The Lost World

Long before Michael Crichton’s high-tech dinosaurs roamed the bestseller lists, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle envisioned an isolated land of prehistoric life that exists in the 20th century. In Conan Doyle’s Lost World (1912) young newspaper journalist Edward Malone is in search of an assignment involving “adventure and danger,” since his beloved Gladys has refused his marriage proposal on the grounds that he’s not “a man of great deeds and strange experiences.” Enter Professor Challenger, an impetuous man who claims to have spotted a pterodactyl deep in the Amazon jungle. When the professor offers to lead skeptics on an expedition to this “lost world,” Malone signs up for the trip of a lifetime. Infused with the same masterful dialogue, suspense, and characterizations as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, The Lost World is a spirited science fiction novel filled with dinosaurs and ape-men, and a story that’s obviously still firing imaginations today.