The Lost World & Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics)

While somewhat dated, this book is well written and exciting to read. As a matter of fact, part of the book's charm is its pre-Great War feel. If you like adventure stories, Arthur Conan Doyle, or big game hunters, then this book is for you!


The complete Professor Challenger, in all his glory.   June 3, 2004
 6 out of 7 found this review helpful

Besides his Sherlock Holmes stories and his historical romances, Arthur Conan Doyle sometimes turned his fertile imagination to producing science fiction, most of it featuring the titanic Professor George Edward Challenger. This excellent Wordsworth volume collects all five of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger adventures. And a very mixed bag they are - ranging from compelling adventure through intriguing pseudoscience to Spiritualist propaganda. I won't add anything to previous reviewers' praise for the justly famous "The Lost World", although I must say I reckon that Challenger's adventures among the dinosaurs of Maple White Land will still be read long after Michael Crichton's derivative works are all dust. (Anyway, I just can't forgive Crichton for using Doyle's title for the "Jurassic Park" sequel.) In "The Poison Belt", Challenger and co. hold ring-side seats for Armageddon, watching from inside an oxygen-tent as a change in the ether apparently poisons everybody else. (Doyle's vision of the poisoned world is worthy of H. G. Wells at his best.) Alas, "The Land of Mist" makes Challenger into a Spiritualist, and is very much from the Conan Doyle who believed in the Cottingley Fairies. Doyle lost his son and his brother in the Great War and these losses clearly affected his judgement. However, if you can get past "The Land of Mist", the two final stories are gems. In "The Disintegration Machine", Challenger jousts with a sinister inventor bent on world domination. Finally, in "When the World Screamed", Challenger shows an astonished world that the Earth is really a living thing, not unlike a giant sea-urchin. Doyle may not appear in many lists of great science-fiction writers, but the best Challenger stories are as entertaining as anything he wrote. (More of Doyle's science fiction and weird fiction can be found in the Wordsworth volume "Tales of Unease", which I also highly recommend.)


Old-fashioned dinosaurs.   May 15, 2004
 1 out of 13 found this review helpful

Click on the Amazon search engine for dinosaurs and half the books seem to be about Barney. Fittingly then, "The Lost World" is really a childrens book, the characters, if they can be called that, are stereotypes of the kind of heroes that populated popular fiction in 1912 when this book was written. Consequently, I think that Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" is more "adult" and also benefits from our increased understanding of prehistoric times.
Given that any book with dinosaurs in it is automatically worth one star, this is an enjoyable work, if not particularly well written. Naturally, the story is proposterous with the protagonists exploring a plateau deep in South America that is stuck in a prehistoric time warp. Notwithstanding the fact that they could have visited Portsmouth with much greater ease and still seen Ape-men, this is a fair story but, like H.G. Wells' "The war of the Worlds", subsequent films have often been superior to the book. This is particularly true when compared with the recent BBC production that improved on the story by making it a lot more menacing in tone and adding a female character to the expedition.
I would have liked to have read more interesting accounts of the dinosaurs encountered on this expedition, although it is curious to see how the perceptions of these fascinating creatures have changed with the advance of science. Certainly, this book recalls a time when I avidly collected tea cards that illustrated these reptiles as looking a million miles away from the multi-coloured, computer-generated images these days.
Younger readers may be disappointed to learn that none of the dinosaurs in this book are purple.


Classic pulp fiction   April 10, 2004
 2 out of 4 found this review helpful

This collection of the Professor Challenger stories is a worthwhile reminder that Conan Doyle had more up his sleeve than Sherlock Holmes. The style can be a bit Victorian, and the spiritualistic stuff sadly shows Doyle's desperate grief for the loss of his son, but these stories are for the most part excellent action adventures, and well repay reading. I'm just surprised that only the title story has made it to film, since the cast of characters(especially Challenger himself, and the acerbic Professor Summerlee) are made for cinema, and the plots could be blockbuster material.


Well, this is a mixed bag   November 6, 2003
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Three short novels (well, The Poison Belt is a novella at most) and two short stories of wildly varying quality (but consistently compelling readability: at its worst, this is still Doyle). First up, The Lost World: almost too well known to need a review, this is a thrilling adventure story to which I was first introduced as an infant and have reread several times since, and ensures Doyle's place in the pantheon of science fiction's pioneers (although it arguably owes more to Rider Haggard than to Verne and Wells). It is THE dinosaur story, and let nobody tell you otherwise.
After this rattling yarn comes The Poison Belt, frankly a rather bizarre offering, with very little incident - in filmability stakes, the very reverse of The Lost World; but a clever and well-constructed piece, nonetheless. Make sure you read The Lost World first, and know and love the characters before embarking on the second novel with them.
And then... well, the previous reviewers have already ripped The Land of Mist to shreds, and deservedly so. It begins by stating that the previous novels were fictional but their characters real - the point being that Doyle wishes to dissociate this defence of Spiritualism from his works of science fiction, with which it is in fact unworthy to be classed. Somehow Challenger the radical has become a closed-minded reactionary, representing just the sort of scientists he confounded before; and there are many other inconsistencies. Some are minor (a poison whose name Challenger forgot in The Poison Belt, and cried "Excellent!" on being reminded, now turns out to be connected to a dark secret in his past); others more serious (the Challenger who in The Poison Belt referred to "the Great Gardener" and the "uncertainty" of what happens after death has been transformed into a convinced atheist - although, of course, he becomes a Spiritualist in the end). Two chapters rise above, or at least out of, the mire of Spiritualist propaganda: the one which deals with an exorcism attended by Ed Malone and Lord John Roxton has some of the earlier novels' sense of excitement and adventure; and that dealing with the home life of the fraudulent medium Silas Linden seems to belong in another book altogether. It exists because Doyle trod in Dickens' footsteps as a social reformer, and, indeed, it evokes Dickens' work: but the horrific scenes of child abuse contained therein will turn some readers' stomachs.
From this unwholesome fare we turn to the short stories - light-hearted offerings in the vein of The Lost World, crammed with Doyle's (and Challenger's) trademarks of wit, humour and utterly preposterous science. For these alone the book is worth the cover price (so far as I am aware, they are not available elsewhere, unlike the novels).
It might be wise, unless early twentieth-century Spiritualism and the follies into which even intelligent men could be led by it are an especial study of yours, to skip The Land of Mist; but the rest of this volume would be an ornament to any library.