Audiobooks by Louis Holberg

Niels Klim's Underground Travels

Niels Klim's Journey Under The Ground. By Louis Holberg, 1741. Tr. John Gierlow. 1845. Being A Narrative Of His Wonderful Descent To The Subterranean Lands; Together With An Account Of The Sensible Animals And Trees Inhabiting The Planet Nazar And The Firmament  From the wiki: Niels Klim's Underground Travels, originally published in Latin as Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741), is a satirical science-fiction/fantasy novel written by the Norwegian-Danish author Ludvig Holberg. His only novel, it describes a utopian society from an outsider's point of view, and often pokes fun at diverse cultural and social topics such as morality, science, sexual equality, religion, governments, and philosophy.

Louis Holberg (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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Gazing at the Moon: 1500 years of lunar exploration and encounters

Collected here are six tales that span nearly two thousand years, from a Roman citizen writing a satire of the ‘historical’ literature of his time in 182 AD to Edgar Allan Poe exploring the idea of a scientific ascent to the moon in 1835. Humanity changed vastly across that time, and yet the moon never lost its allure, its promise of mystery and magic. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear that the moon’s surface was barren, and a wave of moon-based stories inaugurated the expansion into space of fiction. Before we breached the atmosphere and sent men to our planet’s satellite, humanity spent countless millennia gazing up at the moon and wondering what might be there, telling stories by firelight of the mystery and magic of our constant and changing night-time companion.

Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Godwin, Louis Holberg, Lucian Of Samosata (Author), Charles Featherstone (Narrator)

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Proto Sci Fi 182-1741AD: The very first speculative fiction tales, translated from the Latin, Dutch

This volume includes works that we would now recognize as science fantasy, with tropes such as exploring civilizations on the moon and strange devices with magical powers. It includes:  A True Story, Lucian of Samosata, c. 182. Written partly as a response to the inventions in other ‘histories’ of the Roman era, which were often as much fantasy and rumor as fact, this story is the earliest known work to include space travel, aliens, liquid air, robots, interplanetary warfare, and worlds with different rules of physics.  The Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter, Ozaki, c.939. From the oldest extant Japanese folk narrative, this work is also known and in film as “The Tale of Princess Kaguya’. In today’s terms, it is the first work of speculative fiction, concerned with encounters with beings of impossible power, and a princess whose home and people are on the Moon. Somnium, Johannes Kepler, 1609. A novel written by the astronomer whose name is still known today, described by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov as one of the first works of science fiction. Describes a culture and civilization on the Moon.  The Man In The Moone, Francis Godwin, 1638. Drawing on contemporary theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Gilbert, the inhabitants of the Moon in this story are a tall Christian people encountered by a roguish hero who must learn of their lands, and gains items that allow the control of light, heat, and gravity. Described by Edgar Allen Poe as “a singular and somewhat ingenious little book”, it was a direct influence on Jules Verne and HG Wells. Niels Klim's Journey Under The Ground, Louis Holberg, 1741. Originally written in Latin, this is the first book in the “hollow Earth” genre. It concerns a traveler who falls into orbit around the inner sun, and must learn the ways of a strange six-armed people that populate the inner surface of the Earth.

Francis Godwin, Iwaya Sazanami, Johannes Kepler, Louis Holberg, Lucian Of Samoa (Author), Chirag Patel (Narrator)

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