Five Books About Discovering Lost Civilizations

[james_davis_nicoll]

Classic adventure fiction is chock-full of lost or secret civilizations...

Five Books About Discovering Lost Civilizations

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[james_davis_nicoll]

Tor dot com article 523, 2024 article 67.

477 articles to go to article 1000

[dragoness_e]

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan was stumbling on a new lost civilization every other novel. (He spent the other novels getting hit in the head in the weak spot and having amnesia dramatics.)

[ba_munronoe]

There's room there for a retcon in which some of Tarzan's more absurd adventures turn out to be delusional episodes brought on by repeated head trauma. :)

[ffutures]

For some reason your blog wouldn't let me comment, though it did let me comment on someone else's comment. What I was going to say was

Does the Bogeyman culture of Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman count? Not exactly lost, more carefully hidden from humans despite (or because) the Bogeymen have some unspecified need to make humans afraid. I've often wondered why there isn't an RPG or an expanded fictional universe...

The underground civilization of Vril-Ya and its discovery in The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton definitely qualify, I think.

While not exactly a civilization, the ape-men of The Lost World (1910) are a thriving if somewhat violent culture until some pesky explorers turn up to lead the genocide that eventually wipes them out to make room for much more mundane natives and a lot of dinosaurs.