The Lost World and The Poison Belt

A heart-stopping adventure tale featuring a brilliant scientist—one as insufferably pompous as Doyle’s most famous character—and his unlikely trio, and its apocalyptic sequel.

In 1912, the creator of Sherlock Holmes introduced his readers to yet another genius adventurer, Professor Challenger, who in his very first outing would journey to South America in search of . . . an isolated plateau crawling with iguanodons and ape-men! A smash hit, Doyle’s proto-science fiction thriller would be adapted twice by Hollywood filmmakers, and it would go on to influence everything from Jurassic Park to the TV show Land of the Lost. Its 1913 sequel, The Poison Belt, finds Challenger and his dino-hunting comrades trapped in an oxygenated chamber as the entire planet passes through a lethal ether cloud.

Joshua Glenn is a consulting semiotician and editor of the websites HiLobrow and Semiovox. The first to describe 1900–1935 as sci