Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne (1864), and The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), initially seemed to be two versions of the same book. Verne apparently inspired Doyle (and others, including Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Lost World has a lot more overt action and adventure than Journey, which makes it quite different in the middle and end, but there are definitely some similarities between the two books in the beginning.
The setup for both is that a young man who wishes to gain the favor of a young woman goes with an irritable scientist on a quest to remote part of the world on the basis of a report that nobody believes except the irritable scientist.
Similarities with Journey to the Center of the Earth
In the case of Journey, the scientist is a German geologist (Professor Otto Lidenbrock) pursuing a mystery he discovered encoded in an old manuscript, the claim that the author descended to the center of the earth through the crater of a volcano in Iceland. The young man (Axel) is the nephew of the scientist, and is engaged to his god-daughter (Gräuben), who insists that he go on the journey even though he does not believe the journey can be successful and fears its dangers.
In the case of Lost World, the scientist is an English zoologist (Professor George Edward Challenger) who has returned from a trip to South America and published extravagant claims regarding the discovery of strange animals, which the scientific establishment has soundly rejected. The young man (Edward Malone) is an Irish journalist seeking to make his mark on the world after his marriage proposal (to Gladys) was rejected, as he had not demonstrated sufficient heroic manliness.
Both of scientists are made fun of by students; the geologist, in particular, for his stutter. The biologist has been known to commit acts of violence against prying journalists.
(Fictional characters representing gentlemen scientists are perhaps reflective of actual weird geniuses… My non-fiction reading at the moment is an award-winning book about autism, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, which highlights the many eccentricities of 18th-century scientist Henry Cavendish.)
Similarities with Michael Crichton’s Congo
Of course, Crichton *also* has a book called The Lost World, also about dinosaurs, which I read in 2010 (same year I read Congo and several other novels of his). But Journey and Lost World made me think of Congo.
Journey culminates in a kind of cataclysm. There are no suggestions that scientists will follow in the footsteps of the geologist to confirm their observations of an underground sea, clouds, electric light, and living prehistoric plants, animals, and humanoid creatures. This ending reminded me of the ending of the Michael Crichton book Congo (1980), which if I recall correctly, ends with the territory of the talking apes being destroyed, or at least rendered indefinitely inaccessible. Congo is much more recent than Journey or Lost World, but perhaps similar in form and content… Crichton’s science-fiction, like Journey and Lost World, is driven by the science, not the characters. The narrators of Journey and Lost World are everyman characters whose purpose is to bring the reader along and cause feelings of fear and wonder (while adroitly lampshading scientific impossibilities).
Wikipedia says “Crichton calls Congo a lost world novel in the tradition founded by Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, featuring the mines of that work’s title.” That was 1885, after Journey.
The “lost world” genre has more or less moved off into space, since there are few corners of the world that remain truly inaccessible.
Similarities with Pixar’s Up (2009)
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World seems like it could have been a source of inspiration of Pixar’s 2009 movie Up, which is a “lost world” tale involving animals on a plateau in South America. I’m not the only one to have this thought.
Okay, specifically, these plateaus, found mostly in Venezuela, are called tepuis. A documentary about tepuis caught the attention of Director Pete Docter. It sounds like Doyle wasn’t an inspiration as much as the geology itself.
When and Why I Read The Lost World
Similar to Journey to the Center of the Earth?
Genre: adventure
Date started / date finished: 16-Feb-25 to 22-Feb-25
Length: 137 pages
ISBN: B075M831DT
Originally published in: 1912/2017
Amazon link: The Lost World
