The Lost World by Michael Crichton: The Jurassic Park Sequel, Genetic Engineering and the Evolution Debate
After the disaster at Jurassic Park, the company InGen decides to hide the catastrophe from the public and let time pass. But the dinosaurs are not quite gone. The Lost World is Michael Crichton’s sequel to Jurassic Park.
Author: Michael Crichton (1942–2008)
Title: The Lost World (1995)
Format: English Kindle edition (Cornerstone Digital)
Genre: Science-fiction thriller
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B0031RS2A4 (ASIN B0031RS2A4)
Back to the Dinosaurs
Ian Malcolm returns, joined by the field biologist Sarah Harding, in a story full of scientific explanation about genetic manipulation and arguments about the theory of evolution.
An Unsolved Mystery
It is science fiction that plunges us into the prehistoric world of the dinosaurs, whose history is still partly a mystery. Their extinction after a meteorite impact explains part of it: we know they disappeared and left their fossils behind. Humans became the surviving species and set about studying the remains the dinosaurs left behind, mostly through hypotheses and theories about what happened.
Evolution Under Debate
A century and a half after Darwin, as the book shows, almost every speculation about how evolution works is still the subject of intense debate. Crichton uses his dinosaurs to raise those questions.
Site B
Six years after the events of Jurassic Park, rumours of strange animal carcasses on the coast of Costa Rica reach Richard Levine, a wealthy and impatient palaeontologist. He becomes convinced that some of InGen’s dinosaurs survived on a remote island, known as Site B, where the company bred its animals before taking them to the park. When Levine goes missing on the island, Ian Malcolm reluctantly joins a rescue expedition.
A Tribute to Conan Doyle
The title deliberately echoes Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), the classic adventure in which Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a South American plateau where dinosaurs still survive. Crichton’s novel updates that idea for the age of genetic engineering, replacing an isolated plateau with an island created by corporate science.
Malcolm’s Ideas
Ian Malcolm, the chaos theorist who seemed to die in the first book, is back, and Crichton uses him to explore ideas about complexity, behaviour and extinction. Why do species die out? Is extinction caused only by catastrophes such as the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs, or also by changes in behaviour? Malcolm’s lectures, scattered through the action, give the book its intellectual backbone.
Rivals and Children
As in the first novel, Crichton adds rival scientists and children to the mix. A team from Biosyn, the competitor company, arrives on the island with its own plans, and two young stowaways, Kelly and Arby, find themselves in mortal danger. The result is a fast-moving adventure, with memorable set pieces involving raptors and a tyrannosaur family.
Book and Film
Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park borrows the title, the setting and several scenes, but tells a very different story, with a dramatic finale in San Diego that does not appear in the book.
Reading Order
Read Jurassic Park first; this sequel assumes you know what happened at the park.
Then enjoy.
Who Will Enjoy It
Readers who loved the original novel’s blend of science lecture and survival story will find the same formula here, with more dinosaurs, more running and new questions about how intelligent animals learn to behave. The sequel is more of a straight adventure than Jurassic Park, and less of a warning about corporate science, but it moves at high speed and is full of the vivid set pieces that made Crichton a favourite with Hollywood.
Why Read It
For fans of Jurassic Park who want more of the science behind the adventure.
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Part of the reading recommendations featured on books.sapiensverbum.com.
