When I was a child, my parents took me to see a film called The Land That Time Forgot. It was one of the most thrilling things I’d ever seen and I used to enact scenes from it by myself for years afterwards. Inspired by an Edgar Rice Burroughs story, and adapted for the screen by one James Cawthorn (a pseudonym for the fantasy author Michael Moorcock), it showed a group of World War 2 survivors from a British ship and the captain and crew of a German U-Boat submarine wandering way off course and winding up on a long forgotten island where dinosaurs and cavemen and other creatures from different eras of evolution (dinosaurs and humanoid creatures never lived in the same period in our world!) have survived.
A series of exciting adventures follow, but more than anything else what remained with me was the awesome possibility that there might be obscure, hidden corners of our planet where prehistoric beasts and ancient civilisations still remained. It was a way to find the exotic and unknown still alive in a world increasingly mundane and modernised.
As the years went by, I discovered that the Lost World was a popular theme in a lot of adventure fiction, and I devoured a number of Lost World novels and their film versions. One of the most enduring of these is King Solomon’s Mines (1885) by H Rider Haggard, one of the foremost adventure writers of the Victorian era. In it, a group of explorers led by renowned adventurer Allan Quartermain travel to a previously unexplored part of Africa where they find the mines that are supposedly the source of the mythical King Solomon’s amazing wealth. The mines are protected by a lost African tribe, and there are various perils to face. I even had to study this novel in college, which took a lot of the fun out of it at the time!
The success of this novel inspired Haggard and others to write similar tales. Arthur Conan Doyle – yes, the same man who created Sherlock Holmes – wrote The Lost World (1912), in which the eccentric, Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in South America where dinosaurs still live!
More dinosaurs can be found in the 1918 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which inspired the movie that thrilled me so much as a boy.
These novels became popular at a time when the British Empire was at its peak, and people have pointed out that a part of their popularity was how they reflected the grand, adventurous side of empire building. But the Lost World genre also intersects with another genre we have looked at in this column – the Utopian, with stories like Samuel Butler’s Erehwon (1872) in which the lost world is a sort of perfect society that is set up as a satire of and an example for our own society. The Lost World genre wasn’t confined to the English speaking world either, with works such as Jules Verne’s A Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1864) – Voyage au Centre de la Terre in French – emerging from other parts of Europe.
Two major works of horror fiction, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838) by Edgar Alan Poe and At The Mountains Of Madness (1931) — a weird tale of lost caverns and mysterious alien civilisations in Antarctica — by H P Lovecraft can be considered part of the genre.
As more and more parts of the world came to be explored and mapped, Lost Worlds were moved off-world. Edgar Rice Burroughs himself wrote stories like this – the Martian adventures of John Carter that we’ve looked at recently. By and large though, the heyday of the Lost World story faded as the age of European imperialism came to a close.
Still, the idea is a fertile one and surfaces from time to time. Michael Crichton used the phrase ‘Lost World’ as the title of one of the sequels to Jurassic Park, but his 1980 novel Congo is actually a Lost World story, with a quest for King Solomon’s mines and the discovery of the remains of a lost city called Zinj in Africa.
And as long as there is a single inch of space on the surface of the planet, or below it (many Lost World stories are set within a hollow earth), there will always be that little room for doubt which makes it possible to believe in, and long for lost worlds to be found.