51 pages • 1 hour read
Michael CrichtonThe Lost World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Exploitation of Nature
For all its edge-of-the-seat dinosaur chases and its (literally) cliffhanging moments, The Lost World is less a storyboard for an action-packed summer blockbuster (although it became one) and more a parable on the dangers of exploiting nature.
At the thematic core of Crichton’s cutting-edge techno-thriller is a concern as old as the Industrial Revolution itself: the prickly relationship between science and nature, specifically the line where scientific research becomes exploitative, invasive, and destructive. When does legitimate research morph into degrading nature into a commodity, a destructive dynamic whose endgame will be, as Malcolm drily points out to Sarah Harding, the extinction of humanity itself?
Crichton does not simplify the issue by setting “good” scientists against “evil” scientists. Really all of the scientists who descend on Site B represent varying degrees of exploitation. Levine, for instance, the quintessential academic researcher content to sit atop the high hide and observe the movements of the dinosaur herds, reduces nature to a vast lab experiment. For Malcolm, nature is little more than a schoolroom where he expounds on his increasingly darkening perceptions of humanity’s future and the fate of the earth. Sarah Harding tries to learn the secrets of animal behavior. For her, nature is little more than an enticing clockwork whose workings are there to be defined. There is of course something far more chilling in the rationale of Biosyn (its name suggesting its immorality) and its determination to raid the island and pilfer fertilized eggs sufficient to create a hunting preserve. “How many hunters,” Dodgson explains nearly salivating at the thought, “can claim to have a snarling tyrannosaurus head hanging above their wet bar?” (103).
The novel offers no easy solution as Crichton addresses a culture pondering the implications of climate change and the damage done by two centuries of exploiting nature for economic gain may now be irreversible. In the end, Crichton offers only the redolent wisdom of Doc Thorne as the boat pulls away from the island where, because of science’s greed and indifference to nature, the animals they created now face their own gruesome apocalypse. Thorne reminds his boatload of scientists to appreciate rather than study nature, relish its richness rather than exploit it for gain.
The Dynamics of Extinction
Until the latter days of the twentieth century extinction may have been considered (with some exceptions) a benign, reassuring process. Something big changed the environment where species existed content not to evolve. That big event—a meteor, for instance—forced extinction on species in a decisive hammer-stroke. Those uncountable species did nothing—extinction was visited on them.
The vision of Ian Malcolm, the team’s resident philosopher (and expert in the fractal logic of chaos theory), extinction is not quite as easy to understand. Malcolm draws on the theoretical framework of chaos theory, which suggests that immense changes occur because of relatively minor alterations and that once that dynamic is begun the kinetic force behind it will not concede until the ultimate results are played out, results that only in retrospect will seem patterned. As Malcolm says in closing his paper at the Santa Fe Institute, “Whether at the deepest level the fault lies not in blind fate—in some fiery meteor from the skies or a shift in the positioning of the tectonic plates—but in our own behavior. At the moment, we have no answer” (xiv). Malcolm reasons extinction is caused when there is a radical imbalance between a species’ willingness to change and its insistence on remaining the same. Too much of either, he conjectures, leads to extinction. Species are always changing, living, as Malcolm says, on “the edge of chaos” (2).
The experience at Site B only confirms Malcolm’s beliefs. After all, the mercenary genetics researchers at InGen created the mythic Lost World, an island paradise where actual dinosaurs could thrive in real-time. Given the opportunity to resurrect extinct species and observe their behaviors firsthand, science elected to ruin rather than study this world. By irresponsibly cutting a corner and feeding the newly created dinosaurs toxic sheep protein, InGen ensured their quick extinction. It was not fate or chance or some blind intrusion of catastrophe: extinction was caused and then sustained by mercenary actions of humanity. “Human beings are so destructive […] I sometimes think we are a kind of plague” (414), Malcolm concludes, suggesting the extinction of humanity itself will be the result of centuries of carefully weighed and ultimately self-annihilating decisions.
The Complicated Beauty of Nature
Isla Sorna is in its way a lost world, a place on earth largely unspoiled by humanity’s reach. As such, the island offers Crichton a chance to expound on the beauty of unspoiled nature, his way of offering a counterargument to the novel’s overriding thematic interest: What happens to nature when humanity exploits it? What would happen, Crichton asks, if humanity admired nature, instead?
Amid all the furious chases and brutal carnage of the dinosaur attacks in the first novel (and the subsequent blockbuster film), there were also moments of sublime beauty. There are similar moments in this sequel, for example when the team completes construction of the observation deck and first gaze out into the valley below. For all the abandoned In-Gen buildings collapsing into tangled vines and rust, the island maintains its natural beauty.
Levine cannot help but be mesmerized by the great animals, delighted by their color, their movements, their agility. The jungles, the beaches, the cave, the nests, the looming volcanic plateau, the valley of dinosaurs itself—the natural settings of the island are breathtaking even for a hard-core engineer like Doctor Thorne. The aerial vistas offered by the team’s helicopter offer a panorama of unspoiled nature. The cliffs windswept by the waves in the approach to the island mesmerize Sarah Harding, and even though she finds it only in her struggle not to drown she is captivated as well by the cavernous cave.
Moreover, the dinosaurs themselves delight the team. Sarah particularly notes the striking patterns on the lizard skins and the emotion in their eyes. In the moments when the team arrives at the T. Rex nest, they are stunned by the gentleness of the doting parents. In this, the novel captures the sublime delight of nature, even manufactured nature. The dinosaurs offer absolutes in size, ferocity, and terror—but they are still beautiful animals. In a novel driven by the dynamic of species extinction and locked within the hard press of the past, the island offers the splendid moment of now, a reminder of the earth that existed before and will exist after humanity.
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By Michael Crichton
