The Lost World

The Lost World is an adventure and science fiction novel by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1912. It recounts an expedition to a remote plateau in the Amazon basin of South America where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals are said to survive, and it introduces Professor Challenger, a character Conan Doyle returned to in later books.

Ed Malone, a young reporter, is sent to interview Challenger and ends up joining the expedition the professor leads back to South America. The party travels upriver into unexplored country and climbs to the plateau, where the account turns out to be accurate, and much of the novel is spent on what a group of explorers does about a discovery it cannot easily leave behind. The narration belongs to Malone, who reports what the expedition finds as a journalist would.

Conan Doyle wrote the book at a time when the interior of South America was still being mapped, and he borrowed the idea of an isolated plateau from contemporary scientific debate about surviving species. The story became one of the models for later lost-world fiction.