LOST WORLDS

   This rubric covers lost races, lost cities, lost lands: all the enclaves of mystery in a rapidly shrinking world that featured so largely in the sf of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This subgenre was obviously a successor to the FANTASTIC VOYAGES of the 18th century and earlier, but there are important distinctions to be drawn. The earlier tales had belonged to a world which was still geographically "open"; at the time Jonathan SWIFT wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726), Australia had yet to bediscovered by Europeans and Africa had yet to be explored. The lost-world story, however, belonged to a cartographically "closed" world: in Jules VERNE's and H. Rider HAGGARD's day unknown territories were fastdisappearing. The options were running out, and hence the 19th-century lost lands tended to be situated in the most inaccessible regions of the globe: the Amazon basin, Himalayan valleys, central-Asian and Australian deserts, at the poles, or within the HOLLOW EARTH. These works are also distinguishable from earlier travellers' tales by their much greater "scientific" content. The new sciences of geology, ANTHROPOLOGY and, aboveall, archaeology had a considerable influence on Verne, Haggard and their successors. For a while, the fiction was concurrent with the reality (at least in the popular mind). From the discoveries of Troy and Nineveh to those of Machu Picchu and Tutankhamun's tomb, there flourished a "heroic age" of archaeology and scientific exploration, of which the fiction was a natural concomitant.The fiction was often based on PSEUDO-SCIENCE rather than real science, for example the many ATLANTIS stories which followed the success of Ignatius DONNELLY's nonfiction Atlantis, the Antediluvian World (1882). Tales of undiscovered worlds within the Earth tended to bebased on the crackpot geology of John Cleves SYMMES. Perhaps the best of all inner-world fantasies (though not set in a full-scale Symmesian Hollow Earth) is Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon asJourney to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK) by Jules Verne, in which explorers reach a subterranean sea by way of an extinct volcano. Other underground lost worlds include LYTTON's The Coming Race (1871; vt Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 1972 US), William N. HARBEN's The Land of theChanging Sun (1894), John M. LEAHY's Drome (1927 Weird Tales; 1952), Stanton A. COBLENTZ's Hidden World (1935 Wonder Stories as "In Caverns Below"; 1957) and Joseph O'NEILL's Land Under England (1935). The Hollow-Earth story "Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole" (1977) by Steven UTLEY and Howard WALDROP is a pastiche of this whole tradition.The archetypes of the lost-race story are, in the main, unrepentantly romantic. Edgar Rice BURROUGHS was an extensive contributor to the subgenre (with, for example, The Land that Time Forgot (1918 Blue Book; 1924) and most of his Tarzan novels) but its most famous exponent was a generation earlier: H. Rider Haggard, whose lost-race fantasies include King Solomon's Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887), She (1887) - thesetwo introducing the hugely popular erotic motif of the beautiful queen, or high priestess, who attempts to seduce the hero - The People of the Mist (1894), The Yellow God (1908) and Queen Sheba's Ring (1910); thepublication dates of these novels span the period when the species was in its heyday. Other notable examples are William WESTALL's The Phantom City (1886), James DE MILLE's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder(1888) and Thomas JANVIER's The Aztec Treasure House (1890). The best-known individual work in the genre may be The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan DOYLE, a perennially popular adventure story about thediscovery of surviving prehistoric creatures on a South American plateau (The LOST WORLD). The species was popular in the general-fiction pulps butwas in decline by the time the first SF MAGAZINES appeared, though lost-world stories by A. MERRITT - The Face in the Abyss (1923-30 Argosy; fixup 1931) - and by A. Hyatt VERRILL - The Bridge of Light (1929; 1950) - proved influential on some later sf writers. John TAINE's The Purple Sapphire (1924) and The Greatest Adventure (1929) have stronger sfelements than usual, though somewhat vaguely described superscientific technology was common enough in the subgenre. Other authors of lost-race stories include Grant ALLEN, Austyn GRANVILLE, Andrew LANG, William LE QUEUX, John MASTIN, S.P. MEEK, Talbot MUNDY, Hume NISBET, Gordon STABLES,Rex STOUT, E. Charles VIVIAN and S. Fowler WRIGHT.Even from the 1930s, when fewer lost-world stories were being published, there were occasional popular successes. The film KING KONG (1933) opens in a lost world. James HILTON's mystical Tibetan romance of IMMORTALITY, Lost Horizon (1933), wasa bestseller (LOST HORIZON). Later examples can be found in the work of Dennis WHEATLEY, including The Fabulous Valley (1934), Uncharted Seas(1938), which was filmed as The LOST CONTINENT , and The Man who Missed the War (1945).Only very occasional lost-race novels have appeared since WWII. Ian CAMERON's The Lost Ones (1961; vt Island at the Top of theWorld) is set in the Arctic and was filmed by Disney as The Island at the Top of the World (1974) dir Robert Stevenson. Stones of Enchantment (1948) by Wyndham MARTYN, The City of Frozen Fire (1950) by Vaughan WILKINS, Lost Island (1954) by Graham MCINNES and The Rose of Tibet (1962) by LionelDAVIDSON seem rather old-fashioned. Gilbert PHELPS's The Winter People (1963), though, is an intelligent novel about an eccentric South American explorer and his discovery of a remarkable tribe. Stephen TALL's The People beyond the Walls (1980) is a remarkably late example. Generally,though, postwar lost-race stories edge close to pastiche; several examples are given in the HOLLOW EARTH entry.The fact that this species of fantasy was so little influenced by scientific thought may be a result of its being largely anachronistic (and therefore implausible) from its beginnings. Once TRANSPORTATION technology had allowed Phileas Fogg to achieve his object, the lost-race fantasy owed more to the desire that enclaves of mystery should exist than to the likelihood that they did. Even from the point of view of sociological or politicalthought-experiments, the genre had surprisingly little to offer. The lost-race story is obviously an opportunity for the setting up of imaginary UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS, but these elements are not as common as might be expected, and most of the stories listed above - which include the best-remembered classics of the genre - are quite straightforward romantic adventure. It has been suggested, too, that such stories allow exercises in imaginary cultural ANTHROPOLOGY, but few of these stories are of any real interest in this respect - an exception being the late example Providence Island: An Archaeological Tale (1959) by Jacquetta HAWKES - andthey have more to offer the student of popular mythology - in which context they are discussed by Brian Street in The Savage in Literature (1975). Oddly enough there is more and better cultural anthropology inoffworld stories of planetary exploration and COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS (mostly postwar), subgenres that largely superseded the lost-race story,than there are in lost-race stories set on Earth.Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) by Everett F. BLEILER lists and describes some hundredsof lost-race stories up to 1930, its index allowing a sort by scientific advancement (from barbaric to superscientific), or by location (Antarctic to Siberia), or by racial derivation (from Atlantean via Hebrew and Old Norse to Phoenician). A relevant essay is "Lost Lands, Lost Races: A PaganPrincess of Their Very Own" by Thomas D. CLARESON in Many Futures, Many Worlds (anth 1977) ed Clareson.

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   See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); ISLANDS; PASTORAL.