The Abyss of Wonders

Background

The novel concerns a group of people from the US, a young boy along with a Chinese man and an old Russian, who make a spiritual quest to a city of a lost race in the Gobi Desert that is technologically advanced through a combination of theosophy and superscience. It was not the first and only book published by Polaris Press; the press also released 'The Skylark of Space' by E. E. Smith. The 1953 edition included an introduction by P. Schuyler Miller.

Origins & Publication History

The Abyss of Wonders began its life not as a standalone volume but as a serialized story within the pages of Argosy magazine in 1915, a period when pulp periodicals served as the primary vehicle for speculative fiction. Nearly four decades later, in 1953, the work received its first book-length edition through Polaris Press, a small American publisher. This printing carried particular significance: it constituted the second and final title the press ever issued, making the novel a terminal artifact of that imprint's brief existence.

The stated edition size was 990 copies, though the book's own colophon records a figure of 1500, an inconsistency that has puzzled collectors. The volume also featured a prefatory introduction penned by P. Schuyler Miller, lending the slim publication a measure of critical framing. The author, Perley Poore Sheehan, was an American writer whose name has since faded from mainstream literary memory, leaving this Gobi Desert adventure as one of his most recognizable surviving works.

Narrative & Thematic Framework

At its core, the novel follows a small, eclectic party of American travelers—a young boy, a Chinese man, and an elderly Russian—who embark on what the text frames as a spiritual quest. Their destination is a hidden city nestled within the Gobi Desert, home to a vanished race whose civilization has achieved a remarkable level of technological sophistication.

What distinguishes this lost society from more conventional science-fiction depictions is the mechanism behind its advancement: rather than relying on purely empirical science, the inhabitants have fused theosophical principles with what the narrative terms superscience, creating a hybrid epistemology that drives their progress. This blending of mystical and rational worldviews places the story in a tradition of early twentieth-century speculative fiction that frequently treated spiritualism and technology as complementary rather than opposed forces. The ensemble cast, drawn from different national backgrounds, suggests an early attempt at multicultural representation within the adventure genre, even if the underlying power dynamics of the era inevitably shape how each character is portrayed.

Critical Reception & Assessment

The 1953 Polaris Press edition attracted a handful of reviews, none of which were particularly generous. Groff Conklin, writing about the book, characterized it as essentially a children's fairy tale rendered in what he called a kindergarten style that would grate on the sensibilities of contemporary adult readers. P. Schuyler Miller, despite having written the introduction himself, tempered his enthusiasm by suggesting the volume was a worthwhile acquisition for collectors while candidly warning that a casual reader seeking a compelling narrative would likely walk away unsatisfied.

Everett F. Bleiler, the prolific bibliographer of science fiction and fantasy, was even more dismissive, reducing the novel to a curiosity only in his assessments. He faulted the text for being curiously imprecise and wavery, noted its pervasive fairytale atmosphere, and judged the overall construction as weakly planned, riddled with elements that failed to satisfy. Taken together, these critical voices paint a picture of a work never seriously regarded as a literary achievement, surviving in the public consciousness primarily as a bibliographic oddity and a footnote in the history of early American speculative fiction.

Bibliographic Legacy & Scholarly Recognition

Despite the lukewarm critical reception, The Abyss of Wonders has secured a modest but persistent place in the reference literature of science fiction and fantasy. It appears in Donald H. Tuck's 1978 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, in John Clute and Peter Nicholls's 1995 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and in Jack L. Chalker and Mark Owings's 1998 bibliographic history of science-fantasy publishers.

Its inclusion in the latter work is particularly telling: the novel is discussed in the context of Polaris Press, the tiny imprint that produced only two books before ceasing operations, making this title a terminal artifact of that press's output. For scholars tracing the lineage of American speculative fiction from its pulp-magazine origins in the 1910s through its mid-century rediscovery, the work serves as a useful case study in how stories migrate between media—first as a magazine serial in Argosy, then as a limited-edition book decades later. Its rarity, combined with the discrepancy in stated print runs, has also made it a point of interest for collectors of small-press science fiction, ensuring that even a work dismissed by critics retains a tangible, physical presence in the field's institutional memory.