History Main / HollowWorld

* ''Comicbook/AtomicRobo'' makes it very clear that the Earth is ''not'' hollow, because that would be scientifically impossible. However, there ''is'' an extensive, undetectable planet-wide cave network populated by an alien silicon-based ecosystem, created when debris from [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet) Theia]] was captured by Earth's gravity and sank into the crust billions of years ago. [[note]]An ''immortal magma worm'' was involved at some point. We don't really know how.[[/note]]
* In the miniseries ''Comicbook/BatmanOdyssey'', Batman travels BeneathTheEarth and finds it hollow and filled with dinosaurs, trolls, wizards, monsters, and so forth. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Adams#Advocacy_of_Expanding_Earth_theory Neal Adams]] is on board with this idea.

* In Franchise/TheDCU, [[ComicBook/TheWarlordDC Skartaris]] was originally inside a Hollow Earth. A later {{Retcon}} changed it into an alternate dimension that was accessed through gates at the Earth's poles.

* The Earth is hollow in ''ComicBook/SuperDinosaur'' and houses a smaller one: Inner-Earth, which is inhabited by dinosaurs. [[spoiler:And the Reptiloids.]]

* ''Franchise/WonderWoman'':

* ''Franchise/MonsterVerse'':

* ''VideoGame/StarFox'': Macbeth from the original game is stated to be a hollow planet, but in truth there ''is'' a core, albeit smaller than the crust that surrounds it. This makes a huge series of caverns that runs through the entire planet. Andross had plans to turn Macbeth into a massive base. The actual stage even takes place with the Arwings flying around inside the planet.

** The Spin-Dig Galaxy level from ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'' appears to be located inside one of these.

* In ''WesternAnimation/InsideJob2021'', [[ConspiracyKitchenSink every conspiracy theory is true]] ''except'' FlatEarth, which was a bet by employees of the EvilInc running the world about the dumbest thing they could get people to believe. ''Instead'', the Earth is hollow with a [[MushroomMan race of sapient hallucinogenic mushrooms living inside of it]]. One such mushroom, Magic Myc, is one of the main characters.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'': The Fourth Doctor story "The Pirate Planet" gave this an interesting twist. Zanak was a gigantic hollow planet with [[MassTeleportation enormous transmat engines]] at its core. It could literally materialize around smaller planets and squeeze them of their wealth and energies.

* In the MarvelUniverse, Saturn's moon Titan is this: barren on the outside, fully inhabited on the inside.

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' has several different types.

* Creator/ThomasPynchon's ''Literature/AgainstTheDay'' seems to have this. [[MindScrew It's unclear]].
* In the ''Literature/ArtemisFowl'' series, the Fairies moved to inside the HollowEarth in recent times -- that or BeneathTheEarth depending on how you interpret it.
* In one of Creator/IsaacAsimov's stories in the rather epic Robots/Empire/Foundation chronology, some of the inhabitants of Trantor believe the universe to be an infinite mass of earth and rock, punctuated by occasional life-bearing bubbles. It is worth noting that the truth is more along the lines of BeneathTheEarth, but only the (increasingly rare and alienated) scientific and technical elite still believe this, with the others believing such a belief to be a quite frankly bizarre conspiracy, the details of which I can't quite remember.

* ''Literature/TheDeathGateCycle'', by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
** In second book, Elven Star, features the world of elemental Fire as one of these, where all the stars in the sky are [[spoiler:the equivalent of gigantic lighthouse beacons]].

* A variant in Creator/NikolayNosov's children's book ''Dunno on the Moon'', where the Moon turns out to not only be hollow but actually housing a mini-Earth inside it. The only difference for the shorties (all people in the book series are shorties, small humans) living on the mini-Earth is that, at night, everything is dark. Some technobabble explains how they get any light at all during daytime (something about cosmic rays turning into visible light when passing through the Moon's crust). The Moon-shorties have no idea that they are living inside a planetoid, as they don't have rockets yet and, frankly, have no need to try to figure out how to get into space (being a thinly-veiled stand-in for Western capitalists, most Moon-shorties are greedy and corrupt and, as such, are uninterested in the advancement of their people; this is the first book where the concept of money is brought up, when an Earth-shortie goes to a restaurant and tries to leave without paying). Another big difference (that is actually a big plot-point) is that, while on regular Earth all fruits and vegetables are huge compared to the shorties (as it "bigger than the shorties" in some cases), all fruits and vegetable on the mini-Earth are in proportion to them. Thus, for those living on the mini-Earth, hunger is a real possibility. After explaining who he is to two Moon-shorties, Dunno tells them that their rocket on the Moon's surface is full of seeds of giant fruits and vegetables. The three of them try to market that idea and create a fund for building a rocket to get from mini-Earth to the Moon's surface and retrieve the seeds. Unfortunately, without "moonite" (an {{Expy}} of Creator/HGWells's cavorite) that can only be found on the Moon's surface, building a rocket is extremely difficult, as shown by the second expedition sent from Earth (the rocket is much smaller and most of it is devoted to fuel; the first rocket, equipped with "moonite" only needed a little bit of thrust and was luxurious by comparison).
* Nehwon in Fritz Leiber's Literature/FafhrdAndTheGrayMouser stories is a concave hollow world.
* Creator/UmbertoEco's novel ''Literature/FoucaultsPendulum'' pokes fun at this trope, together with many others commonly believed by conspiracy theorists.
* ''Literature/TheFutureOfSupervillainy'' is a volume of ''Literature/TheSupervillainySaga'' that takes place in one of these. It is revealed their world has a HollowEarth full of dinosaurs, lost civilizations, and an eternally shining sun in the center of the Earth. It becomes a place where Gary is able to settle the refugees from a dead planet with the locals' permission.
* In Creator/JohnCWright's ''[[Literature/TheGoldenOecumene The Golden Transcedence]]'', the agent of the Silent Oecumene claims that they live inside a black hole, which has been hollowed out and so exerts no gravitational pull on them.[[labelnote:Details]]Specifically, they claim to have found a way to produce a ''second'' event horizon within the first, and so on, to produce a series of nested 'spheres'. They then populate each new layer as a way to provide nearly unlimited living and computational space. (The agent itself is viewed as being present in a field just outside a miniature black hole of its own.)[[/labelnote]]

* ''[[Literature/GreatShip The Great Ship]]'' is a [[CoolStarShip hollow starship]], about the [[PlanetSpaceship same size as Jupiter]]. It has a hollow core large enough to contain an entire world, [[DeathWorld Marrow]]. The rest of the ship is full of thousands of fuel tanks that can fit moons, and even more caverns designed for habitation.

* The Franchise/IndianaJones novel ''Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth'' is about [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin this]]. More specifically, Indy discovers Ultima Thule (see "Real Life" examples below).

* The Shellworld(s) in Iain M. Banks's ''Literature/{{Matter}}'' is essentially a nesting-doll series of these, although all the inhabitants live on the "outside" of each shell. What's on the inside? Why, artificial stars, some of which roll across the sky and some of which are fixed.

* Due to a combination of its gravitic and atmospheric oddities, the world of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesklin Mesklin]] in Creator/HalClement's hard sci fi classic ''Literature/MissionOfGravity'' was thought by its inhabitants to be bowl-shaped. They were incorrect (it was actually a very flattened spheroid).

* ''Literature/TheNarrativeOfArthurGordonPymOfNantucket'' by Creator/EdgarAllanPoe abruptly ends with Pym's ship falling into a giant hole at the South Pole. It's likely that the whole novel was a parody of travelogues, including this bit, as the "holes at the poles" theory was already becoming discredited by then.

* In the sci-fi novel ''Literature/PrisonersOfPower'' by [[Creator/StrugatskyBrothers A. and B. Strugatsky]], the inhabitants of the planet Saraksh are convinced that they live on the inner surface of a spherical cavity, due to the unusual optical properties of its atmosphere (the horizon looks like it is '''above''' the observer).
* Creator/RichardSharpeShaver's scifi stories and related [[ConspiracyTheorist conspiracy theories]] revolved around a HollowEarth ruled by a race of malicious technocratic [[{{Morlocks}} Morlock]]-like creatures called "deros", who toy with humanity [[ForTheEvulz for their own cruel amusement]].
* Also by Creator/StephenBaxter, a short story called "[[http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf907 Shell]]" is set on a planet that has been ''folded in on itself'' in the fourth dimension. There is no sky -- people looking up see the other side of the planet curving over them, as if it's a shell. When one character uses a hot-air balloon to explore the other side, she witnesses the "shell" flatten out and then become curved normally, [[AlienGeometries while the land she just left curves into a shell over the sky]].

* In the semi-sequel to ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'', called ''Literature/TheTimeShips'' (by Creator/StephenBaxter), the time traveler returns to the future once again, but finds it changed. The Morlocks are now "good" in this future, and are also incredibly advanced, having engineered a [[DysonSphere hollow sphere]] around the Sun slightly inside Earth's orbit. Morlocks live on the outside of this hollow sphere in the dark, while the Eloi live on the sunlit inside of it.

* This is used in ''LightNovel/{{Maoyu}}''. The "no gravitational pull" aspect is got around by having the ''sun'' be a ''repulsing'' force instead, pushing things away from it toward the ground.

** ''Anime/DoraemonNobitasDiaryOfTheCreationOfTheWorld'' have Nobita creating a brand new world of his own using a Universe Creation Kit, but after realizing his world doesn't have mammals in it, only bugs, asks for Doraemon to speed up its evolution process. This leads to the creation of humans' ancestors, with bugs on the othe rhand being forced underground and creating their ''own'' civilization, a Hollow underground city populated by sentient, human-sized insects.

* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'': The plane of Mirrodin is hollow, and mostly metallic. There are five channels, called lacunae, through which one of the planes five suns emerged from the mana core. There are five lacunae, one for each color of mana, and one for each of Mirrodin's five suns.

* The ''Descent'' DLC for ''VideoGame/DragonAgeInquisition'' reveals that Thedas has at the very least shades of this. The DLC's plot leads the Inquisitor and their party far, far below the Deep Roads, which are generally considered the deepest explored reaches of the setting - into a fantastic underground world of gigantic caverns full of bioluminescent life and even a lost ocean. It's also home to [[spoiler:an entire lost clan of creepy dwarves wielding insanely advanced technology, and the Titans, absolutely humungous lifeforms whose mere movements trigger earthquakes on the surface, and whose blood ''is'' lyrium, the substance all surface magic is dependent on. The Inquisitor only explores the uppermost reaches of a Titan, implying the sub-Deep Roads cave systems descend even deeper into the planet, possible to the very core.]]

* In Franchise/TheDCU, [[ComicBook/TheWarlord Skartaris]] was originally inside a Hollow Earth. A later {{Retcon}} changed it into an alternate dimension that was accessed through gates at the Earth's poles.

** The boss battle against [[EverythingsEvenWorseWithSharks Kingfin]] takes place inside a hollow planet, and the final battle against [[BigBad Bowser]] is inside a hollow ''Sun''.

* In the semi-sequel to ''Literature/TheTimeMachine'', called ''The Time Ships'' (by Creator/StephenBaxter), the time traveler returns to the future once again, but finds it changed. The Morlocks are now "good" in this future, and are also incredibly advanced, having engineered a [[DysonSphere hollow sphere]] around the Sun slightly inside Earth's orbit. Morlocks live on the outside of this hollow sphere in the dark, while the Eloi live on the sunlit inside of it.

* In ''WesternAnimation/Atlantis:TheLostEmpire'' the location of Atlantis is in a humongous air pocket in a cave underneath the water, described as being like the grease trap of a sink.

* In ''WesternAnimation/Atlantis: The Lost Empire'' the location of Atlantis is in a humongous air pocket in a cave underneath the water, described as being like the grease trap of a sink.