"The Lost World" by Sir A. C. Doyle

I bought this book in a Tower Records, and placed it in my bookshelf for long, long time... and started to read since last April for no particular reason (maybe, the weather was pretty bad although I was in the mood for fossil hunting somewhere...) The book was published from Penguin books as a series of Puffin Books (the first and original publication was at 1912), which are for children.

The Lost World is the famous "world first science fiction" written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. (Later, this novel inspired Michael Crichton to write a story of the same name, which is a sequel to the Jurassic Park.)

In the introduction page, there is an brief explanation of the book to young readers. There, it says that the description of Professor Challenger are quite similar to the description of Professor E. Rutherford, a 1908 nobel laureate for his investigations of atomic nuclei and radioactivity. According to the introduction, Doyle attended a lecture given by Rutherford at the University of Edinburgh!

I am reading now around the page 100, which depicts the entrance to the amazing world where the Jurassic and Cretaceous monsters are living secretly to the humans. The description of the scene is so beautiful, especially about the river water reflecting the forest green covering the world. Soon after this part, something fearful seems to be expected to happen... I am already very excited at and curious about what happens next.

The story is told by a newspaper correspondent in the form of a letter from the jungle, which was delivered occasionally by an injured member of the exploration party, or someone similar. This style reminds me of Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, which is also recognised as one of the first sci-fi.