In
The Lost World
, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger—a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction—Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, “the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended” and numerous prehistoric creatures and ape-men have survived. “Just as Sherlock Holmes set the standard—and in some sense established the formula—for the detective story . . . , so too has
set the standard and the formula for fantasy-adventure stories . . . ,” Michael Crichton writes in his Introduction. “The tone and techniques that Conan Doyle first refined in
have become standard narrative procedures in popular entertainment of the present day.”