The Lost World (1995): Crichton's only sequel

Michael Crichton wrote a lot of novels, but only one sequel. The Lost World, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1995, sends readers back to the jungles off Costa Rica, this time to the place where the dinosaurs were actually made. It was a major event: Crichton's official site says it spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and Publishers Weekly's review listing gives a first printing of two million copies.

A spoiler note: this post sticks to the sequel's setup. Talking about that setup means mentioning how the first novel left a couple of its characters, so if you haven't read Jurassic Park yet, you may want to start there. Nothing here gives away how The Lost World ends.

Why Crichton wrote a sequel

Crichton had never written a sequel and didn't plan to. On his official site, he explains that the push came from readers, especially kids, who kept writing in to ask for one, often with their own ideas. He'd answer that there wouldn't be one, until he started wondering what a good sequel might look like. Eventually, he said, another film seemed likely and Steven Spielberg seemed to have some interest.

He also explained why sequels are hard. He called it "a very difficult structural problem" because "it has to be the same but different." Make it too similar and it's just a repeat; make it too different and it isn't really a sequel. His official site says he saw the book as a challenge.

The title and Malcolm's return

The title is a tip of the hat to Arthur Conan Doyle, whose 1912 novel The Lost World sent explorers to a remote plateau full of dinosaurs. Crichton later wrote an introduction to a reissue of Doyle's book, exploring how Doyle made dinosaurs believable to his readers.

Crichton borrowed another trick from Doyle: bringing a character back from the dead. The first novel leaves mathematician Ian Malcolm apparently dead of his injuries, and The Lost World makes him its lead. Crichton explained the choice simply: "Malcolm came back because I needed him." He saw Malcolm as the story's "ironic commentator," the one who keeps explaining why things will go wrong. And he pointed out that Doyle did the same thing with Sherlock Holmes, who went over the Reichenbach Falls and later turned out to have survived. In Crichton's words, "these things happen in fiction."

Malcolm is the only main character from the first book who returns, as Publishers Weekly noted in its review.

The setup: Site B

The publisher's description picks up six years after "the secret disaster at Jurassic Park." The park is gone, the island closed, and there are rumors that something survived.

The answer is a second island off Costa Rica. Crichton's site describes it as the island where Hammond created his genetically bred dinosaurs. The Christian Science Monitor's 1995 review calls it Site B, the messy back room of the operation, which fell into ruin after the project was abandoned and left its dinosaurs to roam free.

The cast is mostly new:

• Richard Levine, a paleobiologist. SYFY's Josh Weiss notes that he's the one who sets the plot in motion by going to the island to prove the dinosaurs still exist, a theory Malcolm initially dismisses.
• Sarah Harding, a young field biologist Malcolm already knows.
• Kelly and Arby, two 11-year-old stowaways, according to Crichton's site.
• Jack Thorne and Eddie Carr, who help Malcolm mount a rescue trip to the island.
• Lewis Dodgson, the rival scientist from the first book who, SYFY notes, returns as the main antagonist. He and his crew want to steal dinosaur eggs.

Themes: extinction and behavior

The first novel was about whether people can control what they create. The sequel asks a different question, one Crichton put directly in a note on his official site: what makes any species become extinct?

He traced that interest back to studying evolution as an undergraduate in the 1960s. He wrote that Catastrophism, the idea that extinctions come from sudden worldwide disasters, had returned to scientific debate after two hundred years of ridicule, thanks to Luis Alvarez's team and their proposal that a meteor impact caused the Cretaceous extinctions. The novel takes a different angle on the question. Publishers Weekly summarized its argument as extinction driven by changes in behavior rather than in the environment. The Monitor's reviewer put it this way: in Crichton's telling, dinosaurs didn't die out because they were static creatures hit by a meteorite, but because they kept changing, risking failure with every step.

That's why so much of the book is spent watching the animals. The same reviewer noted the novel's portrait of dinosaur family life, including doting tyrannosaur parents and herbivore herds that guard their young, with two species sticking together for mutual defense. The velociraptors, by contrast, are a mess. In one passage excerpted on Crichton's site, Levine studies their nesting ground and finds disorder: quarreling adults, trampled nests and young animals left to fend for themselves.

Crichton also cut one of Malcolm's speeches late in revisions. In an early draft, a heavily sedated Malcolm delivered a long monologue arguing that change is central to the world. Crichton wrote that the speech put the other characters to sleep and didn't seem to fit, but he always liked it.

How it was received

Reviews were mixed. The Christian Science Monitor called it "mostly a shameless reprise" of Jurassic Park, but concluded that "this formula is riveting, despite the book's flaws." Publishers Weekly complained of "stiff prose and brittle characters," while granting that Crichton "can still conjure unparalleled dino terror." Crichton's site notes he was on the cover of Time magazine on Sept. 25, 1995.

The book vs. the 1997 film

Steven Spielberg's film The Lost World: Jurassic Park opened May 23, 1997, with a screenplay by David Koepp and Jeff Goldblum back as Malcolm. It keeps the title, the island and a few character names, but much of the rest is reworked. SYFY's rundown of the differences includes:

• Hammond. The film continues from the first movie, where Richard Attenborough's Hammond survived, and has him send Malcolm to Site B.
• Merged and new characters. Thorne and Eddie are combined into one role, played by Richard Schiff, and Kelly and Arby become a single character, Malcolm's teenage daughter Kelly. Vince Vaughn's Nick Van Owen is new.
• Sarah Harding, played by Julianne Moore, is recruited by Hammond to document the animals.
• Levine's role in launching the story is gone, and Dodgson is replaced as the antagonist by Peter Ludlow, Hammond's nephew.
• The film opens with small dinosaurs attacking a wealthy couple's young daughter, a scene derived from one of the first novel's opening chapters rather than from the sequel.

The biggest structural change is the ending. The novel's climax plays out on the island; the film's final act goes somewhere the book never does.

If you've seen only the movie, the novel is a quite different experience: slower, more interested in animal behavior and evolution, and built around Malcolm's voice.