Lost World FROM OUR EDITORS
It's been six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, when the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end. The dinosaurs are destroyed, the park is closed, but there are rumors that something has survived. The Jurassic Park sequel turned motion picture.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since that extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end - the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public. There are rumors that something has survived.
SYNOPSIS
"HARROWING THRILLS . . . FAST-PACED AND ENGAGING."
--People
It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end--the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, the island indefinitely closed to the public.
FROM THE CRITICS
Mim Udovitch
"The Lost World" is Mr. Crichton's sequel to the enormously successful "Jurassic Park"....The plot is slower to start this time around, but it can afford to be, since, the mask of inherent unpredictability notwithstanding, we know what's coming. It is, however, substantially similar, and since its pleasures are those of a thriller, for review purposes let that suffice. -- New York Times
Publishers Weekly
One fact about this sequel to Jurassic Park stands out above all: it follows a book that, with spinoffs, including the movie, proved to be the most profitable literary venture ever. So where does the author of a near billion-dollar novel sit? Squarely on the shoulders of his own past work-and Arthur Conan Doyle's. Crichton has borrowed from Conan Doyle before-Rising Sun was Holmes and Watson in Japan-but never so brazenly. The title itself here, the same as that of Conan Doyle's yarn about an equatorial plateau rife with dinos, acknowledges the debt. More enervating are Crichton's self-borrowings: the plot line of this novel reads like an outtake from JP. Instead of bringing his dinos to a city, for instance, Crichton keeps them in the Costa Rican jungle, on an offshore island that was the secret breeding ground for the beasts. Only chaos theoretician Ian Malcolm, among the earlier principals, returns to explore this Lost World, six years after the events of JP; but once again, there's a dynamic paleontologist, a pretty female scientist and two cute kids, boy and girl-the latter even saves the day through clever hacking, just as in JP. Despite stiff prose and brittle characters, Chrichton can still conjure unparalleled dino terror, although the wonder is gone and the attacks are predictable, the pacing perfunctory. But his heart now seems to be not so much in the storytelling as in pedagogy: from start to finish, the novel aims to illustrate Crichton's ideas about extinction-basically, that it occurs because of behavioral rather than environmental changes-and reads like a scientific fable, with pages of theory balancing the hectic action. As science writing, it's a lucid, provocative undertaking; but as an adventure and original entertainment, even though it will sell through the roof, it seems that Crichton has laid a big dinosaur egg. 2,000,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB main selection. (Sept.)
Library Journal
abridgment of Crichton's latest novel, a sequel of sorts to the best-selling Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990). Ian Malcolm, who supposedly died at the end of Jurassic Park, nonetheless returns to the islands off Costa Rica with a new crew to search for lost worlds of dinosaurs and investigate several theories of extinction. Unfortunately, The Lost World comes up short compared to the intrigue that the extraction, repair, and replication of dinosaur DNA generated for readers and listeners in Jurassic Park. Instead, The Lost World consists mostly of more dinosaurs that chase and sometimes capture Malcolm's cohorts or members of a rival gang led by an unscrupulous genetic engineer, Lew Dodgson. Dodgson would love to steal a few dinosaur eggs as part of a scheme to hatch the perfect laboratory animal ("If they're extinct, then they can't have any rights," Dodgson observes). Recommended.-Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., Ohio
BookList - Ray Olson
Every Cretaceous critter in John Hammond's bioengineered dinosaur preserve was destroyed after the events of "Jurassic Park". Yet five years later, carcasses of recently dead, supposedly extinct saurians are washing ashore on nearby islands. Time for intrepid scientists to discover and observe again. Onboard this time are the chaos and complexity theorist who almost died in Hammond's folly, a stuck-up rich guy paleontologist, an Amazon of a large-animal ethologist, a regular-guy engineering genius and his assistant, and two computer whiz kids who stow away to join the adults. And, of course, there are venal villains (three) trying to get to the salable goods first (guess what their fate is). Crichton adroitly combines popular scientific colloquy and ripping good, blood-and-guts (literally) action once again. If it all seems rather predictable, remember that the pleasures of familiarity and referentiality rank high among the rewards of popular fiction. Here such pleasures begin with the title, plundered directly from the granddaddy of the modern-day dinosaur romance, Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World" (1912).
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