The Lost World

THE POISON BELT being an account of another adventure of Professor George E.

Challenger, Lord John Ruxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone, the discoverers of The Lost World.

CHAPTER I.

ENTITLED THE BLURRING OF LINES It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail which time may blur.

But even as I do so, I am overwhelmed by the wonder of the fact that it should be our little group of the lost world—Professor Challenger,

Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and myself—who have passed through this amazing experience." When, some years ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall to my lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is unique in all

human annals and which stand out in the records of history as a great peak among the humble foothills which surround it.

Okay.

So that book cover and the title was actually meant to evoke an Arthur Conan Doyle story book called The Lost World about dinosaurs.

Yeah.

Um, it wasn't that it was a book about dinosaurs, but it was a book about something that's gone.

Being an account of another adventure of Professor George E.

Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the discoverers of The Lost World.

Chapter One, entitled The Blurring of Lines.

It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail which time may blur.

But even as I do so, I am overwhelmed by the wonder of the fact that it should be our little group of The Lost World, Professor Challenger, Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and myself, who have passed through this amazing experience.

When, some years ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall to my lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is unique in all human annals and which stand out in the records of history as a great peak among the humble foothills which surround it.

The event itself will always be marvelous, but the circumstances that we four were together at the time of this extraordinary episode came about in a most natural and, indeed, inevitable fashion.

And that reminded me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was, you know, of course wrote all the Sherlock Holmes stories, but that wasn't his passion, writing mystery stories or writing stories featuring Sherlock and Watson.

Because he wrote something called The Lost World, which is what inspired Michael Crichton to write his

own version of The Lost World, right, about the dinosaurs.

But he also wrote some other kind of action-adventure-type books.

I think that is where Doyle's heart really was, was in those.

would be the other, I mean, obviously far behind Holmes, but the other character he's known for.

And of course, uh, he wrote the original, the lost world, you know, the sort of dinosaur, you know, sort of that, you know, writing in that, in that, uh, in that genre, the land that time forgot slash the savage land slash warlord slash all of that goes back to the original, uh, to Conan Doyle's original, uh, The Lost World stories.

So he was active in this time, but of course, fans, you think fandom is bad here in the 2020s? It was no treat in the late 1890s either.

They were demanding more homes.

THE POISON BELT being an account of another adventure of Professor George E.

Challenger, Lord John Ruxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone, the discoverers of The Lost World.

CHAPTER I.

The Blurring of Lines It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail which time may blur.

But even as I do so, I am overwhelmed by the wonder of the fact that it should be our little group of the lost world—Professor

Challenger, Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton, and myself—who have passed through this amazing experience." When, some years ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall to my lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is unique in all human annals and which stand out in the records of history

as a great peak among the humble foothills which surround it.

This season I'm looking at dinosaurs in fiction, going from Jules Verne to the present day.

I'm currently exploring the world of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World from 1912.

I've already reviewed the book with a fantastic guest, Richard Fallon, so go back a couple of episodes if you want to know more about the actual book, because today's episode is all about the murky world of conspiracies and cryptozoology.

When Richard and I chatted, we talked a bit about Doyle's belief that that he may have seen a dinosaur or a plesiosaur on his honeymoon, and that Doyle wasn't really afraid to defend what we now consider, and many at the time considered as well, fringe sciences like spiritualism and fairies.

Now Carl Hagenbeck was someone who in the 1800s supplied animals and horrifically humans as well for display in circuses and zoos.

He supplied people like P.T. Barnum, for example.

And actually, at the start of this English translation, which was published in 1912, so same year as The Lost World came out, there's this description we get of Carl Hagenbeck.

I don't know whether it's very complimentary, but it's from the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London.

THE POISON BELT by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle being an account of another adventure of Professor George E.

Challenger, Lord John Ruxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone, the discoverers of The Lost World.

CHAPTER I.

The Blurring of Lines It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail which time may blur.

You find me on this episode here in the zoology wing of the Explorers Club because we are finally getting down to the sort of thing that this podcast was created to do.

We are finally, finally, finally getting started on what I'm sure will be a series of episodes about none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

I'm extraordinarily excited to talk about this.

It's been a long time coming.

So I think we're just going to get stuck in.

We're going to get started.

I'm going to start opening up the book, looking at the chapters and just talking about stuff as I come to it and as things occur to me because I had wanted to do a preliminary episode about the prehistory of The Lost World as I did once upon a time a long time ago.

on my old show the white atlantic weird podcast i know a lot more now than i did then i've read many more good books and i have come across great writers on the subject of both arthur conan doyle and the lost world specifically and i was just getting a little bit wound up about where to start so we're just gonna crack into it and i might as well mention that there have been a couple of really good podcasts about the lost world recently and one of them for example would be yes the the doings of doyle podcast which is as you can get is about sir arthur himself have a three-part series on the lost world it is extraordinarily scholarly as you would imagine if you're familiar with that particular show i highly highly recommend it I would also like to recommend the more recent episode with Richard Fallon talking about The Lost World on the podcast called Pirates Don't Eat the Tourists, which is a Jurassic Park podcast.

THE POISON BELT being an account of another adventure of Professor George E.

Challenger, Lord John Ruxton, Professor Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone, the discoverers of The Lost World.

CHAPTER I.

The Blurring of Lines It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail which time may blur.