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.

What could be better than a dinosaur on a beach? Scott Brick describing the dinosaur, that's what. We're in luck, then, as Brick performs his usual magic with ferocious beasts, mad scientists, and mere mortals in this bestselling sequel to JURASSIC PARK. You've probably guessed that not all the dinosaurs died after running amok in that ill-conceived dinosaur theme park. Velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rexes are still around (in Costa Rica of all places), and they're thoroughly irritated. Brick delivers the novel's science and pseudoscience in a clipped, authoritative manner that makes it all accessible. He offers fun vocal portraits of the characters, including enthusiastic kids and a reedy-voiced crazy paleontologist. And when it comes to action--pow!--he's all in. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine