King Solomon's Mines

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What Hacker News says

• hc-taway · Mar 7, 2021 · Recommends

  …outside the book you're trying to read. So, I'd say entry-level depends on the kind of classic, and where you're coming from. Adventure-classic? For a native English speaker? Easy recommendation for King Solomon's Mines. It's great, it's pulpy, it's not terribly long, it's... weirdly modern in some ways? The language isn't old enough to be hard to read. Delightful, even in 2021. Adventure-classic + literature? The Odyssey.…

  on “Why Read Classic Books?” ↗
• karatestomp · May 12, 2020 · Recommends

  …genuinely excited and gripped by something like Moby Dick. I guess if I had any advice to offer to someone wanting to achieve that (if it's an achievement) it'd be to try older popular literature (try King Solomon's Mines, it's amazing, then work your way to even older stuff) to get used to older English (nb not Old English, which is another thing entirely and you're not likely to encounter much of it in anything but an…

  on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?” ↗
• phantasmish · Dec 11, 2025 · Recommends

  Try The Four Feathers by AEW Mason, if you haven’t. There are also two or three film adaptations, can be fun to see where and how each deviated from the book. And maybe King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard. More British old-timey adventuring, though without so many ships. If you want an antihero-rake and a tale told tongue firmly in cheek, see if the Flashman novels by Fraser are to…

  on “If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?” ↗
• kombookcha · Jun 25, 2026 · Recommends

  …differently to all of these very adult concerns. One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about…

  on “Dostoyevsky Isn't Difficult” ↗
• hc-taway · Mar 9, 2021 · Mentions

  King Solomon's Mines would count as fantasy-adventure, for its time period. It gets listed among influences on or precursors to 20th-century fantasy literature pretty often. I think it's 200ish pages, maybe 250. It's closer…

  on “Why Read Classic Books?” ↗
• ChrisMarshallNY · Nov 10, 2022 · Mentions

  …also been a huge motivator. It’s kind of like, in the Nineteenth Century, large parts of the world were still unexplored, so authors like H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle, could write books like King Solomon’s Mines, or The Lost World, and people could sort of believe “it could happen.” These days, we know our world much better. We can call up satellite views of Base Camp, on Mt. Everest. But we are now looking…

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• fractallyte · Apr 4, 2025 · Mentions

  > I don’t know…the actual inspirations for Indiana Jones, like Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's novels, "King Solomon's Mines", and the real life Roy Chapman Andrews, who led expeditions to Mongolia and China in the 1920s and wore a fedora. The actual inspiration for Indy was protagonist Harry Steele from the movie The Secret…

  on “An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip” ↗
• ben7799 · Aug 12, 2021 · Mentions

  I struggled with whether or not to include that one.. haven't actually read it and wasn't sure. The whole genre is "Lost World" and goes all the way back to King Solomon's Mines in the 1800s.

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• topranks · May 2, 2023 · Mentions

  It’s also used in King Solomon’s Mines: https://www.coursehero.com/lit/King-Solomons-Mines/motifs/

  on “Anthropologist pair solve the mystery of Mayan 819-day count” ↗
• deltarholamda · Jan 22, 2026 · Mentions

  …has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer. On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.

  on “Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"” ↗
• HuShifang · Feb 18, 2023 · Critical

  …likes it or not), the fact remains that most art is timeful, not timeless -- even works that "work" very well in their own time are usually consigned to obscurity once the world moves on. I tried to read "King Solomon's Mines" a couple months ago, and it was truly unreadable to me -- it relied upon cultural assumptions that are just utterly alien to me, and I couldn't enjoy it. And that's okay. I don't want to read a version…

  on “Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books” ↗
• 5040 · Jun 4, 2024 · Mentions

  …all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants.…

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• red_admiral · Jun 2, 2025 · Mentions

  From King Solomon's Mines, there's a line from the indigenous "bad witch" when she's trapped the protagonists in the jewel hoard cave - something like "What will white man to with the jewels now? Eat them, perhaps?"

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