The Lost World (Crichton novel)

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In 1993 Chaos theorist and mathematician Ian Malcolm is revealed to have survived the disaster at Jurassic Park four years before. InGen subsequently paid for his extensive reconstructive surgeries, in exchange for his silence. In the years since InGen files for bankruptcy and the Costa Rican government bombs Isla Nublar to prevent the dinosaurs from escaping the island. While giving a lecture on the nature of extinction Malcolm is challenged by a young and pompous paleontologist named Richard Levine. Levine references possible dinosaur sightings in the jungles of Costa Rica and Malcolm cautiously dismisses him. Levine thereafter receives permission to briefly see a large rotting animal carcass washed onto the beach in Costa Rica. He secretly cuts off a piece of its flesh before the authorities burn it with flamethrowers. He’s later told there’s been an outbreak of disease, which the authorities suspect is linked to the unknown animals. 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, afraid the Costa Rican government will find and destroy the dinosaurs, Levine spontaneously leaves for an island, 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, corporate saboteur Ed James meets up with disgruntled Biosyn employee Lewis Dodgson, and biologist George Baselton, and discloses information on the survivors of the InGen Incident of 1989, but Dodgson urges him to find more data on Levine and Malcolm. Eventually, Malcolm learns Levine is missing.

Two high-school children, R. B. 'Arby' Benton and Kelly Curtis, who work for Levine, visit Jack 'Doc' Thorne, a retired university professor, at Thorne Field Systems, his private venture in Woodside, California. There, the kids express their concern over Levine mysteriously disappearing. Thorne had been building custom expedition equipment for Levine, paid for with money from Levine’s wealthy family. Thorne uses a satellite phone to contact Levine. They are able to speak with him briefly and Levine seems to be in danger. They go to Levine's apartment, where he had been secretly researching InGen. Malcolm joins them, and the group discovers Levine had gone to Isla Sorna, one the five islands in the Las Cinco Muertes island chain. Unbeknownst to the group they are being spied on by James. Thorne and Malcolm are joined by Eddie Carr, Thorne's assistant, on an expedition to rescue Levine. They take two trailers, one of which has a lab, and a modified electric Ford Explorer. By phone Thorne ask Malcolm’s friend & colleague Dr. Sarah Harding to join them, as she’s a behavioral biologist who specializes in studying large African predators. Sarah is in the field studying Hyenas when he calls and doesn’t make it clear if she’ll come.

The group arrives on the island with weapons and a conjoined pair of specially equipped RV trailers, built by Thorne, that serve as a mobile laboratory. They find and explore a geothermal powered complex of abandoned InGen buildings, including a worker village and a laboratory. Malcolm explains to Thorne and Eddie the motive behind the creation of InGen and Jurassic Park. They find old documents describing a strange disease. Meanwhile, Arby and Kelly stow away in one of the trailers. Arby discovers a computer, and logs into the InGen Site B computer network, and finds, to his disbelief live camera footage of living non-avian dinosaurs. Malcolm, Eddie and Thorne find that the power was on, even after more than five years because the island ran on geothermal power. They also find Levine, who is overjoyed at the trove of information he can glean from this "lost world" and is ungrateful for being rescued. Arby gains access to the old InGen LAN (local area network), allowing them to view the island by built-in cameras. They deploy a high-hide, set up with scaffolding, next to a large clearing to observe the dinosaurs, where Levine and Malcolm share their hypotheses about the animals.

Lewis Dodgson, his assistant Howard King, and George Baselton learn from James of Levine's expedition and travel to Isla Sorna. This second group plans 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, just as they approach the island Harding lets it slip she didn’t tell the others she was coming, 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 due to his misconception about the Tyrannosaurus' vision. Meanwhile Dodgson and King become separated after being attacked by the tyrannosaurs and are both knocked unconscious.

Later, while inspecting the nest, Malcolm finds the injured infant. He and Sarah instruct Eddie to kill it because it has no chance of surviving. However, Eddie refuses to shoot the animal, brings it to the trailer instead. When the group discovers this, Malcolm and Harding begrudgingly agree to set a cast around its leg while the rest of the group goes to the high-hide. King awakens and tries to make it back to the chartered boat alone. However, a herd of Pachycephalosaurus urges him to abandon Dodgson’s jeep, and reach the boat on foot. He eventually reaches the clearing. Meanwhile, Levine, Eddie and the kids witness a pack of Velociraptors attack a herd of Triceratops unsuccessfully. As night approaches, the same Velociraptors emerge from the jungle and kill King as he tries to escape. As Malcolm and Harding finish setting the T. rex's leg, the parents come looking for their infant and attack the trailers, pushing one of them over a cliff and badly injuring Malcolm.

Thorne takes the Explorer to rescue Malcolm and Harding. However, the Explorer shorts out. Thorne is able to find the gas-powered Jeep abandoned by King. As Thorne approaches the cliff, his lights scare away the two tyrannosaurs, who run into the forest with their chick. Thorne helps Sarah and Malcolm climb a rope to safety. Meanwhile, the raptors attack the high hide and kill Eddie. Kelly and Arby try to escape to the roof of the high-hide but Arby falls down to the ground. He saves himself by jumping into a cylindrical survival cage. The raptors roll the cage away, and one raptor has the key in its mouth. Thorne and Sarah come back to the hide, while Malcolm stays in the trailer drugged with Morphine. Sarah and Kelly chase the raptor with the key on a motorcycle 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. On their way, they see dozens of huge skeletons of Apatosaurus, which puzzles Levine. They soon reach the nest and are attacked by raptors. Thorne grabs Arby's cage and escapes with Levine. The raptors relentlessly pursue the Jeep, before they fall of a cliff. Levine narrowly escapes a raptor, as it is shot by Sarah. Levine and Thorne make it the worker village, and the raptors finally stop their pursuit, while Kelly and Sarah go to bring back Malcolm. At the trailer, the raptors come back. However, 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 to search for fuel but is unable to find any. Instead he encounters a pair of Carnotaurus whom he notices are capable of changing color, like chameleons. Levine too notices the strange Dinosaurs and notifies Harding. They formulate a plan and rescue Thorne by disorienting the two Carnotaurus by flashing lights very quickly.

In the morning a herd of Maiasaurs destroy the jeep looking for their stolen eggs. Thorne realizes Eddie installed their Explorer with breakers to reset it in the event it shorted out. 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. Kelly logs onto the InGen computer network. Meanwhile, Levine starts panicking, saying that the raptors will return at sunrise. The raptors do come back and try to break into the general store. Eventually, Kelly discovers a boat docked on the island and finds a maintenance tunnel, allowing the group to reach the boat just as the raptors break into the general store.

As the group sails away, Thorne reflects on what’s real in the world. Levine is optimistic about further studying the island, to learn the truth about extinction. He states his belief that it is truly a “lost world”. Malcolm and Harding challenge his assertion. They inform him of what they discovered in the laboratory: during Site B's active years, InGen accidentally fed the young carnivorous dinosaurs sheep extract infected with prions, which cause a disease that infects their brains and shortens the dinosaurs' lifespans. Although the scientists contained the disease, it began to spread again after they abandoned the island, preventing the dinosaurs from reaching maturity and allowing for an over abundance of predators.

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

After the publication of Jurassic Park in 1990, author Michael Crichton was pressured by fans to write a sequel.^[4][5] 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".^[4] 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.^[6]

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.^[4] 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".^[4] 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.^[7]

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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[4]

The Lost World was released on September 20, 1995.^[11][12] 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.^[13] In 2021, the Folio Society published a special edition of the novel with illustrations of select scenes.^[14]

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The Lost World spent eight weeks as number one on the New York Times Best Seller List,^[4] from October 8, 1995,^[15] to November 26, 1995,^[16] and it remained on the list as late as March 1996.^[17][18][19]

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".^[20]

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".^[21]

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".^[22]

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".^[22]

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".^[23]

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."^[24]

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.