In The Lost World, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger--a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction--Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, "th...

In The Lost World, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger--a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction--Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, "the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended" and numerous prehistoric creatures and ape-men have survived. "Just as Sherlock Holmes set the standard--and in some sense established the formula--for the detective story . . ., so too hasThe Lost Worldset the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories . . .," Michael Crichton writes in his Introduction. "The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined inThe Lost World have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day."