Dinosaur Summer | Literary Precedents

Dinosaur Summer Literary Precedents

Many science fiction books written for adults are crossover books—they appeal to young readers who enjoy imaginative tales of exotic adventure, and Bear has written many such books. Dinosaur Summer, however, is written specifically for the young adult market, the same market that its inspiration, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), targets, and like The Lost World, it is a crossover book that appeals to grownups as well as young readers. In Dinosaur Summer, Bear treats The Lost World as if it were a historical document, rather than a novel. In Dinosaur Summer, all the characters in The Lost World were real people, and their adventures on an isolated plateau in South America really happened.

Conan Doyle's The Lost World is what was called a "boys' book," a subcategory of young adult literature that is now dead—in fact, The Lost World probably killed it. Boys' books were tales of adventure that were supposed to teach teen-age boys how to behave like men; a still-popular example of this is H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885), a tale of a search for the diamond mines of King Solomon in southern Africa. Haggard's book set the standard for authentic detail in boys' books; the various African tribes he described were known to him from his experiences when exploring South Africa. In The Lost World, Conan Doyle satirizes boys' books: the fighting, quarreling, and derring-do of such books is ridiculed. The great Professor Challenger is primarily a bully who tends to introduce himself to people by beating them up. The explorers in the novel tend to be pigheaded.

The hero of the novel, Malone, learns an important lesson when he returns to England and discovers that his lady love has found another man: running off on adventures does not impress...
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