A heart-stopping adventure tale featuring a brilliant scientist--one
as insufferably pompous as Doyle's most famous character--and his
unlikely trio, and its apocalyptic sequel.
In 1912, the creator of Sherlock Holmes introduced his readers to yet
another genius adventurer, Professor Challenger, who in his very first
outing would journey to South America in search of . . . an isolated
plateau crawling with iguanodons and ape-men! A smash hit, Doyle's
proto-science fiction thriller would be adapted twice by Hollywood
filmmakers, and it would go on to influence everything from Jurassic
Park to the TV show Land of the Lost. Its 1913 sequel, The Poison
Belt, finds Challenger and his dino-hunting comrades trapped in an
oxygenated chamber as the entire planet passes through a lethal ether
cloud.
Joshua Glenn is a consulting semiotician and editor of the websites
HiLobrow and Semiovox. The first to describe 1900-1935 as science
fiction's "Radium Age," he is editor of the MIT Press's series of
reissued proto-sf stories from that period. He is coauthor and coeditor
of various books including the family activities guide Unbored (2012),
The Adventurer's Glossary (2021), and Lost Objects (2022). In the
1990s, he published the indie intellectual journal Hermenaut.
Conor Reid is a podcaster and writer from Ireland. He has published
widely on popular fiction and science, including The Science and
Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs (2018). He is the Head of Podcasts at
HeadStuff Media as well as the host and producer of his own critically
acclaimed literature podcast, Words to That Effect. The podcast, which
has been performed live in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, tells
stories of the fiction that shapes popular culture.
