Lost World (genre)

The Lost World literary genre is a fantasy or science fiction genre that involves the discovery of a new world out of time, place, or both. It began during the late Victorian era and remains popular to this day. The genre arose during an era when lost civilizations around the world were being discovered, such as Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the city of Troy, or the empire of Assyria. Public imagination was ready to believe just about anything as real stories of Indiana Jones type discoveries made headlines.

King Solomon's Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard was the first of the Lost World genre, and was very popular. It laid the groundwork and was highly influential on Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Edgar Wallace's King Kong and Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Samuel Butler's Erewhon may be considered in this category.

More recent Lost World books include Michael Crichton's The Lost World which was the basis for the movie The Lost World: Jurassic Park.