The Lost World

September 4, 1995
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.

September 15, 1995
When strange animal carcasses begin to wash up on the shores of Costa Rica, an eccentric paleontologist suspects that dinosaurs may exist somewhere in the area. This much-anticipated sequel to the megahit Jurassic Park (Knopf, 1990) reads more like a movie novelization: so bereft of plot and characterization in deference to action that it is closer in spirit to Steven Spielberg's movie version (1993) than to the entertaining and educational novel that preceded it. Reprising their roles from Jurassic Park are Ian Malcolm, who bought the farm courtesy of a T-rex in JP but whom Crichton seemingly couldn't resist resurrecting, and Lew Dodgson, the evil scientist who makes a living stealing ideas from his fellow researchers. Malcolm and Dodgson, leading separate parties, converge on a small Costa Rican island where the resident raptors, tyrannosaurs, and other carnivores make their field trip distinctly unpleasant. Despite its flaws, however, there will undoubtedly be huge demand in public libraries for Crichton's latest. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95.]-Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal

September 1, 1995
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). ((Reviewed Sept. 1, 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)