Читать книгу The Valley of Fear - Артур Конан Дойл, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 7

One of Conan Doyle’s better-known other works is the science-fiction novel The Lost World, published in 1912. The character Professor Challenger mounts an expedition to the Amazon Basin. He and his entourage encounter all manner of prehistoric animals along the way and witness warfare between an indigenous tribe and ape-men. In context, this novel can be seen as a document of scientific inquiry at the time. The French science-fiction author Jules Verne had died six years before, leaving an anthology of similar stories, including Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Similarly, Conan Doyle’s contemporary, the English writer H. G. Wells, had published The Time Machine in 1895. These books all enabled the characters to visit other places in time and to witness extinct creatures brought back to life. This general theme proved popular in an era when fossils and the processes of evolution were beginning to be understood by science. Conan Doyle used science to underpin his literature, although it is fair to say that he allowed pseudoscience to also appear towards the end of his life. Sherlock Holmes was Conan Doyle’s expression of his recognition that the application of empirical science and acute intellect were the things that members of the British Empire saw as the reason for their success.