YMMV / The Lost World (1912)

• Awesome Ego: Lord Roxton is a suave, adventurous type that, unlike Challenger, also can always back up his claims, excels in everything he does, saves the day more than once and when he boasts, he has actual reasons to do so. By the end of the novel, he's the only character that got everything he wanted and then some, rather than being back to square one - achieved mostly by staying focused on his goals, instead of chasing after fantasies about glory or validation.
• Common Knowledge: "It's that original Lost World book"! Except the plot doesn't get into the Amazonia until you are past the midpoint, and then it takes its time to reach the plateau itself. The actual stay there and all the iconic elements are very brief compared with the bulk of the book spent just in England, with various characters having (sometimes violent) arguments.
• Fair for Its Day: His You No Take Candle speech aside, Zambo is depicted as strong, intelligent and good-hearted. Even his manner of speaking can be explained away as him being South American and English not being his first language. As for the other non-whites, despite the odd condescending tone, the main characters never view them as inferiors.
• First Installment Wins: This book has inspired numerous adaptations and tributes, while you'd be hard pressed to find many people who even know there are further books in the series, let alone having read them.
• Ho Yay: At the end of the book, Lord John Roxton asks Malone if he'll be using his share of the diamonds to get married, and Malone tells him that he'd rather go with him. (Yes, going on an expedition with Roxton was a substitute for getting married.) They then shake hands.
• It Was His Sled: The book is a Trope Namer for Lost World and has been adopted and spoofed so many times, even people who have never read it will still be familiar with the general outline of the plot. What remains outside common knowledge is the entire subplot regarding vengeful slavers, which is usually Adopted Out, how the expedition leaves the plateau and, of course, the original personalities of all the main characters.
• Values Dissonance:
  • A lot is made of the fact that Edward Malone is Irish. He also takes a very lax attitude to racism being directed his way (Doyle himself was of Irish descent).
  • Professor Challenger is a Bold Explorer Gentleman Adventurer out there to prove to the world at large that he's right and everyone else is wrong. Also included: enormous ego, being sexist and racist even when compared with other characters, Hair-Trigger Temper (including physically attacking people he disagrees with) and general characteristics that, when taken together, would make him nowadays a particularly vain villain of a story about exploring uncharted wilderness, rather than someone to root for. It is telling that already the 1925 The Lost World adaptation toned down his characteristics, and from there on, every single following adaptation pretty much recreated the professor from a scratch.
  • There are also "treacherous half-castes" and a "loyal Negro" in the expedition party. Naturally, by the time of the 1992 film adaptation, the "treacherous half-castes" were replaced with a treacherous Portuguese. He is just Gomez with a Race Lift and so by extension his brother gets the same. The graphic novel by Capstone Publishing just omitted them completely.
  • The term "half-breeds" for people of mixed descent can grate on modern ears.
  • The entire story is basically a glorification of European colonialism, how only the noble civilized white people can bring order and peace to the savage lands of the primitive brown peoples and their equally primitive and violent fauna, and it's perfectly fine to pillage them of their resources. Nowadays, this is a horrendously racist viewpoint, but pulp adventure stories like this were a dime-a-dozen in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's days.
  • With big-game hunting becoming less acceptable, Roxton has on one occasion been replaced by a new character, a female photographer, and underwent Adaptational Villainy on another. Other adaptations tend to downplay his background as a hunter.

---