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Subgenre of the fantasy or science fiction genres

The lost world is a subgenre of the fantasy or science fiction genres that involves the discovery of an unknown Earth civilization. It began as a subgenre of the late Victorian adventure romance and remains popular into the 21st century. The genre arose during an era when Western archeologists discovered and studied civilizations around the world previously unknown to them, through disciplines such as Egyptology, Assyriology, or Mesoamerican studies. Thus, real stories of archaeological finds inspired writings on the topic. Between 1871 and the First World War, the number of published lost world narratives, set in every continent, increased significantly. The genre has similar themes to "mythical kingdoms", such as Atlantis and El Dorado.

King Solomon's Mines (1885) by H. Rider Haggard is sometimes considered the first lost world narrative. Haggard's novel shaped the form and influenced later lost world narratives, including Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1888), Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot (1918), A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (1918), and H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (1931). Earlier works, such as Edward Bulwer Lytton's Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) use a similar plot as a vehicle for Swiftian social satire rather than romantic adventure. Other early examples are Simon Tyssot de Patot's Voyages et Aventures de Jacques Massé (1710), which includes a prehistoric fauna and flora, and Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), an 18th century imaginary voyage inspired by both Defoe and Swift, in which a man named Peter Wilkins discovers a race of winged people on an isolated island surrounded by high cliffs as in Burroughs's Caspak. The 1820 Hollow Earth novel Symzonia has also been cited as the first of the lost world form, and Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and The Village in the Treetops (1901) popularized the theme of surviving pockets of prehistoric species. J. H. Rosny aîné would later publish The Amazing Journey of Hareton Ironcastle (1922), a novel where an expedition in the heart of Africa discovers a mysterious area with an ecosystem from another world, with alien flora and fauna. Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) has certain lost world elements towards the end of the tale. James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933) enjoyed popular success in using the genre as a takeoff for popular philosophy and social comment. It introduced the name Shangri La, a meme for the idealization of the lost world as a Paradise. Similar books where the inhabitants of the lost world are seen as superior to the outsiders, are Joseph O'Neill's Land under England (1935) and Douglas Valder Duff's Jack Harding’s Quest (1939). Hergé also explores the theme in his Tintin comics The Seven Crystal Balls and Prisoners of the Sun (1944–48). Here the protagonists encounter an unknown Inca kingdom in the Andes.

Contemporary American novelist Michael Crichton invokes this tradition in his novel Congo (1980), which involves a quest for King Solomon's mines, fabled to be in a lost African city called Zinj. During the 1990s, James Gurney published a series of juvenile novels about a lost island called Dinotopia, in which humans live alongside living dinosaurs. In video games, it is most notably present in the Tomb Raider and Uncharted franchises. The Hanna Barbera action cartoon Space Ghost features a segment "Dino Boy in the Lost Valley", about a young boy named Todd who survives a plane crash and lands in a hidden prehistoric valley in South America. In another Hanna Barbera cartoon Valley of the Dinosaurs science professor John Butler and his family wife Kim, teenage daughter Katie, young son Greg, and dog Digger are on a rafting trip along the Amazon River in an uncharted river canyon when they are suddenly swept through a cavern and caught in a whirlpool. Upon resurfacing, they find themselves in a mysterious realm where humans coexist with various prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs. The Butlers meet and befriend a clan of Neanderthal cavepeople. In movies, the Indiana Jones franchise makes use of similar concepts. Also comics make use of the idea, such as the Savage Land in Marvel Comics and Themyscira in DC comics.

Early lost world novels were typically set in parts of the world as yet unexplored by Europeans. Favorite locations were the interior of Africa (many of Haggard's novels, Burroughs' Tarzan novels) or inland South America (Doyle's The Lost World, Merritt's The Face in the Abyss), as well as Central Asia (Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, Haggard's Ayesha, the Return of She, Merritt's The Metal Monster, Hilton's Lost Horizon) and Australia (James Francis Hogan's The Lost Explorer and Eureka by Owen Hall (pseudonym of New Zealand politician Hugh Lusk)). Later writers favored Antarctica, especially as a refuge for prehistoric species. Burroughs' The Land That Time Forgot and its sequels were set on the island of Caprona (a. k. a. Caspak) in the Southern Ocean. In Edison Marshall's Dian of the Lost Land (1935), Cro Magnons, Neanderthals, and mammoths survive in the "Moss Country", a sheltered warm corner of the continent. Dennis Wheatley's novel The Man Who Missed the War (1945) also deals with a warm and hidden area on the continent, where there live humans such as the descendants of Atlantis. In Jeremy Robinson's Antarktos Rising (2007), dinosaurs and Nephilim emerge as the icecap melts. Mat Johnson's Pym (2011) describes giant white hominids living in ice caves. Ian Cameron's The Mountains at the Bottom of the World (1972) has a relict population of Paranthropus living not quite in Antarctica, but in the southern Chilean Andes. Crusoe Warburton (1954), by Victor Wallace Germains, describes an island in the far South Atlantic, with a lost, pre gunpowder empire. According to Allienne Becker, there was a logical evolution from the lost world subgenre to the planetary romance genre: "When there were no longer any unexplored corners of our earth, the Lost Worlds Romance turned to space." Below is a list of classic lost world titles drawn from Lost Worlds: The Ultimate Anthology. Titles were selected from drawn from 333: A Bibliography of the Science Fantasy Novel, Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Lost Race checklist and E. F. Bleiler's Science fiction, the Early Years.