Earlier in February, I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Mostly because it&
Earlier in February, I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Mostly because it’s an early piece of literature containing dinosaurs/paleontology as a focus. Also because it sounded fun. Despite the degree of time separation between now and then, the book was entertaining to read. Honestly some books published in the last twenty years were harder to parse than The Lost World. As paleontological fiction, it is vastly outdated. The story takes place in the eponymous lost world, an enormous tepui in the Amazon. In it are a variety of mostly European fauna (Iguanodon, Pterodactylus, Megaloceras) and some contemporary animals that may have been unintentionally airlifted from other parts of the world. Doyle described “a scaly anteater” which I was at first willing to give the benefit of the doubt that it was a way of describing a gylptodont, but is more likely to be him not knowing South America doesn’t have pangolins. It’s also really racist. Challenger is apparently able to tell Malone is Irish by the shape of his skull (which… like… there’s flesh in the way dude…), the black character is happily subservient to the British protagonists, and at one point they commit a near genocide of ape-people. More subtly there are a bunch of references to the inherent superiority of the British to the rest of the world which is really hard to take seriously some times. Also I’m like 75% sure at the end of the book Roxton and Malone return to the lost world to start a diamond mining company. Which is, to put it lightly, an enterprise that is consistently exploitative of their workers. So why did I draw the main characters? I’ve done this with a few books. Especially ones with characters who are described in specific terms. To get a picture of what they look like, because when I read I imagine the events visually, I, er, make a picture. An, unlike the monstrosity that is A Song of Ice and Fire, the story had only a few characters I thought necessary to sketch as I read. Roxton is an archetypal British safari adventurer with red hair and a mustache, Challenger is described with drooping eyelids and a big beard like an Assyrian statue, Malone is described the least but is also the youngest, freshest faced, and a big simp, and Summerlee is older with a goatee and a drone, sarcastic wit. They are fun to read divorced from reality. Challenger and Summerlee get into petty scientific debates constantly. Roxton is the most practical but also really wants to shoot dinosaurs. And there is a lot of fun poking at the seriousness with which 19th century scientists take themselves. -- source link
#literature#early paleontology#character design