The Hollow Earth — Rudy Rucker

"The Hollow Earth" is a classic work of American steampunk. In 1836, our seventeen-year-old narrator Mason Reynolds leaves his father's Virginia farm with the black Otha. He befriends the dissolute Edgar Allan Poe, and they fall through a thousand-mile-deep hole in the ice of Antarctica. Within the Hollow Earth, Mason woos and wins Seela, who lives upon a giant flower. At the earth's the core he finds a sky-surfing tribe known as the black gods -- and a cluster of giant, god-like sea cucumbers known as woomo. Mason, Seela, and Poe make their way out through the crust and back to Earth. But due to their time in the strong light of the woomo, their skins are black. And then they encounter Poe's double...