The Lost World (Crichton novel)

The Lost World

First edition cover
Author	Michael Crichton
Cover artist	Chip Kidd
Language	English
Genre	Sci-fi action
Publisher	Knopf
Publication date	September 20, 1995
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	393
ISBN	0-679-41946-2
OCLC	32924490
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3553.R48 L67 1995b
Preceded by	Jurassic Park

The Lost World is a 1995 science fiction action novel written by Michael Crichton, and the sequel to his 1990 novel Jurassic Park. It is Crichton's tenth novel under his own name, his twentieth overall, and the only sequel he ever wrote. It was published by Knopf. A paperback edition followed in 1996. A year later, both novels were re-published as a single book titled Michael Crichton's Jurassic World, which is unrelated to the 2015 film of the same name.

Plot

In 1993 Chaos theorist and mathematician Ian Malcolm is revealed to have survived the disaster at Jurassic Park four years before. While giving a lecture on the nature of extinction Malcolm is challenged by a young and pompous paleontologist named Richard Levine.

Levine persuades Malcolm to help him search for a "lost world" of dinosaurs, in order to learn the true nature of extinction. They eventually learn of a secret secondary ‘Site B' location InGen had where they made the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park.

Eighteen months later, Levine spontaneously leaves for an island, which he believes is Site B, without informing Malcolm. He arrives with a Costa Rican guide, but the two are attacked by an unseen animal and his guide is killed. Meanwhile Ed James, a spy for hire, meets up with corporate research thief Lewis Dodgson. Dodgson urges him to find more data on Levine and Malcolm.

Two high-school children, R. B. 'Arby' Benton and Kelly Curtis, who work for Levine, visit Jack 'Doc' Thorne, a retired university professor. The kids express their concern over Levine’s disappearance. They discover Levine had gone to Isla Sorna, one the five islands in the Las Cinco Muertes island chain. Unbeknownst to them they are being spied on by James. Thorne and Malcolm are joined by Eddie Carr, Thorne's assistant, and the men resolve to leave immediately to rescue Levine. By phone Thorne asks Malcolm’s friend & colleague Dr. Sarah Harding to join them, as she’s a behavioral biologist who specializes in studying large predators.

The group arrives on the island with a conjoined pair of specially equipped RV trailers, built by Thorne, that serve as a mobile laboratory; along with weapons, a modified electric Ford Explorer, & an electric motorcycle. Unbeknownst to the men, Arby and Kelly stowed away in one of the trailers. Inside Arby discovers a computer and accidentally logs into the InGen Site B wireless network, and finds, to his disbelief live camera footage of living non-avian dinosaurs. The group discovers Levine, who is ungrateful for being rescued. The men then deploy a high-hide, set up with scaffolding, next to a large clearing to observe the dinosaurs.

Lewis Dodgson, his assistant Howard King, and George Baselton learn from James of Levine's expedition and travel to Isla Sorna. They plan to steal dinosaur eggs for Biosyn, the company responsible for the sabotage of Jurassic Park. Before departing Dodgson’s group encounters Harding and offer to give her a ride to Isla Sorna. However, Dodgson attempts to kill her by shoving her off the boat, but she survives. She eventually meets up with Malcolm's group on the island.

Dodgson's group begins stealing eggs starting with a heard of Maiasaura, using an ultrasonic emitter to ward away the animals. Next they attempt to raid the Tyrannosaurus nest, breaking one infant’s leg in the process. Their emitter fails and Baselton is killed. Dodgson and King become separated while fleeing the Tyrannosaurs and are both knocked unconscious. King awakens and tries to make it back to their chartered boat alone.

Later, while inspecting the Rex nest, Malcolm finds the injured infant and instructs Eddie to kill it. However, Eddie refuses, and Malcolm & Harding begrudgingly agree to set its bone while the rest of the group goes to the high-hide. From the High-Hide the group witness the Velociraptors attacking & killing King. While Malcolm and Harding finish setting the T. rex's leg, the parents come looking for their infant and attack the trailers, pushing one over a cliff and badly injuring Malcolm.

Thorne leaves to rescue Malcolm and Harding. Meanwhile, the raptors attack the High-Hide and kill Eddie. Arby falls down but saves himself by jumping into a cylindrical survival cage. The raptors roll the cage away, and one raptor runs off with the key stuck in its mouth. Thorne and Sarah come back to the hide, while Malcolm stays in the remaining trailer drugged with Morphine. Using the electric motorcycle Harding and Kelly chase the raptor with the key through the fields, eventually shooting it and recovering the key.

Meanwhile, Thorne and Levine use the Jeep to track the other raptors to their nest. They soon reach the nest and are attacked by the raptors. Thorne grabs Arby's cage and they flee. They make it the worker village and the raptors give up their pursuit. Kelly & Harding with the motorcycle go to fetch Malcolm. At the trailer the raptors return, but Harding, Kelly, and Malcolm escape using gas grenades.

The group, reunited, takes refuge in the general store of the old InGen worker village. They formulate a plan to reach the landing site where the helicopter is set to meet them in the morning. Thorne ventures out into the village in search of fuel but stumbles across a pair of Carnotaurus whom he notices are capable of changing color, like chameleons. Levine & Harding rescue Thorne by disorienting the two Carnotaurus by flashing lights in their eyes.

In the morning a herd of Maiasaurs destroy the jeep looking for their stolen eggs. Harding resolves to retrieve the Explorer as there’s less than an hour till their pickup helicopter arrives and leaves without them. Upon finding the car, she encounters Dodgson attempting to steal it for himself. An adult T. rex approaches, and they both hide under the car. Harding pushes Dodgson back out, whereupon the T. rex picks him up, carries him to its nest, and feeds him to its offspring. Harding sets out to reach the helicopter before it can take off, but she’s too late. Meanwhile, Kelly logs onto the InGen network to find another way off the island. The raptors return and try to break into the general store. Eventually, Kelly discovers a boat dock and a maintenance tunnel. The group, along with Harding, reach the boat just as the raptors enter the general store.

As the group sails away, Thorne reflects on the nature of reality. Levine is optimistic further study of the island will reveal the nature of extinction, seeing it as a pristine "lost world". Malcolm and Harding though inform him of a discovery they made: During Site B's active years, InGen accidentally fed the young dinosaurs sheep extract infected with prions. All the dinosaurs are infected with a disease that shortens their lifespans; allowing for the unnatural abundance of predators on the island.

Background

Author Michael Crichton in 2002

After the publication of Jurassic Park in 1990, author Michael Crichton was pressured by fans to write a sequel. Following the success of Jurassic Park's film adaptation in 1993, director Steven Spielberg became interested in making a sequel film. Crichton had never written a sequel to any of his novels before and was initially hesitant to do so. He said a sequel was "a very difficult structural problem because it has to be the same but different; if it's really the same, then it's the same—and if it's really different, then it's not a sequel. So it's in some funny intermediate territory". In March 1994, Crichton said there would probably be a sequel novel as well as a film adaptation, stating that he had an idea for the novel's story.

Although the character of Ian Malcolm had originally died in the first novel, Crichton chose to bring him back for the sequel: "Malcolm came back because I needed him. I could do without the others, but not him because he is the 'ironic commentator' on the action. He keeps telling us why it will go bad. And I had to have him back again". Bringing a dead character back was an idea Crichton got from Arthur Conan Doyle, who did the same with his character Sherlock Holmes. Malcolm was also considered a favorite character among readers of the first novel and people who watched its film adaptation. An early draft of the novel included a lengthy tirade by Malcolm regarding God and evolution, but Crichton removed it "because it just didn't seem to fit". One early draft included a substantially different ending to the published version. It featured a character named Elliot Wu, the brother of Henry Wu, Jurassic Park's chief geneticist in the first novel. Elliot himself originally served as a scientist before taking on the role of caretaker for Isla Sorna in the aftermath of the disaster at Jurassic Park and the dissolution of employer InGen.

In March 1995, Crichton announced that he was nearly finished writing the novel, with a scheduled release for later that year. At the time, Crichton declined to specify the novel's title or plot. Crichton later stated that the novel's title is an homage to Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name, as well as the 1925 film adaptation of Doyle's novel, also titled The Lost World. Crichton's novel also shares some story similarities with Doyle's novel, as they both involve an expedition to an isolated Central American location where dinosaurs roam. However, in Crichton's novel, the dinosaurs were recreated by genetic engineering, rather than surviving from antiquity. The Lost World was the only book sequel Crichton ever wrote.

The Lost World was released on September 20, 1995. It was published by Knopf, with an initial printing of 1.7 million copies, a high number reflective of Crichton's popularity at the time. Crichton went on a press tour to promote the novel's release. In 2021, the Folio Society published a special edition of the novel with illustrations of select scenes.

Reception

The Lost World spent eight weeks as number one on the New York Times Best Seller List, from October 8, 1995, to November 26, 1995, and it remained on the list as late as March 1996.

People wrote: "Action-packed and camera-ready, The Lost World is to its predecessor what microwave dinners are to home-cooked meals: hardly authentic, but in a pinch fully satisfying". The magazine wrote that "the odd reappearance of Ian Malcolm, when other key characters from the original have been dropped, makes one wonder if only Jeff Goldblum was available to appear in the movie sequel. But even at his most calculating—incorporating two urchins, crafting a feminist hero—the author pleases. Characteristically clever, fast-paced and engaging, Michael Crichton's latest work accomplishes what he set out to do: offer the still-harrowing thrills of a by-now-familiar ride".

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times gave the novel a negative review and called it a "tired rehash" of Jurassic Park. She wrote that the novel lacked the "surprise or ingenuity" of its predecessor, calling it "so predictable and unimaginative that it seems to have been intended to save special-effects technicians the hassle of doing new work on the movie sequel". Kakutani said the novel represented "a new low" in Crichton's "attention to character", and criticized the character of Malcolm in particular: "Except for complaining about the injuries he suffered in 'Jurassic Park', Malcolm makes virtually no reference to his previous visit to dino-land [...]. Instead of even making a half-hearted attempt to turn Malcolm into a reasonable facsimile of a person, Mr. Crichton cynically uses him as a mouthpiece for all sorts of portentous techno-babble about chaos theory, extinction theories and mankind's destructive nature. As for the other characters, they are each given handy labels for easy identification".

Tom De Haven of Entertainment Weekly gave the novel a "B−" rating and wrote that it "is like a videogame in prose—a few hundred frantic pages of run, hide, kill, and die. Over and over again". De Haven criticized the lack of characterization and wrote that Crichton was "clearly off his stride here, right from the start. Without any need to build scientific plausibility into the plot (he did that last time, beautifully), Crichton seems unengaged by his own material, distanced from it, and his cautionary lectures about extinction and natural selection seem halfhearted attempts to legitimize his return to familiar territory. But if there's a lack of freshness to the novel (even the title isn't new; it's borrowed from the granddaddy of all dinosaur tales, by Arthur Conan Doyle), it is still a very scary read".

De Haven felt that the novel's opening chapters were "rushed and contrived. Although it's perhaps a deliberate, affectionate nod to the old let's-get-going-so-we-can-get-to-the-good-parts kind of storytelling that was such a staple of 1950s monster movies, it's still cheesy. [...] No matter how feeble the premise, though, or how shallow the characterizations, I wouldn't dream of talking anybody out of reading the novel. For clarity, terror, and sheer grisliness, the action far surpasses anything in the original book; even better, the suspense is masterfully stretched out, then released all of a sudden—just when you least expect it". De Haven concluded that its predecessor "has earned a secure place for itself in the history of popular American literature. The Lost World, at best, will be a footnote. But still, it made my palms sweat".

Neal Karlen of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Crichton "has done the sequel step just right, keeping the tropes of the earlier novel familiar for the fans while changing the ideas and story line enough to keep even his severest and most envious critics turning the pages to find out what happens next". Karlen noted that, "Once again, the dinosaurs seem the real stars", while writing that the human characters "are introduced as if in shorthand screenplay form". Karlen especially praised the novel's raptors, calling them "seemingly meaner, more loathsome, and once again better developed than almost all of the book's human characters".

Frank McConnell of The Atlanta Journal was critical of Crichton's storytelling and compared the novel to a bowl of Cheerios cereal: "pure product, unsurprising and tasty, but not especially substantial."

Film adaptation

Main article: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a 1997 science fiction film and sequel to Jurassic Park, loosely based on Crichton's novel. The film, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, who also directed the first Jurassic film, was a commercial success, breaking many box-office records when released, but received mixed reviews. It has a number of plot differences from the novel and incorporates scenes from the first novel that were not previously filmed, including a scene with a young girl being attacked by small dinosaurs.

External links

• The Lost World official website Archived 2015-05-04 at the Wayback Machine