The Lost World
- Written By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost World
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The map ends. The past begins.
Edward Malone wants one thing: a story wild enough to impress the girl who insists she could never love an ordinary man. He finds it in Professor George Edward Challenger, a walrus-mustached bully of a scientist whom all of London dismisses as a fraud. Challenger claims to have found a plateau deep in the Amazon basin where prehistoric life never died out. Malone talks his way onto Challenger’s expedition alongside the icily skeptical Professor Summerless and the unflappable big-game hunter, Lord John Roxton
The four men reach the plateau by a route no one else could follow, and the bridge back to civilization collapses behind them. What they find is no rumor. Pterodactyls wheel above cliffs and iguanadons move through the high timber in herds, as something far more dangerous watches from the shadows. Marooned, hunted, and running low on cartridges, the party has to survive long enough to find a way out and prove what they have found.
Published in 1912, The Lost World gave adventure fiction one of its most durable blueprints: the hidden world, the impossible expedition, the scientist too stubborn to be doubted or deterred. Every secret jungle and lost continent that followed, both on the page and on the screen, owes something to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysterious plateau.
“There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.”
About the Author
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, where he trained as a physician. He wrote his first fiction between patients, and when a struggling ophthalmology practice in Southsea left him with long empty afternoons, he used them to write A Study in Scarlet, introducing Sherlock Holmes in 1887.
Holmes made Doyle the most famous writer in England, but he chafed against the character’s shadow. Professor Challenger, who first appeared in The Lost World, was Doyle’s answer: a loud, quarrelsome contrast to the detective’s cool restraint. Doyle drew on a lifelong fascination with natural science and exploration, and on the paleontological discoveries reshaping the public imagination in the years before the novel’s publication, to build a scientist as memorable in his way as Holmes.
Doyle died in 1930, but Challenger’s plateau outlived him. The novel launched the “lost world” as a genre unto itself, and its fingerprints run straight through to Jurassic Park nearly a century later.
