The Complete Land That Time Forgot

This volume assembles all three of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ science-fantasy “lost world” novels, “The Land That Time Forgot,” “The People That Time Forgot,” and “Out of Time’s Abyss.” Starting out as a harrowing wartime sea adventure, Burroughs’s story ultimately develops into a lost world story reminiscent of such novels as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” (1912) and Jules Verne’s “The Mysterious Island” (1874) and “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864). Burroughs adds his own twist by postulating a unique biological system for his lost world, in which the slow progress of evolution in the world outside is recapitulated as a matter of individual metamorphosis. This system is only hinted at in “The Land That Time Forgot” and is presented as a mystery whose explication is gradually worked out over the course of the next two novels. It forms a thematic element serving to unite three otherwise rather loosely linked stories.