Video: In Search of the Unknown: The Cryptozoological Fiction of Robert W. Chambers

Robert W. Chambers’s 1904 novel In Search of the Unknown follows Gilland, an ornithologist at the Bronx zoo, who is sent out to track down living mammoths, anomalous primates, giant birds, amphibious humanoids and revivified dinosaurs.

The book predates both Bernard Heuvelmans’s foundational On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). In this talk for The Last Tuesday Society I argued that it shows cryptozoology already existed as a fully realized set of ideas before the term was coined, and that Chambers deserves more credit as a pioneer of science fiction.