The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

'The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere.'

My father was born before television was invented, and I have never known a world without it.  I once asked him what it was like before television.  He said they had radio instead, and he made this observation: with television, you are presented with the pictures as well as the words and sounds; with radio, all you had were the words and sounds, and everything else had to be filled in by your own imagination.  He said this made the scary stuff far scarier than anything you can see on TV, such is the power of imagination.  

Of all the things he heard on the radio, the scariest was a dramatisation of The Lost World, and he said that he still had vivid memories of the pictures other people's words had conjured up in his imagination.

There is a lot to be scared about in this novel: wild Amazonian natives, murderous bandits, river rapids, sheer cliffs, ravenous dinosaurs, evil ape-men and a rampaging professor of archaeology. The story is simple enough: the scientific community guffaws at Professor G.E. Challenger's claims of having discovered an isolated plateau somewhere in the Amazon basin where Jurassic dinosaurs survive to this day (1912), and he has to return there in order to bring back concrete evidence and clear his name.

It's a story that could not credibly be told nowadays, not with the globe having been thoroughly explored and surveyed on land and from space.  All the blank spaces on the map, big and small, have been filled in, and there is little room for romance (except in the imagination).

So if you are in the mood for an old-style ripping yarn, and if you can overlook the racist subtext in the novel, then The Lost World is one of the better ones - Sir Arthur knows how to tell a tale.  Like my father, I enjoyed allowing his words to stir my imagination.