[Lindsay 3] The Lost World by Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton has been one of my favorite authors for only a couple of years now, but I've been trying in that time to slowly work my way through all his novels. This book is the second part of the Jurassic Park story, and it's the only sequel Crichton ever wrote. It takes place six years after the events of JP, with mathematician Ian Malcolm as the main protagonist. He and Lewis Dodgson, the unscrupulous researcher from the Biosyn company, are the only two characters from JP to make an appearance in the sequel. The primary action of the plot takes place on Isla Sorna, an island near Costa Rica that InGen had been using as part of their dinosaur breeding program. Malcolm and his team end up there initially to rescue Richard Levine, a fellow-researcher-friend of Malcolm's who goes to the island out of curiosity after he is exposed to a strange creature on a beach in Costa Rica. Dodgson and his team arrive later to steal dinosaur eggs and by doing so fulfill the goal of stealing InGen's research that Dodgson was working toward in JP. Conflicts between the two different groups and, of course, between dinosaurs ensue.

I enjoyed the book, but overall didn't find it quite as exciting as JP, despite the abundance of action scenes. The overall sense of danger and impending doom that runs throughout JP is greatly reduced in The Lost World, so even though I was hooked on the story, it was more out of curiosity about the history of the InGen project than out of interest in what was presently happening to the characters. Even the dinosaurs are less interesting, and the whole scope of the plot and setting is a lot narrower than JP.

While the main theme of JP revolves around the dangers of playing God and creation, LW focuses more on adaptation and extinction. Like in JP, Crichton uses Chaos Theory as a plotting device, but I felt much more intrigued by the concept as a whole and its connection to plot in JP. Theme and plot don't actually tie together as well in LW, so a lot of the time during my reading, I was wondering why the extinction idea was all that important to the direct events of the story or to the development of any of the characters. In JP, this is a critical connection that is much better executed.

The Lost World isn't a bad book by any means, though. The action is good, the science is interesting, and it gives more of a glimpse into the world created in Jurassic Park. Despite being a sequel that isn't quite as strong as its original source material, it's still worth a read.