Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit by Robert Ames Bennet is about Lieutenant Balderson's chilly and courageous adventures through the lifeless Arctic. Excerpt: "Ice--ice on every side, north, and south, east and west, as far the eye can see--not the broad, level floes of the Arctic Circle, with here and there a majestic berg towering skyward like some gigantic crystal cathedral, but a vast stretch of ponderous floe-bergs, ridged with jagged hummocks, their broken surface covered with snow, fast turning to slush under the blaze of the six months' sun."
1901 Occult Novel. Contents: from Above; Hyperborean; Valkyrie; Thorlings; Nifleheim; Biornstad; Hammer-Drott; Orm-Crown; Holy Rune; Shadow of the Orm; Down the Mark; Over the Giol; Black Death; Bos Latrifrons; Dwerger; the Orm; Waiting;.
This book is a critical analysis of political economy, meant to reveal the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of production. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a famous German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist.
Review by Darius M. Klein: "A Classic of the Genre" is how Jessica Salmonsen has described this work. Robert Ames Bennet was primarily a writer of Westerns, but also wrote two Lost Race romances, one of which is "Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit." The plot concerns a group of explorers who fly in a balloon to the North Pole, where they discover, via an opening, that the earth is indeed hollow. Once inside the earth they encounter Viking and Neanderthal communities, along with survivals of Mesozoic megafauna. "Thyra" manages to intertwine the Utopian Lost Race and Lost World subgenres into a single, action-packed plot which never meanders or digresses. The first Viking community upon which the heroes stumble after they enter the bowels of the Earth (and where they find the eponymous heroine) is an unlikely Christian-Socialist Utopia. As they penetrate further into the Earth's interior, they encounter those Vikings who have given themselves over to idolatry and human sacrifice, along with a community of stereotypically aggressive and bestial Neanderthals. At the novel's climax, they have a perilous close encounter with some demonic prehistoric reptiles in the Hela Pool (a particularly well-written scene). The copy of this work which I obtained is a photocopy of the microfilm of the original 1901 edition, which has delightfully quaint illustrations; I don't know if they have been reproduced in the "Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Fiction" series' edition. Mr. Bennet's other Lost Race Romance, "The Bowl of Baal," also combines Lost Race and Lost World motifs, and is recommended here. Of the two, however, "Thyra" is the better.
