Meh.

Years ago I visited a museum. There were endless glass displays, some of which held guns used in war; others held swords that at one time were raised in combat against empires that have long since fallen. But I wasn't there for them. I was there for a dinosaur. At one point I came to a long hallway and followed it to the end. It opened up into a colossal room, where right in the center, standing nearly two stories high, was the reason I came that day.

The museum's enormous Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. Though I have seen skeletons of the most dominant predator in Earth's history since then, that was the first one I had ever seen in person. Before that trip, the T-Rex had only ever come to life for me in the films of Steven Spielberg. I saw The Lost World: Jurassic Park in theatres when it first came out in 1997, but only now, 23 years later, did I pick up the movie's source material, Michael Crichton's The Lost World.

I will tell you that I started but never finished the novel Jurassic Park for the same reason I started but never finished reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; I saw the movie first, and the movie and book are pretty much identical. After a few hundred pages, I just couldn't do it anymore. Because they were so nearly identical, it felt like I was reading the movie screenplay. The Lost World, however, does not suffer from this problem. The movie and book are very, very different; each is mostly its own unique creation, and though the movie wasn't that great, I still think both are worth checking out, but especially the book, because it's a lot better.

In the book, a series of undocumented animals start being reported on an island off Costa Rica, several years after the Jurassic Park disaster. Eventually, a group of scientists end up on the island, one of them because he was investigating and the others later on as part of an effort to try to rescue him. Chaos ensues, and the scientists must fight to survive against the dinosaurs roaming the island. The most fascinating thing, I found, was how little of the book Spielberg used for the movie. Some of the scenes in this book are a Hollywood director's dream, combining action and gripping suspense. I would argue the film would have been a lot better if it used more scenes from the book.

One thing I didn't like was how bloated the book was. My edition was 416 pages, but I feel like it could have been 350-375 pages. Dr. Malcolm goes on long rants about chaos theory and his bizarre theories about evolution and the extinction of the dinosaurs, among other things. I thought these were somewhat boring at times, and that some of them could have been condensed or even removed entirely. On the plus side, the last hundred-or-so pages of this book are mostly non-stop, heart-pounding suspense; I felt like I didn't take a breath the whole time, and I found myself staying up late to read more.

Overall, though a bit boring at times, The Lost World is otherwise a page-turning dinosaur adventure with great characters, and one that will keep you on the edge of your seat for much of its length. It's vintage Michael Crichton. Recommended!

I was surprised as to how different this was from the movie. I mean like an entirely different story. While I did enjoy film, I think that the book is far superior. There less characters and the story was a little more streamlined than that of the original novel. But I'm saying that in a good way, as you got to follow the path of returning characters, while getting to know the newer ones during this adventure. I also once again enjoyed Dr Malcolm's constant input about life, extinction, etc. He's just a fantastic and entertaining character. I also felt that they really made the great point of not truly knowing the dinosaurs and their behaviors here, as these are just man's interpretations of the extinct animals. So throughout the story, you can't guess what each type of dinosaur will do next and that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout. But, much like Jurassic Park, this has a solid amount of action, suspense and gore. The raptors are truly terrifying, and are on full display with their high intelligence during much of this book. But I loved this story, maybe not quite as much as the original, but damn close.

Note to self: if I am EVER stuck on an island with dinosaurs, do not be a jerk or I'm guaranteed to be eaten by a T-Rex. Also, if I ever need to look up anything on a computer, ask a kid because apparently adults cannot operate them.

The Jurassic Park adventures are always fun. One thing I especially liked about this book is the woman scientist was one of the strongest and most competent of the team. (The movie drove me crazy because the so-called African animal expert took blood soaked stuff INTO HER TENT while trying to hide from predators...). Other than her, I pretty much wanted everyone to die - wow just like Jaws a couple weeks ago. I guess the kids were ok - someone needs to be able to log into the computers and they were the only ones who knew how. The adults were pretty good at yelling at the poor kids to hurry up though.

And Malcom...sigh...his function in the book seemed to be to spout long lectures on the philosophy of evolution, extinction, etc. There is a time and place for those, and sure, it can be interesting - but when you are being hunted by dinosaurs is not that time!

I did enjoy the book, and would have given it another star if a couple more of the adults had been eaten.

Well this was in no way as good as the first one. The buildup was slow, the “action” was inevitable and the end left a open to interpretation which after all that was uncalled for. The sudden miraculous resurrection of Malcolm in the beginning was the first of many zingers dropped. Honestly given Malcolm’s life changing injury from book one I still have zero idea why he went back so willingly. I mean the true stars of this book are the kids under 15 who like in book one -thought with different kids obviously- the kids computer skills save the day.  The raptors were scary and some scenes were tense but again that’s to be expected, they’re carnivores and hunt in a haunting pack formation that’s near impossible to outrun. After the thrill of book one this one just did not live up to the hype. My expectations were way up and the in my opinion shit ending just leaves me unsatisfied.

I will start my review by saying that I did not enjoy this novel nearly as much as the first book, Jurassic Park. While this was an incredibly easy and fast read, I would have preferred if Crichton had cut roughly a hundred pages of additional information that, in my opinion, did not add to the story. Other than that, wow! What an adrenaline-charging, action-packed book! Crichton sure knew how to grab his audience by the hand and take them on a roller-coaster into a whole other world—a world in which you are sure to get Lost, ha-ha!

Losing yourself in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park world of dinosaur adventure, you might want more of the same – and if you do, Crichton has cooperatively provided The Lost World, a 1995 sequel to his original 1990 novel. While The Lost World does not really provide anything new in his treatment of a fictive world where living dinosaurs can be synthesized from preserved DNA strands, it should be serviceable entertainment for Jurassic Park’s legions of fans.

Crichton had often focused on the subject of unforeseen consequences of hastily pursued scientific innovation, as with his debut novel The Andromeda Strain (1969) and the 1973 film Westworld (directed and written by Crichton), as well as Jurassic Park. The Lost World bears the name of a 1912 novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — a book that posited the existence of a Brazilian plateau where dinosaurs survived the Cretaceous extinction. Crichton’s book, for its part, follows very closely the storytelling blueprint established by Jurassic Park.

The Lost World begins with a lecture at a Santa Fe think-tank by chaos-theory mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm. “Wait a minute,” you say. “Didn’t Dr. Malcolm die in the novel Jurassic Park?” And the answer is – yes, Dr. Malcolm did die in the book (though not in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation of the book). What then is going on here?

The short answer is “retcon” – a term that is short for “retroactive continuity.” There have been a number of times, in the history of storytelling, when a storyteller has killed off a character, decided to bring the character back, and then needed to find a plausible-sounding way of explaining why this previously dead character is still alive. Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, John Rambo, Boba Fett, and Loki have all been “retconned” at one time or another, and Ian Malcolm is “retconned” here.

The narrator of The Lost World provides a quick, breezy explanation that Dr. Malcolm’s “promising career had been disrupted by a severe injury during a trip to Costa Rica; Malcolm had, in fact, been reported dead in several newscasts” (p. 1). The necessary retconning having thus been dispensed with, Dr. Malcolm, just as in Jurassic Park, is given the opportunity to descant on his philosophy of chaos theory or “complexity theory,” telling his Santa Fe audience that “Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish” (p. 2).

As in Jurassic Park, one often gets the sense that Dr. Malcolm is in the story in part as a way for novelist Crichton to express his own ideas regarding shortcomings in contemporary thinking – as when, responding to an audience member’s statement that “The Cretaceous [extinction] allowed our own sentient awareness to arise on the planet”, Malcolm contemptuously replies, “What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There’s no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare” (p. 6).

Part of Malcolm’s philosophy seems to involve what might be termed “scientific realism.” Criticizing a modeler in the biology department at his university for making a model velociraptor insufficiently “menacing”, Malcolm reflects that “the truest picture of life in the past incorporated the interplay of all aspects of life – the good and the bad, the strong and the weak. It was no good pretending anything else” (p. 83).

At the Santa Fe lecture, Dr. Malcolm encounters Dr. Richard Levine, an obnoxious though talented paleontologist, as well as Sarah Harding, a mammalogist who studies African predators such as lions and hyenas, and who is Malcolm’s friend and former lover. Levine believes in a “lost world” scenario of dinosaur survivals into the present day, acknowledging that there is no hard evidence of such a scenario but insisting that “absence of proof is not proof of absence” (p. 8). And he intends to mount an expedition to some islands off Costa Rica’s west coast in order to test out his theory – specifically, to a place called Isla Sorna, where it turns out that John Hammond’s InGen corporation actually carried on the work of creating the dinosaurs through DNA technology.

The novel’s antagonist, Lewis Dodgson, was previously seen in Jurassic Park as a rival industrialist for the BioSyn corporation, trying to steal dinosaur embryos from InGen. Well, he’s at it again – with the only distinction being that this time, Dodgson wants to lead an expedition to Isla Sorna so that he can steal dinosaur eggs rather than dinosaur embryos. He tells an accomplice that a genetically restored dinosaur “is for all practical purposes not an animal at all. It can’t have any rights.” Accordingly, Dodgson says, “these animals are totally exploitable,” and can be used for animal testing, or placed in a hunting reserve to be shot by big-game hunters. In short, the reader is expected to hope that Dodgson will get eaten by a dinosaur at the earliest possible moment.

In Costa Rica, Dr. Martin Guitierrez, a U.S.-born biologist, tells Levine about Biosyn agents looking for large animals on an island off the coast. He adds that scientific research has become profit-driven, and states that “Anything new or unknown is automatically of interest, because it might have value. It might be worth a fortune” (p. 31).

Levine soon makes his way, independently, to Isla Sorna. There is no word from Levine after he arrives on Isla Sorna, and Malcolm is leading an expedition in search of him. Dodgson meanwhile is leading his own expedition in search of dinosaur eggs to steal. And Harding, contacted in Africa, is leaving her own predator research and traveling independently toward Isla Sorna. The stage is set for more dinosaur-centered drama.

Reading Crichton’s The Lost World, I found myself reflecting upon the pressures that face a writer who is composing a sequel to a successful and beloved novel. For instance, Jurassic Park placed a strong focus on the theme of children in danger, through the characters of Tim and Lexi, who were brought to the island by their grandfather John Hammond. Therefore, The Lost World must also show children in danger.

The children in question, Arby and Kelly, are both likeable and (for Crichton) well-drawn characters, who developed a rapport with Levine when Levine, in some legal trouble, was sentenced to teach middle-school science as a form of community service. Fair enough – and it was good to see that the otherwise obnoxious Levine could show more of a kindly side toward children who shared his enthusiasm for science. But the plot device through which Crichton gets Kelly and Arby to Isla Sorna seemed implausible in the extreme, even for a novel about DNA-generated dinosaurs.

Comparably contrived was a murder attempt against one of the major characters that occurs about halfway through the novel. It was as if Crichton was saying to himself, “I’m 200 pages into a 450-page suspense novel. I’ve got to hurry up and make something suspenseful happen.” To say that this scene didn’t work for me would be an understatement. It makes no sense – except, perhaps, inasmuch as it leads to some dinosaur-fueled poetic justice for the would-be murderer about 200 pages later.

To convey the idea that the humans on Isla Sorna are, inevitably, affecting the dinosaurs in the process of studying them, Malcolm invokes “the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that whatever you studied you also changed” (pp. 270-71). And yes – as, by this point in the novel, at least a couple of people have been killed and eaten by the dinosaurs, I suppose it can be said that the science in this instance has become participatory and not merely observational.

Where The Lost World fell short for me was in the way Crichton didn’t really take the premise of his story in any truly new directions. The book begins. People go to an island with living dinosaurs. The dinosaurs start attacking the people. Some people get killed by the dinosaurs, and some don’t. The book ends.

It didn’t have to be this way. There is a long and honorable history of science-fiction sequels that honor their predecessor while introducing some truly surprising new elements of plot or characterization – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Aliens (1986), Blade Runner 2049 (2017). But The Lost World never really goes in any direction beyond what we already saw in Jurassic Park.

To be fair, I do think that Crichton was trying, at times, to reach for something more. Malcolm states clearly what drew attention to Isla Sorna: “There have been dinosaurs on this island for five years, maybe more…but none have appeared elsewhere. Suddenly, in the last year, carcasses of dead animals are showing up on the beaches of Costa Rica, and, according to reports, on islands of the Pacific as well” (p. 301). The solution to this mystery provides further evidence of the slipshod way in which the late and unlamented InGen corporation went about its work. Further revelations of this kind would have been welcome.

I can see where Crichton does seem to be trying to respond to prior criticisms of his work. He has often been criticized for weak depictions of women characters, and in The Lost World he takes pains to present strong women characters. Sarah Harding is a bona-fide butt-kicking action hero; I could easily imagine Sigourney Weaver or Linda Hamilton playing her in an alternate film version of the book. And young Kelly makes a vital discovery at a crucial point near the novel’s ending, saving the lives of her friends; and when Kelly seems to downplay what she has done, Sarah sternly says, “All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don’t you take it away from yourself” (p. 421). This emphasis on women’s empowerment is most welcome in a Crichton fictive universe that is often testosterone-drenched (see Rising Sun, 1992) and sometimes downright misogynistic (see Disclosure, 1994).

All of which is to say that The Lost World is decidedly a mixed bag. Steven Spielberg publicly disallowed his 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, saying that it can be difficult for a filmmaker to make a sequel when the only real motivation is external – meaning market demand for a sequel. I can’t help wondering if novelist Crichton, deep down, might have felt the same way about this novel.

Reading The Lost World on a trip to Costa Rica, I found it perfectly suitable for reading by a gently heated sunset pool on a green mountainside overlooking the city of Alajuela – a propitious occasion for imagining the gorgeous tropical landscape of Costa Rica as a home for dinosaurs. As long as you don’t go into the book expecting anything more than that…

For me, a disappointment after the first Jurassic Park, but still a great read.

I found the book out of balance. He included too much information through dialogue and the progression into the climax dragged. However, I still enjoyed it. I enjoy Crichton's writing, something about it. I like the intellectual stimulation and the action and the thrill of the scenes he creates. He overloaded the narrative with "suddenly," and "at that moment," which I found a bit annoying. He also used literary techniques with little to no effort, such as "his heart was beating in his chest." I suppose that describes it well, as opposed to his heart beating in his thigh, although perhaps the latter may be more interesting.

I plan to finish all of Crichton's work. I cheated a bit with some research on this one. Many agree the novel ranks lowest in his bibliography. From what I understand the market demanded a second book, and it shows in the short-cut quality of the work.

Now that was really enjoyable!! I really loved all the science and theories.

Uff que bodrio. La misma formula que la primera parte, la misma! El primer libro es entretenido y safa pero aquí al forzar la trama ya se ven los hilos y se vuelve todo mas inverosímil.

Me ha gustado, ha sido bastante entretenido.
Después de más de 20 años de haber leído Parque jurásico, leo esta segunda parte, el cual también intercalé con la película (es un poco diferente ya que hay personajes en el libro que en la película ni aparecen). Libro de aventura-acción.
# 7. Un libro donde el personaje principal trabaje en tu trabajo actual o en tu trabajo soñado. Reto Popsugar 2021