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The Lost World and The Poison Belt (SF) - Arthur Conan Doyle ****

The MIT Press 'Radium Age' series makes a very positive hit with the highly readable (if occasionally offensive by modern standards) 1912 The Lost World, coupled with a far less known, but nonetheless interesting, novella featuring the same characters, The Poison Belt from 1913.

It's easy to see The Lost World, featuring as it does dinosaurs in the present day of 1912, as a precursor to Jurassic Park, but here the ancient organisms are not re-born through genetic manipulation but have survived in a region which has become separated from the rest of South America. Admittedly, the science is dodgy - even on isolated land masses, animals evolve and we wouldn't expect to see creatures from the Jurassic as they used to be. But it is still an SF story, while also acting as a parody of the adventure stories of the late Victorian/Edwardian era.

This aspect of being a parody is significant. It comes through particularly strongly in a couple of the central characters. Professor Challenger is a scientist whose response to anyone disagreeing with him is to have a fight with them, while Lord John Roxton is a send-up of the huntin', shootin' soldier-cum-hunter so typical of the adventure story set in strange lands of the time. There's no doubt that the book suffers from the level of racism that was accepted then - though even this is tempered with the edge Doyle gives the writing. So, for example, Challenger at one point refers to a group of South Americans as a 'degraded race, with mental powers hardly superior to the average Londoner.'

However, it is also worth stressing that this is a genuinely engaging book to read. Some of the Radium Age titles can only really be read at a meta-level, thinking 'yes that's interesting, because...' but Conan Doyle knew how to write. When, for example, the main characters first get to the top of the plateau that forms the 'lost world', I had to keep on reading because it is gripping stuff.

By contrast, The Poison Belt is far less remembered, in part because Doyle gives us a lot less narrative drive - though still manages to keep it readable. The novella concerns the Earth moving through a poisonous belt in space (or, technically, through the aether, which was already scientifically doomed as a concept), apparently killing much of the population. What the introduction and  afterword miss was that in 1910 there had been a considerable scare when it was suggested that the tail of Halley's Comet contained large amounts of the poisonous gas cyanogen. A leading contemporary French astronomer Camille Flammarion said that if Earth passed through the comet's tail 'cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet'. It's hard to believe this wasn't the inspiration for Conan Doyle's story, published just three years after the comet's passage.

There is an assumption, based on the pseudo-science that race is something physically meaningful, that different races would differ in their speed of response to the belt, as would those of Northern Europe compared with those from Europe's south. This, though, is a very minor part of the main storyline, which covers the response of the famous four (plus Challenger's wife) to the death of everything but plants and their own imminent demise (put off for a while by oxygen cylinders). Although this could be heavy handed, thankfully it was written before Doyle's wholehearted plunge into spiritualism, and remains interesting. As Joshua Glenn points out in the afterword, a major feature is the contrast between the two scientists' approach - Challenger's combination of intuition and wild speculation, which triumphs in extremis, alongside Professor Summerlee's more conventional scientific caution, which is better at the small stuff, but fails to make the same intuitive leaps.

This is an excellent addition to the Radium Age series, in that it is both an important contribution to the development of science fiction and enjoyable to read.

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