The Lost World

Sherlock Holmes should have been a science fiction hero: the character who works by logic, who uses science, he was made for the genre. But when Conan Doyle did create a version of Holmes in his science fiction stories, Professor Challenger proved to be a rather different type of character, someone for whom ratiocination is never quite enough to solve the overwhelming mystery of the world, so he becomes a man of action. In this, his first outing, for instance, he leads an expedition to a remote plateau in South America so cut off from the world that dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures have survived here. The expedition is cut off on the plateau, attacked by pterodactyls, captured by ape men, and caught up in a war between the ape men and a tribe of primitive humans. Why it's on the list: Can you imagine King Kong or Jurassic Park or any of a host of similar stories without The Lost World? Writers around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth were fascinated by the idea of the primitive, but it was Doyle who showed how you could bring the prehistoric right into the modern world.