I can’t remember when I first became entranced with lost and forgotten cities. I think I stumbled on Gods, Graves and Scholars when I was a preteen. Then there were tales of Pompeii, hidden and preserved beneath the ash fall of Vesuvius. I well recall reading in Kipling’s Jungle Book both the tale of “The King’s Ankus” and also of the horrific fight of Bagheera, Baloo and Kaa the rock python versus the monkeys of the crumbling city engulfed in jungle in “Kaa’s Hunting.” So the infection began early.
Gods, Graves and Scholars, my introduction to lost cities, is an old book by C.W. Ceram. First published in 1951, a year before I was born, it tells the tale of the unearthing of Troy, and the unearthing of King Tut’s tomb. The hanging gardens of Babylon! Ancient tablets! This book made me want to be an adventurous archaeologist. I still heartily recommend it to anyone who loves romance, adventure and forgotten treasures!
My next book has, alas, not withstood the passage of time so well. SHE by H. Rider Haggard, has overtones that are both sexist and racist to the modern reader. Yet it also has a powerful female character and a cracking-good adventure tale. Horace Holly and his young protégé Leo travel to Africa, where they discover not only an ancient civilization but She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, an extraordinarily beautiful and ‘well preserved’ woman who rules there. She becomes enamored of the handsome Leo. And I will say no more! Read it as a period piece that reflects Victorian culture. Read it for the tale of a powerful woman!
And if you enjoy SHE, then follow it with King Solomon’s Mines, also by H Rider Haggard. Elephant hunter Allan Quartermain sets off to discover the fabled mines of King Solomon. Again, enter this domain with a high tolerance for Victorian era concepts about Africa. Consider that part of the experience educational and the rest of the adventure fun.
Have you had enough of old books? Brace yourself. You know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the author of the Sherlock Holmes tales, but he wrote in a variety of worlds. The White Company would take you back to the days of chivalry. Doyle was a Spiritualist and a firm believer in mediums and communication from beyond the grave. But in The Lost World he carries us off to South America, and a hidden land of surviving dinosaurs and ape-men! Again, you will encounter outdated values blended into a masterful tale.
And finally, a book that is less than fifty years old but, in my opinion, never received the attention it deserved. Also, I’m cheating. Because this tale is actually told in two books. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, author of the Nebula award winning Healer’s War and frequent collaborator with Anne McCaffrey is mostly known for her light and humorous tales, often involving cats and magic. But my favorites are her darker works. Healer’s War involves a nurse serving during the Vietnam War and a magic amulet. It well deserved its Nebula. But her two books series Nothing Sacred and Last Refuge tells an equally compelling end-of-the-world tale of a young woman who is captured, brutalized and then imprisoned in an icy and forbidding compound. Without more spoilers for a tale that deserves to unfold at its own pace, I will only mention one word: Shambhala, sometimes known as Shangri-la!
I enjoyed each of these novels in very different ways. I hope you will, too.
Robin Hobb is the author of the Farseer Trilogy (Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin and Assassin’s Quest). She returns to Buckkeep, and two of her favorite characters, with the Fitz and the Fool trilogy—Fool’s Quest, the second novel in the new trilogy, is available now from Del Rey.
The cursed city of Ampridatvir appears in “Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream”, part of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth.
I’m really tired of the constant warnings that books written over 100 years ago have “overtones that are both sexist and racist to the modern reader.” Are Tor readers really such a delicate combination of sensitive and ignorant that they need to be told this? I think you underestimate our intelligence.
The nation of Saba, home to the lost Hebrew Tribe of Dan, who guards the Ark of the Covenant in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar, which is loosely based on the legend that a temple in Ethiopia houses the Ark. This city is located on the shores of Lake Victoria, claiming that the Tribe of Dan took the treasures from Solomon’s Temple into Africa.
Robin Hobb herself has several lost Elderling cities accessible through the “Stones” in her books.
The principal focus of Sanderson’s Words of Radiance is finding an apparently inaccessible “lost” city hidden in the Plains.
I’d say that the lost city in Haggard’s Allan Quatermain also deserves mention. That book, I think, was the one that really firmly established the tropes of the 19th Century “Lost Race” story (which continues to the present day — what was the movie “Stargate” if not a Rider Haggard story?).
Stephen Hunt’s Kingdom Beyond the Waves had a pretty great lost city.
And in the Tarzan books, you could hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a city still inhabited by descendants of Crusaders or something.
For a definitely different twist on “lost cites”, try “What’s The Name Of That Town?” by R.A. Lafferty (who pretty much specialized in “definitely different”).
Dylan Horrocks’ comic book/graphic novel Hicksville has a man finding a cartoonist’s Brigadoon, a mysterious lost town in New Zealand where the library has multiple copies of all published comics, plus comics that were never published elsewhere but should have been. (I regret that that description is something of a spoiler, but there’s no way to avoid spoilers while explaining the relevance of this book to the topic at hand.)
It was comics that introduced me to the 19th-century “lost world/race” tropes of Haggard and Conan Doyle. Many of the adventures of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge involved such lost races or lost cities (e.g. “Tralla La,” a take-off on Shangri-La; Plain Awful, a city/race “Lost in the Andes” where all people and objects are blocky and round things are taboo; “Forbidden Valley,” a Conan Doyle-style dinosaur valley in South America). The Disney Duck comics continue to be popular in other parts of the world (Scandinavia, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, etc.), and other writers/artists have also created many fine stories where the Ducks (or Mice) discover lost worlds, civilizations, peoples and cities. Barks’ classic stories, mostly forgotten in the USA, are well known elsewhere. Almost any Finn, for instance, will be familiar with the “square egg story” (“Lost in the Andes”). Other great comics of course have also used these lost world/race/city tropes.
Yes, @5, Stargate is a Haggard lost-race story. And Up! is a lost-world story.
I would argue that Stargate is the best Rider Haggard adaptation we’re ever likely to see.
The H. Rider Haggard books are available from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/365
Judith Tarr’s Forgotten Suns is a lost city book of sorts, because it’s about a lost planet. Archeologists on an interdicted planet uncover information that only a young woman and an ancient man recognize as clues that will lead them to a lost group of people.
@@.-@: Stones…or a certain river
If you liked Haggard and other such Victorian adventures, the “Amelia Peabody” series by Elizabeth Peters is a pastiche/parody/tribute– with some of the problems inherent in pastiche-ing some outworn social attitudes, but a lot of fun nonetheless.
Or, for that matter, they’re fun if you love tales of archaeology in interesting places, Amelia’s husband being “the foremost archaeologist of this or any other age,” at least according to his wife. And while Amelia in consequence of her gender has no formal degrees or standing, there’s nothing she loves more than an unexcavated pyramid.
In particular for the theme of this post, The Last Camel Died At Noon describes Amelia’s encounter with a lost civilization descended from the ancient Egyptians.
A nice companion to C. W. Ceram’s history of unearthing lost cities is Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins (1954), which records her fascination with the various and varied abandoned city sites around the world. Illustrated versions are preferred.
*Gods, Graves and Scholars* is a fantastic book, one of those few reference titles I keep on hand.
Haggard and Doyle may be dated, and there may be issues with themes/prejudices, both both were fantastic writers who knew how to spin a rollicking good adventure yarn.
And Haggard, at least, doesn’t have a lot of the problems that other adventure fiction writers had; or at least, he has different problems. He actually lived in Africa, so had more of an understanding of the land & the inhabitants than, say, Burroughs, who was just making stuff up. (Having said that, in many cases you can follow his characters’ trails by the heaping piles of hunted animals they leave along the way.)
I am reminded of David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z, about British explorer Percy Fawcett’s expeditions to the Amazon rainforest during the 1920’s in search of the titular lost city, described in a Portugese manuscript from the 1750’s. It’s a great read, especially for those who either love tales of exploration or all things Victorian.