The Lost World

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Book Description

It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end -- the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public.

There are rumors that something has survived....

Amazon.com

Written in the wake of Jurassic Park's phenomenal box-office success, The Lost World seems as much a guidebook for Hollywood types hard at work on the franchise's followup as it is a legitimate sci-fi thriller. Which begs the inevitable questions: Is the plot a rehash of the first book? Sure it is, with the action unfolding on yet another secluded island, the mysterious "Site B." Is the cast of characters basically the same? Absolutely, from a freshly minted pair of cute, compu-savvy kids right down to the neatly exhumed chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (who was presumed dead at the close of JP). But is it fun to read? You betcha. Hollywood (and Michael Crichton) keeps telling us the same old stories for a very good reason: we like them. And the pulp SF formula Crichton has mastered with Jurassic Park and The Lost World is no exception.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Paul Hughes

From Publishers Weekly

One fact about this sequel to Jurassic Park stands out above all: it follows a book that, with spinoffs, including the movie, proved to be the most profitable literary venture ever. So where does the author of a near billion-dollar novel sit? Squarely on the shoulders of his own past work?and Arthur Conan Doyle's. Crichton has borrowed from Conan Doyle before?Rising Sun was Holmes and Watson in Japan?but never so brazenly. The title itself here, the same as that of Conan Doyle's yarn about an equatorial plateau rife with dinos, acknowledges the debt. More enervating are Crichton's self-borrowings: the plot line of this novel reads like an outtake from JP. Instead of bringing his dinos to a city, for instance, Crichton keeps them in the Costa Rican jungle, on an offshore island that was the secret breeding ground for the beasts. Only chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, among the earlier principals, returns to explore this Lost World, six years after the events of JP; but once again, there's a dynamic paleontologist, a pretty female scientist and two cute kids, boy and girl?the latter even saves the day through clever hacking, just as in JP. Despite stiff prose and brittle characters, Chrichton can still conjure unparalleled dino terror, although the wonder is gone and the attacks are predictable, the pacing perfunctory. But his heart now seems to be not so much in the storytelling as in pedagogy: from start to finish, the novel aims to illustrate Crichton's ideas about extinction?basically, that it occurs because of behavioral rather than environmental changes?and reads like a scientific fable, with pages of theory balancing the hectic action. As science writing, it's a lucid, provocative undertaking; but as an adventure and original entertainment, even though it will sell through the roof, it seems that Crichton has laid a big dinosaur egg. 2,000,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB main selection.

From Booklist

Every Cretaceous critter in John Hammond's bioengineered dinosaur preserve was destroyed after the events of Jurassic Park. Yet five years later, carcasses of recently dead, supposedly extinct saurians are washing ashore on nearby islands. Time for intrepid scientists to discover and observe again. Onboard this time are the chaos and complexity theorist who almost died in Hammond's folly, a stuck-up rich guy paleontologist, an Amazon of a large-animal ethologist, a regular-guy engineering genius and his assistant, and two computer whiz kids who stow away to join the adults. And, of course, there are venal villains (three) trying to get to the salable goods first (guess what their fate is). Crichton adroitly combines popular scientific colloquy and ripping good, blood-and-guts (literally) action once again. If it all seems rather predictable, remember that the pleasures of familiarity and referentiality rank high among the rewards of popular fiction. Here such pleasures begin with the title, plundered directly from the granddaddy of the modern-day dinosaur romance, Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World (1912).

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Ray Olson

From Library Journal

abridgment of Crichton's latest novel, a sequel of sorts to the best-selling Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990). Ian Malcolm, who supposedly died at the end of Jurassic Park, nonetheless returns to the islands off Costa Rica with a new crew to search for lost worlds of dinosaurs and investigate several theories of extinction. Unfortunately, The Lost World comes up short compared to the intrigue that the extraction, repair, and replication of dinosaur DNA generated for readers and listeners in Jurassic Park. Instead, The Lost World consists mostly of more dinosaurs that chase and sometimes capture Malcolm's cohorts or members of a rival gang led by an unscrupulous genetic engineer, Lew Dodgson. Dodgson would love to steal a few dinosaur eggs as part of a scheme to hatch the perfect laboratory animal ("If they're extinct, then they can't have any rights," Dodgson observes). Recommended.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., Ohio

About Author

Michael Crichton was born in Chicago and was graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University. At twenty-three, Crichton was a visiting lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University, England. Upon his return to the States, Crichton began training as a doctor, and was graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1969. He paid his way through medical school by writing pseudonymous thrillers, one of which (A Case of Need, 1968) won an Edgar Award. By the time he graduated, Crichton had already written a bestseller (The Andromeda Strain, 1969) and sold it to Hollywood. He then pursued postgraduate studies at the Salk Institute in California before taking up writing full time.

Crichton has written ten novels — The Andromeda Strain, 1969; The Terminal Man, 1972; The Great Train Robbery, 1975; Eaters of the Dead, 1976; Congo, 1980; Sphere, 1987; Jurassic Park, 1990; Rising Sun, 1992; Disclosure, 1994; and The Lost World, 1995 — each of which displays an intimate knowledge of a different, specialist subject, among them primatology, neurobiology, biophysics, international economics, Nordic history and genetics. He has directed six movies, including Westworld, Coma, and The Great Train Robbery, and is the creator of the hit television series ER (which won eight emmys in 1995). He is a computer expert who wrote one of the first books about information technology (Electronic Life, 1983); he has run a software company; he has designed a computer game called Amazon; is a committed collector of modern art and the author of a learned study on Jasper Johns (Jasper Johns, 1977). His other works of nonfiction include Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, 1970, and Travels, 1988. Crichton's novels have been translated into twenty-four languages; eight of his novels have been made into films, including Jurassic Park, one of the most successful films in motion picture history.

Michael Crichton is married and lives in Los Angeles.

Book Dimension :

length: (cm)17.2 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)10.7

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