Showing posts with label The Lost World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Lost World. Show all posts

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Conan Doyle’s mistake

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous as the author of the character Sherlock Holmes, the detective who relies on logic to solve the most abstruse cases, as in the famous quote from the story The adventure of the blanched soldier, included in the collection The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes:
When you have eliminated all that is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Apart from his mystery books, one of his science fiction novels is also very well known: The Lost World, published in 1912, whose protagonist is Professor Challenger, an unbearable scientist, who also appears in other stories by Doyle. This is the plot of The Lost World:
A group of explorers manages to reach an almost inaccessible mesa, lost in the Amazon rainforest, so isolated that dinosaurs and other extinct animals survive there, as well as two races of humans or primitive pre-humans (Pithecanthropus and Homo sapiens). After they manage to escape and return to England, Challenger gives a lecture about his findings, which nobody takes seriously until he exhibits a specimen of Pterosaur that he managed to take from the mesa in the form of an egg, later incubated.