First, let me state that this is NOT a sequel to Conan Doyle's work. Instead, it is an alternate history asking what would have happened if a real Profesor Challenger had discovered a real Lost World, all reported by Conan Doyle, of course. The immediate difference a LW fan will notice is that the dinosaurs have been "updated" to fit current thinking. No kangaroo hopping megalosaurs. Another difference is that author Greg Bear's Lost World is much larger than Conan Doyle had described. However, Bear sticks with the notion of several groups of animals from different time periods mixed together. In fact, Bear does something interesting with this notion. He imagines that several animals have kept evolving since they were stranded in the Lost World. So there are several new types of dinos mingled with the old ones, as well as other creatures (one particularily nasty animal shows up towards the end). Despite these differences, I do not think fans of the original novel will be disappointed.

How about the book itself? Well, the humans are pretty shallow. Not much depth. But they are still pretty enjoyable, and I think that the reader is able to associate with the main ones by the end. The dinosaurs, on the other hand, are well thought-out and assume personalities of their own. They really make the book for me. The writing is very minimalist, luckily there are some excellent illustrations that accompany the book. Without them it would be impossible to visualize some of the animals, especially the imaginary ones. However, besides the occasional swear word or gory scene, the book often reads a little too much like children's literature. But since the focus is on the boyhood attraction to adventure, this is barely noticed.

The major flaw of the book is predictability. Some things you just know are going to happen, and you find yourself thinking "Com'on, get to it already." However, I think this is forgivable because when a certain obvious event happens, it is exciting.

What makes this book really work is Greg Bear's respect for the source material and the people who brought the genre to life. Unlike Crichton, Bear loves Conan Doyle's work, and it shows. He also portrays many of the filmmakers who brought dinosaurs to life, O'Brien, Copper, Harryhausen, in a very sentimental manner. This book is as much about them as it is about dinosaurs.
Review by Walter J. Williams.

Each series includes a supplemental text feature. In volume two, the feature is "The New Traveller's Almanac", which unites nearly every fantasy land, castle, country and lost world in a globe-spanning gazetteer... Including the Lost World. Under chapter three, the League mentions Maple White Land and link it, in fashion typical to the series, to other literary and cinematic works:

The most astonishing of Brazil's mystery sites, which we have saved for last, is Maple White Land, a plateau in Amazonas State explored in 1912 by sometime League associate George Challenger. Here... there survive a multitude of species long since thought to be extinct, including the sabre-toothed tiger and many dinosaurs. A species of ape-man, again conceivably related to the "rat-dogs" or the Yahoos, once existed on the plateau before being ethnically purged by a local Indian tribe called the Accala, and some locations close to Maple White Land have shown signs of infestation by species that would seem to be prehsitoric in their origin. Some few miles down the Amazon from the volcanic plateau, for example, there is a secluded lake known as the Black Lagoon by local Indian tribes, where monsterous amphibian bipeds have apparently been sighted. These may be some hitherto unknown Silurian throwbacks that have come downstream from Maple White Land...