appendix on Shaver written by Conspiracy Nation's Brian Redman will appear in Maury Island UFO.) Another chapter by Childress, "The Search for the Hollow Earth" provides an even more expanded historical overview of beliefs and explorations regarding subterranean humanity. The book comes lavishly illustrated--many Shavertron covers and cartoons--and reproduces "I Remember Lemuria" and "The Shaver Mystery" from the pages of the original edition. That alone makes it a good buy. Childress' exercise of his erudition on the the topic, however, makes it--ahem--an underground classic. Review by Kenn Thomas, Steamshovel Press, www.umsl.edu/~skthoma

I purchased "Lost Continents & The Hollow Earth" by David Hatcher Childress & Richard Shaver because I was interested in reading the two Mutan Mion stories by Richard Shaver which are included. Although originally published in "Amazing Stories" (a fiction magazine), the author insisted that the stories were true, and many readers wrote in with their own experiences with beings from inside the Earth.

The first story in this book and the series is "I Remember Lemuria", a novella which was first published in "Amazing Stories" in March of 1945. In this story we are introduced to Mutan Mion (the Atlan whose memories Richard Shaver claims to have) who discovers that Mu (Earth) is being controlled by deros (detrimental energy robots). The story takes place in the far past, and uses myths such as Atlantis and the Titans in its subject matter. The story would fall into the category Space Opera, so if you enjoy that subgenre you may be interested in reading it. If one were to rate this story based on the impact it had at the time, it would have to get five stars, but in reading it now I would only give it three. It is difficult to understand how anyone would take it to be real, and there are much better Space Opera stories out there, such as the Lensman series by Dr. Edward E. Smith.

The second story is "The Return of Sathanas", which was first published in "Amazing Stories" in November of 1946 as a novel. However, it only runs about 100 pages, so it is really a novella size story. This is another of the Mutan Mion stories, and in this one he is in pursuit of Sathanas, a dero, and chases him back to Mu. This story brings some of the Norse mythology into play, but overall the story is nothing special. This story rates two stars by itself. This story was co-authored by Bob McKenna, but he is not credited in this text.

Also included in this book is the foreword to the 1948 book which contained both of these stories, and there is also an introduction (by David Hatcher Childress), a copy of the Shaver Alphabet, and a short piece called "The Shaver Mystery" (also by David Hatcher Childress) which talks about the controversial stories and their impact.

The rest of the book includes four short pieces by David Hatcher Childress which deal with "new age" theories about technologically advanced ancient civilizations which may have lived in the "Hollow Earth" or at least used vast networks of tunnels under the continents. While these are entertaining to read, they are not very good science as Childress will often describes how a source is discredited for certain reasons, and yet he continues to use some of their ideas as sources to support the existence of these ancient civilizations.

At this time, this book is the only place where one can find any of the Shaver stories, and so for that reason it might be of interest to some people. As a source of information about ancient civilizations it is entertaining, but much of it is based on questionable sources and it should not be taken as fact.

The book is split into 3 parts: two sci-fi stories from Richard Shaver's Lumeria series and three chapters on hollow earth history. The stories are stupid and boring. The only reason you would want to read them is if you were into Sci-Fi history. I couldn't even finish the Return of Santhas. The last three chapters on hollow earth history were quite interesting though. They follow some quack and some reasonable theories about tunnels in South America and Asia. He does a good recap of the Incan/Spanish conflict that led to the theories on lost cities of Gold. So parts 1&2 (no stars), part 3 (4 stars)

Ever since I heard about the Shaver Mysteries in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction I've wanted to read them. Deranged robots, "deros", hanging around in Earth's caverns using degenerate tech from an old civilization to corrupt a modern world? Sign me up!

Well, the experience of actually reading two of Richard Shaver's "true" accounts of life in the past proved less exciting.

The dullness of most of "I Remember Lemuria" -- seemingly, according to Childress' rather sketchy details in his accompanying essay "The Shaver Mystery", a 1948 book reprint of the first Shaver story "I Remember Lemuria!" from the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories -- reminds me of the typical utopian novel. Our narrator, one Mutan Mion, who inscribed his stories on metal plates for Richard Shaver to find, is a not very talented artist sent to Tean City for better education. Mutan is an ordinary man living in Sub-Atlan which is in the hollow earth beneath Atlantis. There he not only meets the love of his life, the "variform" Arl of purple fur, a tail, and cloven hoofs, but encounters an atmosphere of paranoia and fear as one of the Titans - humans unpoisoned by the sun and who continually grow in body and brain, wisdom and intelligence, throughout their life - is killed and another hints at a plot to overthrow the government. (Shaver ignores most of the consequences of this biological peculiarity of continual growth, but he does note that this world's buildings have no roofs.)

Soon Mutan and Arl are on the run to the Nortans, a planet of giants, including the 80 foot tall Vanue who bonds men to her with irrestisible sexual attraction. And there is a return to Earth to battle for the soul of civilization and the revelation of the evil doings of the deros in caverns near the surface and their evil, degenerate master.

Now this is a lot less interesting than it sounds because the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, expanded Shaver's original 10,000 word story into a mini-epic of 31,000 - mostly with a lot of footnotes which purport to show how the story's events fit in with certain mythologies or refute the understanding of modern physics or more clearly explain the notion that our aging sun's radiation is now an age-producing poison that also affects the mind. And there is a whole lot of talk about Mantong. That's the notion, proposed by Shaver in a 1943 letter to Amazing Stories, that all 26 letters of our alphabet represent concepts, and that every English word could be decoded to show what it represents in that most ancient of humanity's languages. Bogus etymologies don't interest me much though we did get the cool word "deros". As a story, things don't get interesting until about three-fourths of the way through, but, as an example of a bizarre mixture of anxiety about the Atomic Age, hollow earth theories, Lemuria, the idea that man has degenerated from ancient physical perfection, proto-von Daniken ancient astronauts, the perils of centralized government, and technosex, it is weirdly compelling.

Things are a lot more interesting and enjoyable, in a pulpy sort of way, in "The Return of Sathanas" - and, no, it's not at all coincidental that Sathanas sounds like Satan. Our narrator Mutan is back. It's thousands of years later, and now he's a member of the Nor Patrol of the Nor Empire and out to bring back that Titan gone bad, his mind poisoned by the sun, Sathanas. In the pursuit, Mutan gets involved in a war between the human Aesir and the giant Jotans (yes, Norse mythology is discussed). Sathans captures Mutan and Arl and wants to perversely use growth rays on the beautiful Arl - famous for her expert use of pleasure enhancing stim rays - to turn her into the supreme example of the sex slaves he traffics in. The footnotes explicitly reference Charles Fort a number of times and often suggest the use of technology by deros to produce horrors in our surface world including the rather tasteless suggestion, for a 1946 story, that Nazi concentration camp guards were influenced by deros in order to get a little flesh for the latter's cannibalistic needs.

The rest of the book is the usual "alternative history" you get in books like this which is to say some interesting details if not believable conclusions. Childress repeats himself sometimes but provides a look at the history of the hollow earth idea - though not as good as the one in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. We are told of underground structures in Central Asia and South America and given some pretty fabulous traveler's tales of other structures and vast tunnel systems by people like Nicholas Roerich and Ferdinand Ossendowski.

And there really aren't any robots, deranged or otherwise.

Writng about Ray Palmer (1910-1977), the gnomelike and energetic editor of _Amazing Stories_, Theodore Stugeon said: "To this day, fights start in bars over the 'Shaver Mystery' or the 'Shaver Hoax,' depending upon who's doing the swinging at the moment. There is as much documentation that Ray believed in it as that he didn't, and I for one don't much care: true or not, it was a colorful and kooky piece of business..." (_Sturgeon in Orbit_, 1964, 105).

Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975) was a semi-literate welder at a Ford plant in Detroit who began to hear voices on the job-- at first, the thoughts of his fellow workers and then those of humans being tortured by evil creatures living in caverns deep underground. He was in and out of mental institutions, where he was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. (Among other things, he was convinced that he was being stalked by a demon named Max.)

One day, Shaver began a correspondence with Ray Palmer at _Amazing_. Palmer encouraged Shaver to write more. Many of Shaver's tales were presented as factual: racial memories of real-life events in the past. There was a flood of letters in response, and the circulation of _Amazing_ shot up. It changed from a quarterly to a monthly magazine almost overnight.

Shaver's thesis is that there were once a band of benevolent races living together in Lemuria: Titans, satyrs, sibyls, centaurs, and the like. But they began to be poisoned by radiation from the sun and were forced to leave the planet. Many of their descendants mutated into evil creatures called deros who live inside a hollow earth. The deros use ancient machines left underground to read the minds of humans. Other underground machines are used to emit rays that cause disease and insanity or that incite wars. The deros come in and out of holes at the North and South poles in flying machines to kidnap people to torture and eat.

Authorship of Shaver's pieces is a bit problematic. Some pieces were rewritten by Palmer and other Ziff-Davis writers to smooth out grammar and mechanics, give them a more coherent plot, and excise or tone down sadomasochistic sex scenes. (One piece submitted by Shaver had a sex scene that ran on for fifty pages.) But they do have an odd charm. There are the numerous footnotes in which Shaver explains the odd bits of ancient language that pop up in the body of the text, or the reasons why the deros may form an alliance with the Nazis in the near future. There are the sections with off-trail observations. ("'Evil' is 'live' spelled backwards".)

_Lost Continents & The Hollow Earth_ (1999) by David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver is, I suppose, a reasonably entertaining introduction to Shaverism. It has a garish and action-packed cover and a generous number of pulp illustrations (covers, interiors, cartoons, and original Shaver drawings) that graced Shaver oriented issues. It contains the two most reprinted Shaver pieces, "I Remember Lemuria" and "The Return of Sathanas". There is also an alphabet that Shaver claimed was the ancient source of all our languages today. Wow! And there are five essays by Childress on Shaverism in which he concludes that There Must Be Something In It.

The Shaver Mystery pieces appeared in _Amazing_ from 1945 through 1947. By 1948, the publishers pulled the plug on the series. Shaver later continued to write Lemuria pieces for Palmer-edited magazines like _Other Worlds_ and _Fate_. But by the early 1950s, his heyday as a writer was over. It seems incredible that stories this wild, this nonsensical, and this badly written were taken seriously as fact by anybody. But they were. Raymond W. Bernard, a Rosicrucian leader, believed Shaver's claim that the hollow earth people had taught him the secrets of relativity before Einstein. Bernard died of pneumonia in 1965 on an expedition to South America. He was looking for openings into the hollow earth at the time.

I have been waiting for a long time for this book, I have not been disappointed. The information and theories are some that I have wondered about. This gives the opportunity to digest asnd absorb some of the myths and legends that have been circulating on this planet for ages.

Regards Zy

david hatcher childress has presented one of the best reads on this subject! excellent illustrations great layout and even if you dont believe this it's a great science fiction read to say the least!

This book didn't turn out to be as interesting as I thought it would be. He reprints the entire 1948 book "I Remember Lemuria" by Richard Shaver. Which I found pretty boring. Childress' comments on the hollow earth were interesting though, but I wouldn't have bought the book for them.

I do a lot of sending information to others, and this is one of the best books for the information.

I bought this book thinking it would be a good interesting read. It was for a couple chapters and I couldnt finish it for fear of being ill. He basically borrows theories and other tidbits from other books by Occult authors. It talks about "The Great White Brotherhood" but doesnt mention that this Brotherhood is the top echelon of the Illuminati Occultists who rule this world. The first story was good because it shows what mind control can do to a person and reminds me of what Philip K Dick once went through. This book has limited documentation if any and no definitive answers and just mystery and doesn't resolve much. If you want a good read with documentation pick up "Bloodlines Of The Illuminati" by Fritz Springmeier. Its probably the most amazing book you will ever read!